OpenWorm

from an article in The Atlantic

But in between the cell-on-silicon and the brain-on-silicon simulators lies a fascinating and strange new project to create a life-like simulation ofCaenohabditis elegans, a roundworm. OpenWorm isn't like these other initiatives; it's a scrappy, open-source project that began with a tweet and that's coordinated on Google Hangouts by scientists spread from San Diego to Russia. If it succeeds, it will have created a first in executable biology: a simulated animal using the principles of life to exist on a computer.

"I suspect that we'll recognize that living systems are far-from-equilibrium molecular systems that are carrying out very specific sophisticated physical patterns and have some ability to sustain themselves over time," OpenWorm's organizer Stephen Larson wrote to me. "Thinking about it that way makes me go beyond a black and white notion of 'alive' to a more functional perspective -- living systems are those which self sustain. Our goal is to aggregate more of the biological processes we know that help the worm to self-sustain than have ever been aggregated before, and to measure how close our predictions of behavior match real living behavior, more than it is to shoot for some pre-conceived notion of how much 'aliveness' we need."