I think most people thought that it was kind of one of Jim's wild ideas. It was only really articulated for me at a party. There would be parties at various people's houses, and I was there and who knows how many drinks I had or how many drinks anyone had had, but Joe Sambrook, who was the leader of the molecular biology labs, he was really the scientific leader of Cold Spring Harbor, came up to me and pointed my – I remember pointing his finger at me and he was a shouter, shouting: there is no biology in neurobiology, there is no biology in neurobiology, repeating himself again and again. And I didn't understand what he meant. I mean, neurobiology, these are cells. And I realized that what he meant was there's no molecular biology and neurobiology. And he was right.

Molecular biology had invaded only a few fields. I think immunology first, that's a biological system of individual cells. So, easier to understand than something complex like an organ with a lot of different cells in with precise architectures and precise relationships to one another. So, I don't know whether he changed his mind, but I think that's what he meant. And it is what Jim had in mind about starting the neurobiology group to get molecular biology injected into neurobiology. It was the transformation of the courses, and importantly, the flag went up when the symposium, the Cold Spring Harbor Symposium , one of the most important scientific events of the year when the topic was, what was the year ‘83 ? When the topic was Molecular Neurobiology.

Nancy Hopkins is a developmental biologist and the Amgen, Inc. Professor of Biology at MIT. Working under Jim Watson and Mark Ptashne, Hopkins earned her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1971. As a postdoctoral fellow she moved to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where she continued working under Watson researching DNA tumor viruses. In 1973 she joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in the Center for Cancer Research, where she researched the mechanisms of replication and leukemogenesis by RNA tumor viruses for 17 years.

Hopkins has also led an ongoing effort to end discrimination against women in science. In 1995 she was appointed Chair of the first Committee on Women Faculty in the School of Science at MIT, and in 2000 she was appointed Co-Chair of the first Council on Faculty Diversity at MIT. Hopkins co-authored the fourth edition of Molecular Biology of the Gene. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.