I did start some genetic screens when I was still a postdoc with Bob Horvitz, but the main thing I was doing there was mapping out the parts of the nervous system that were involved in interacting with the environment. And I should say, the first thing was actually just figuring out what the worms could do. There had been some reports from the seventies that they could detect certain salts and amino acids, and I kind of pushed on that and explored it and developed behavioral assays for them, and then discovered that they had an incredibly complex and discriminative sense of smell, which had not been known. And so, they can smell about half the randomly chosen chemicals that you present to them, many of them at nanomolar concentrations. They can make very fine discriminations among them based on their structure. They're attracted to some; they're repelled by others. And this turns out to be the most, sort of the richest and most complex way they have of interacting with the environment. So, by sort of discovering that, I was then in a position to ask questions about things like discrimination and behavioral mapping, and ultimately questions like learning as well.

In retrospect, the fact that they would respond behaviorally to half the things I got from the MIT stockroom was ultimately reflected as well in the way that their genomes worked. So, about 10% of all genes in the worm genome encode G protein-coupled chemosensory receptors. Until recently, it held the record for the most G protein-coupled chemoreceptors in any animal. So, humans it's about 300 or 400. Drosophila it's about 150. Mice it's about 1,000, and C. elegans it's over 2,000 different receptor genes. But recently it has been overtaken by the elephant, which has 4,000-something receptors. Who knows why.

In any case. So yeah, so it turned out that this was something that the animal was devoting a lot of its genome to, devoting a lot of its attention to, its environment, which is largely in the dark and rotting materials is detecting different kinds of bacteria and other creatures in its environment, and it does that using its sense of smell.

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.