blog

Our editor-in-chief, Sarah Greene, attended the President’s Special Lecture at SfN on Monday evening, at which Neurobiologist Cori Bargmann gave a talk entitled “Genes, the Environment, and Decisions: How Fixed Circuits Generate Flexible Behaviors.”

Bargmann is well known for her work on olfaction in the model system Caenorhabditis elegans. In an introduction to her talk at SfN, a video clip was shown of 2002 Nobel Prize winner Sydney Brenner, who established C. elegans as a model organism for the investigation of neural development.

Brenner’s Nobel lecture in December 2002, “Nature’s Gift to Science,” was an homage to this nematode, and he reflected that having chosen the right organism turned out to be as important as having addressed the right problems to work on.

In the clip below, Sydney Brenner explains on Web of Stories why he chose C. elegans as a model organism:

The nervous system is attractive … because it embodies so many things that you feel are not going to have a simple explanation.

You can view more of Brenner’s videos and videos from other neuro-stars on the Web of Stories:

• Sydney Brenner
• Marvin Minsky
• Gerald Edelman
• Aaron Klug
• Martin Raff