After my fly food experience, I went to work for Sidney Kushner, who was a bacterial geneticist at the University of Georgia. And I was working on mRNA processing and we were trying to figure out again, how to clone genes in bacteria. And at this point in the history of the field, we had to purify our own restriction enzymes for the most part in order to do the cloning. I remember that CLA-1 had to be grown up, the bacterium had to be grown up in autoclave cow dung, which we would pick up from the agriculture experiment station associated with the veterinary school. So again, it hadn't been professionalized in any of the ways that it is now, but we could create this with our own hands. We could cook up the cow dung, we could grow the enzymes, we could then do the experiments. And, the postdoc who was in the bench next to mine at the time was a guy named Doug Prasher who went on to be one of the people who cloned the GFP gene from the jellyfish later in his career when he was at Woods Hole.

Cori Bargmann is an American neurobiologist and geneticist whose research focuses on C. elegans genetics and the neural pathways controlling behavior, including pathogen response and odor recognition. Bargmann is the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor and Vice President for Academic Affairs at The Rockefeller University.

Bargmann received her Ph.D. from MIT in 1987, where she studied the neu/HER2 oncogene with Bob Weinberg. Her work on the neurobiology and genetics of behavior began during a postdoctoral fellowship with Bob Horvitz at MIT. She was a faculty member at the University of California, San Francisco from 1991 to 2004, and has been the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor at Rockefeller University since 2004. Her work has addressed the relationships between genes, circuits, and behaviors in C. elegans, including the basis of odor recognition and odor preference, the circuits and neuromodulatory systems that regulate innate behaviors, the genetics of natural behavioral variation, and behavioral responses to pathogens.

Bargmann is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. In 2012, she received the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience and in 2013, the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. In 2013-2014, she and Bill Newsome co-chaired the advisory group to the NIH Director for President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative. In 2016, she became the first Head of Science at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a position she held until 2022.