I would say seeing something for the first time and having it make sense is a terrific joy in science. It's a selfish joy, but why not? And I remember hearing a story about the first scientist who saw bacteria mating and how he was in the lab late at night in, I don't know, the 1920s or something, and he went and he grabbed the janitor to show him these bacteria mating. It's like there are two joys in science. The first is discovering something and the second is sharing it with someone else. It's that sense of a new discovery of something that you can't wait to tell someone else because they will be fascinated by the result as well. So, there have been moments like that, and some of them are logical and clear and they all had that quality of wanting to share with people what that was and what it meant.

And I had a moment where I was actually for the first time, looking at a gene that we had cloned after one of these laborious genetic screen chromosome walking slogs through the genome that you had to do at the time because there was no genome, of course, you were just trying to identify what you could find and realizing that this was a G protein-coupled receptor. So, this was the first molecularly identified G protein-coupled receptor that could be functionally linked to the response to a specific odor. And it was one in the morning, and I had to tell someone, and the postdoc had- she had just gone home at midnight, and I wasn't going to wake her up after she had finally gotten to sleep. And so, I was like, who am I going to tell? And my youngest sister at the time had a night job where she was doing recording subtitles for the blind at a TV station. I called her up at her job recording and I explained the result to her. She understood it perfectly. She thought it was a good thing.

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.