The specific project that Bob Weinberg and Mike Wigler were working on was a little bit before my time actually. That was the RAS genes. And in fact, the oncogene field in general, and in particular the projects we worked with, there were many labs working on them. And if anything, in general, the attitude was one of excitement and much more of a sense of sharing results and talking about them than feeling aggressively competitive with other people. So, for example, the first paper that I was the first author of, very similar work was done at the same time by Tadashi Yamamoto's lab in Tokyo. We had a very positive interaction about it when we realized we were doing the same things. We traded sequences and made sure we had gotten the same answers before we submitted our papers. It was all very positive. And, similarly, there were many people who were excited about tyrosine kinases at the time, Bishop and Varmus [at UCSF] and, at the Salk, Tony Hunter and people like that. It was always more of a question of wanting to share your excitement about the work rather than deep concern about competitiveness. Of course, we wanted to all get there, we wanted to get the right answer, we wanted to be there at the same time, but I don't particularly remember negative feelings about, for example, in the RAS era, Wigler or Mariano Barbacid, who was the other person who was working on it at the time. I mean, I remember their names and what they were doing, but it was not a concern.

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.