I told you that I went to MIT to study cancer because molecular biology was there and I started studying behavior when I saw that molecular genetics was going to be able to move that field forward as well. Even though I spent several years at the microscope doing laser ablations before I actually got into the genetics, I could sort of see that. And in the same way, I've seen in my own field many times how technological developments really push it forward, whether it was the genetically encoded calcium indicators or the optogenetics tools or other kinds of increasingly sophisticated tools for manipulating nervous systems. And technology doesn't always get the kind of support that it needs, and that's something else that I've sort of seen. What did it take to make a really valuable general-purpose technology like the genome, just tremendously valuable technology, and how is that different from other things that maybe didn't have as much impact as they could have in the same ways? And why was that? And how could you make new technologies more like the genome?

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.