[Birgit Zipser] showed me, so a leech ganglion is 400 neurons. Of course, there's a whole string of leech ganglia in the nerve. Leech are little, I see. They're all microscopic things. But a leech ganglion is about 400 neurons, and there's a whole string of them and basically one to the next, to the next. They're very similar to one another. And that's how the analysis had focused on is what was similar. And electrophysiology had shown that some of those neurons in a leech ganglion carried the signals for pain. Some of them carried signals for touch, some of them carried signals for pressure, so this was the coating of how neurons, how nerve cells conduct information. Very similar to my working on pain research demonstrating the neurons that carried the pain signals through the nervous system. But the puzzling thing about these antibodies was that maybe they would identify some of the pain neurons, but not all of the pain neurons or maybe some of the pain neurons and some of the touch neurons. But they were classes of neurons that we had not appreciated based on physiology or pharmacology, the things or anatomy. I mean it was the most exciting and puzzling result because you're looking at the biology, you can't ignore the biology. The biology tells you something about how things work.

Susan Hockfield is a neuroscientist whose research focuses on brain development and glioma, pioneering the use of monoclonal antibody technology demonstrating that early experience results in lasting changes in the molecular structure of the brain. She is a Professor of Neuroscience and President Emerita at MIT. She was the first woman and life scientist to serve as MIT’s sixteenth president from 2004-2012.

Hockfield earned her B.A. in biology from the University of Rochester (1973) and a Ph.D. from Georgetown University at the School of Medicine (1979). In 1980, Hockfield completed an NIH postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at San Francisco. She then joined the scientific staff at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York where she ran her own lab for five years. She also served as director of the Summer Neurobiology Program from 1985 to 1997. In 1985, Hockfield became the William Edward Gilbert Professor of Neurobiology at Yale University. She went on to serve as the Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences from 1998-2002, and Provost from 2003-2004.

In December 2004, Hockfield assumed office as the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She held this role until June 2012 and continues to hold a faculty appointment as professor of neuroscience and as a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

Hockfield has received numerous awards including the Charles Judson Herrick Award from the American Association of Anatomists, the Wilbur Lucius Cross Award from the Yale University Graduate School, the Meliora Citation from the University of Rochester, the Amelia Earhart Award from the Women’s Union, and the Yale Science and Engineering Association 2021 Award for Distinguished Service to Industry, Commerce or Education.

She also holds honorary degrees from Brown University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, New York University, Northeastern University, Tsinghua University (Beijing), Université Pierre et Marie Curie, University of Edinburgh, University of Massachusetts Medical School, University of Rochester, and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory School of Biological Sciences.