In the NYT, is here. As he would say: self-recommending.

Lessons learned from my decades running a front office

When I saw my NSF office in the old Arlington Headquarters, I was so impressed that I sent my mom a photo. It was roughly double the size of my dean’s office at my home institution and had a conference table suitable for a small hockey match. Several weeks later, sworn in and on the job, I realized that the door wouldn’t really close. Oh, it had hinges. But it was meant to be open. All the time.

That was a shock. For sixteen years as a dean, my door had been closed an awful lot. I was used to privacy. I’d read, think, make my calls, and when the door opened again, I’d made up my mind.

At NSF, the door stayed open. And outside that doorway stood the front office of NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate.

In an earlier post I wrote about the rules that change when you’re the one moving the pieces. This one is about execution. Whether you’re a newly minted chair, center director, dean, or agency head, the scientist in you tends to think of the front office as overhead for the real job at hand. Those budget people, schedulers, and speechwriters handle the paperwork so you can get the ‘vision’ done.

That’s so wrong. The front office is a principal’s primary tool. Your front office filters what reaches you and in what order. It also decides who gets fifteen minutes and who gets forty-five. It shapes how your decisions land three levels down. A PI can survive a mediocre lab manager. A principal with a mediocre front office is, in effect, governed by it.

Why do we scientists get this so wrong? Because our careers are usually ego-centered. We choose our graduate students. We choose our postdocs, our lab managers, our collaborators. If someone isn’t working out, we don’t renew them. The lab reflects the PI because the PI picked it.

As a dean, I ran my office the same way. I hired my COO and my CFO on merit, and both were extraordinary. What made them extraordinary wasn’t technical skill, though they had plenty of that. It was situational awareness and strategic thinking. They knew what was happening in the building before I did, and they knew what it meant. With people like that, a closed door is a luxury you can afford. The office runs, and it runs the way you would run it.

In that world, selection is the management.

Then you go to Washington.

As a rotator at NSF, you don’t select your front office. You inherit it. Career staff, federal process, taskers coming down from the Director and up from Congress. People who have watched Heads of Directorates come and go, and who will watch you go too.

So what replaces selection? That’s the question nobody prepares you for. Very few scientists have ever had to make an inherited team work. It’s a different skill, and frankly a harder one.

My answer, worked out the hard way, came down to two moves. If I couldn’t choose the people, I could change what the office was for. And I could control how it spent my time.

When I arrived, the National Ecological Observatory Network wasn’t being managed out of the Division of Biological Infrastructure, where it belonged. It was being run out of my front office. The previous AD, and particularly the deputy AD I inherited, had sensed NEON was already in trouble and pulled it close. That’s why my boss, in what was supposed to be a pro forma job interview, told me to “fix NEON.” I’ve written about that rescue before. This is a different part of the story.

Pulling a troubled project close feels like control. It isn’t. A front office that runs a program stops serving the whole directorate and becomes an operating unit with its own project to protect. Worse, it controls the information about that project.

Which is exactly what happened. NEON’s front-office program management sat on the stream of bad news from the project, which eventually led to crisis.

Moving NEON to DBI fixed two problems at once. It put competent, certified program managers in the cockpit. They were now flying the plane. It also put the project where NSF’s forensic and infrastructure specialists could actually see it. They surfaced the problems the front office had kept hidden. The structural fix was the information fix.

Could I have just demanded better reporting from my own office? No. I’d be asking the people doing the filtering. I had to move the project.

Deans, take note. Every signature initiative that reports straight to your office carries a small version of the same risk.

The second thing I did was probably unusual–at least at NSF. I created a secret veto over my own Outlook calendar. My scheduler booked meetings the normal way. I could strike them. No one really knew. The meeting would simply go away.

Why the hush-hush? If I’d been open about it, the larger directorate and the NSF would have had a second channel–people would have learned to lobby me directly and go around my scheduler. The front office that I was trying to win over would have read it as distrust. The secret veto let the office run smoothly.

But the real reason was simpler. It was my replacement for the closed door. In a job where the door stayed open, the calendar was the one place where a decision was mine alone.

That’s not a small thing. At the top executive level, your calendar is your strategy. How you spend your hours is your priority statement, and the organization reads it that way whether you intend it or not.

It’s also where I made my worst front-office mistake. I vetoed an interagency meeting with Vice President Biden. I thought the VP was a lower priority. It wasn’t. Biden phoned my boss and relayed the pain to me. I was suitably chastened.

Think about how that error surfaced. Nobody in my office could catch it, because nobody in my office knew. It came back down from the top via a phone call from the Vice President of the United States to my boss. That’s the most expensive channel there is.

Afterward? I kept the veto secret and simply got more careful.

I see the symmetry now. With NEON, someone in my office kept information from me. With Biden, I kept information from my office. Both times the system corrected itself, but at the highest level and at the highest cost. Concealment in a front office fails no matter who’s doing it.

So what would I tell a scientist about to become a chair, a dean, or a government science principal?

Treat your front office like you would treat a Zeiss laser-scanning confocal microscope: you can’t do your job without it. Decide how your front office will let you execute your vision before you worry about the people who sit in it. Selection is a luxury. Make controlling function and time a priority. Move projects out of your front office and into line management, where they belong and where professionals can see them. Treat your calendar as strategy because everyone else will.

And keep your door if you can. You’ll need it. But put one person on the inside. Someone like my University COO or my CFO, with real situational awareness, who would have looked at a canceled meeting with the Vice President and asked, “Are you sure?”

If I did it again, I’d tell one person.

The front office isn’t overhead around the job. It’s where the job happens.

Merging the NSF and NIH

Two speeds

In the fall of 2014, Ebola was loose in West Africa and, for a few frightening weeks, in Dallas. WHO had first reported cases in Guinea on March 23. By October, the virus had reached an American hospital, and the National Science Foundation moved.

On October 16, the NSF Director issued a Dear Colleague Letter inviting proposals on how Ebola spreads and how people behave in an epidemic. The mechanism was RAPID: internal review only, up to $200,000, one year. NSF staff at the time put the turnaround at one to two weeks from proposal to money.

What could an NIH-funded investigator do in the same weeks? The answer is: not much, quickly. NIH had no standing agency-wide mechanism for urgent extramural awards. Its fastest disaster mechanism, run out of NIMH, took about eight weeks from submission to award. NIH didn’t adopt an agency-wide urgent award policy until June 2018, after Ebola and Zika, and even that version is open only to existing grantees, needs an ad hoc review panel, and still goes to Council.

I want to be fair here. NIAID was fast in its own way. Its intramural vaccine trial started at the NIH Clinical Center the first week of September 2014, built on candidates that had been in human testing since 2003. That’s real speed. It’s also the speed of an in-house lab with a decade’s head start, and it tells you nothing about how fast the government can put money in the hands of a university scientist with a new idea.

Two agencies. Two clocks. Same virus.

The seam in ordinary times

Ebola shows what the split between NSF and NIH costs in a crisis. The BRAIN Initiative shows what it costs on an ordinary Tuesday.

I’ve written about BRAIN before (”The Coordination Problem“), so I’ll be brief. When I led NSF’s part, NIH, NSF, DARPA, IARPA, and later others funded the brain, each with its own review culture, vocabulary, and sense of what counted as progress. NIH had most of the money. NSF had most of the physicists, engineers, and theorists the field needed. Getting the two to point in the same direction took a remarkable amount of senior time, many meetings, and a fair number of compromises that made diplomatic sense and less scientific sense.

So here’s the question. Why do we fund the study of the brain’s molecules in one agency and the mathematics of its networks in another? Nobody designed it that way. It just happened.

The foundation Bush proposed

In July 1945, Vannevar Bush sent Science, the Endless Frontier to President Truman. It proposed a single National Research Foundation, with one division for medical research. Bush wanted physicists, chemists, and physicians under one roof, governed by scientists, insulated from day-to-day politics, and funded for the long haul.

Then came five years of fighting. Senator Kilgore had his own plan, with more political control and more emphasis on applied work. Congress finally passed a Bush-style bill in 1947, and Truman vetoed it. His objection was governance: the bill put the foundation’s director under a part-time board of private citizens instead of under the President. Truman wanted a science agency that answered to him. Bush wanted one that didn’t.

While Washington argued, biomedicine found a home. In 1946 the medical research contracts left over from the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development went to the Public Health Service, and the NIH extramural grants program grew up around them. By the time the National Science Foundation Act finally passed in 1950, NIH had four years’ head start and a growing constituency in Congress. Mary Lasker and her allies were about to show the country what disease-named institutes could do for an appropriation.

That’s the history in one sentence: the split between NSF and NIH came out of a delay. Nobody ever sat down and decided that basic biology and biomedicine belonged in different agencies with different review systems and different cultures. We’ve lived with an accident for 76 years and gotten used to calling it architecture.

The consolidation we’re getting

I know how this argument sounds in October 2026.

The administration proposed collapsing NIH’s 27 institutes and centers into eight. Congress said no in the FY2026 funding bill. The restructuring has gone ahead anyway, administratively, including changes to how NIH runs peer review, made by directive rather than statute. On the NSF side, the FY2027 request eliminates the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate outright. Consolidation is already happening. It’s just happening by fiat, and in the direction Truman wanted: more presidential control, less insulation.

So let me be explicit about where I stand. I’m not arguing for that. What’s underway at NIH is the opposite of Bush’s idea, wearing some of its clothes. Bush’s foundation was built to be hard for any president to bend. The current project is built to make science easy for this current administration to bend.

It’s worth remembering that Congress protected both agencies this year. NIH came through FY2026 at about $48.7 billion, roughly flat. NSF ended up near $8.75 billion, up from a requested $3.9 billion. The current structure survived its hardest year yet. Why would anyone want to rebuild it now?

Because surviving isn’t the same as being well designed, and because the next reorganization is coming whether the science community writes it or someone else does.

Bush’s terms

Here’s what I’m proposing. One National Research Foundation, combining NSF with NIH’s extramural research programs (but not the NIH intramural program in Bethesda), built on Bush’s terms.

Governance first. A board of distinguished scientists and citizens with staggered, fixed terms. A director with a fixed term, removable only for cause. Readers of “The Board That Couldn’t Be Fired“ will know why I care about that clause. An agency the President can reshape by memo is a science foundation that will be reshaped by memo.

Statute second. Here’s a fact about NSF that deserves more attention than it gets. Apart from global change research, nearly everything that made NSF NSF (research computing, the major facilities, its role as the place other agencies came to for the basic science under their missions) rested on custom. Custom works fine until someone decides to move it. A merger would require a new organic act, and a new organic act is a chance that comes along about once every 75 years to write the franchise into law. I’d take it.

Culture third. The story of Ebola in 2014 should give you a big clue as to which agency culture I’d prefer for the merged successor. The ability to invest quickly, with program officers having a high degree of discretion, informed by merit review when possible, strikes me as very important.

Names last. Keep the disease-named institutes as divisions inside the foundation. The National Cancer Institute should still exist, with that name, and the people who march for it every spring should still have something to march for. Bush’s Medical Research division can contain multitudes.

What do you get for all this? One director defending one top line for American research. One review system with one set of standards. No seam for BRAIN to fall into, and no second clock when the next virus shows up.

The best objection

The strongest argument against what I’m proposing comes from NSF’s own appropriations history, and I’d rather meet it head-on.

Until 2005, the VA-HUD appropriations subcommittee funded NSF. That year both chambers abolished VA-HUD and moved NSF and NASA into the new Commerce-Justice-Science subcommittee. The community was pleased. A science bill! In hindsight, the move was never priced. Relationships reset: Kit Bond, NSF’s most reliable Senate champion, stayed behind. The competition changed from veterans’ medical care to the FBI, NASA, the Census, and federal prisons. And NSF lost the best position an agency can have: a small, sympathetic line in a big bill. In CJS it became a big account in a medium bill.

Apply that to my foundation. A combined agency of something like $58 billion would be the biggest discretionary item in whatever bill it landed in. By the small-in-a-big-bill rule, that’s about the worst place to be.

My answer is NIH. NIH is already the biggest item in Labor-HHS, and it does fine. It doubled between 1998 and 2003, on schedule, the only completed doubling in modern American science funding. Big in a big bill hasn’t hurt it at all. Why? Disease. Every member of Congress has constituents with cancer, Alzheimer’s, or diabetes, and every one of those diseases has an institute with its name on the door. That rule describes agencies without constituencies. That’s NSF’s problem, and it’s exactly the problem a merger is meant to solve.

NSF has never lacked for friendly authorizers. Its authorization doubled on paper in 2002, again in the COMPETES Acts, again in CHIPS and Science, and the appropriators never followed through. Basic science outside medicine has never found an appropriations constituency. The only proven machine for building one belongs to NIH. A merger bets that the machine can carry physics, ecology, and mathematics along with it.

It’s a bet, and it’s somewhat out there (easy for a nearly retired professor). The coattails could run the other way, with disease advocates turning the whole foundation into a translational shop. That’s why the culture and the governance clause matter more than the org chart.

What stands in the way

Any proposal this big owes the reader a bill. Here’s mine.

The culture could go the wrong way. NIH’s extramural budget is roughly five times NSF’s. Put them together without a deliberate design, and the bigger culture wins. The study section absorbs the program officer, and the next Ebola response gets slower. Every agency merger I’ve watched has followed the money. This one would too unless the statute says otherwise.

Congress would have to willingly redraw its own committee map. NIH’s appropriation currently lives in Labor-HHS, NSF in CJS, with different authorizers on each side. Wherever the successor foundation ends up, it changes who it competes with for allocations, and it resets relationships on both sides at once. The 2005 move shows Congress can rehouse a science agency when it wants to. It doesn’t show Congress will.

One foundation is one target. In an upcoming commissioned piece, I’ll argue that the American research system’s resilience comes partly from having many funders, so that a hit to one doesn’t take down the whole. A single foundation is the biggest hub you could build. The governance protections above are there because of this risk, and I won’t pretend they eliminate it. A future administration with a grudge against science would have one director to fire instead of two.

“Single” is an overstatement. DOE’s Office of Science, DOD, NASA, USDA, and ARPA-H stay where they are. So do NIH’s intramural program and the Clinical Center, in my version, because their mission-driven, in-house work belongs with HHS. What I’m proposing is a single foundation for investigator-initiated research. That’s still most of the federal basic research enterprise, and it’s where the return on investment would be the highest.

The argument Bush lost

Bush lost in 1947 to a President who wanted control over science. Seventy-nine years later, the same argument is being had again, in the opposite order. This time, consolidation comes first, and whoever moves fastest settles who controls it.

I’d rather the science community moved first. If American research is going to be reorganized, and it is, the reorganization should be written in statute, governed by a board that can’t be fired on a whim, and run on the culture that could fund Ebola research in two weeks. That’s Bush’s foundation. We should have built it in 1950.

We can still build it. Somebody is going to.

I’m winding things up at my university before retiring in January after 29 years. The agenda runs from critical to trivial. Signing up for Medicare Part B is really important. Cleaning decades of assorted detritus out of my office, less so. I’m also getting a lot more comfortable saying no, explaining that, as the lamest of ducks, my influence with the powers that be is asymptotically approaching zero.

Over the years I watched many colleagues and friends go through this same end-of-career passage. Now it’s my turn.

So what happens to this blog? It continues, and so does my Substack, thanks to my friends at Emergent Ventures. The blog may be a bit less focused on S&T policy, but it’s been through transitions before: when I moved from heading Krasnow to leading NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate, and again when I returned to GMU as a public policy prof. I’ll keep the title, Discoverers and Discoveries, because that’s the theme that ties everything together. At Krasnow, we were building an institute at the intersection of neuroscience, computer science, and cognitive psychology to explore the complexity of mind. At NSF BIO, we were investing in Understanding the Rules of Life. And in this most recent chapter, we were trying to understand the ecosystem that has produced an era of massive discovery, from LIGO to AI.

I’m already finding new outlets for my intellectual energy. Last year I slogged through Moby-Dick. This year it’s Joyce’s Ulysses. When I read those books in high school and college, it was always under the gun of a paper being due. Now it’s just for fun. I’m also working through a second-book slump. The new project on how culture shapes S&T started out focused on aviation, which is far from my training, and has had to evolve into something more closely aligned with my neuroscience background. That work goes on too.

What comes next will probably be more personal: exploring my own evolution as a discoverer, and making some new discoveries. If only about how to write more effectively.

P.S. I’ll be reposting my Substack pieces here as well, so everything lives in one place. Stay tuned!

A Washington lunch, and the fiction that makes builders build

I had lunch recently with a friend at a small Italian place in DC near Sibley Hospital. We gossiped a bit and then got down to business. Our agenda? Intelligence – the medium of exchange here in Washington – and a set of public facts on which the two of us had completely different perspectives. His was an active framework: take the constraints and work from within to do something substantially new on the science front, albeit with less money. Mine was more positional: block where you can, wait for better times to build back, and meanwhile amplify the lame-duck narrative to prepare stakeholders for a colossal policy reversal.

At the same time, we were both signaling to each other at the meta-level. Carefully chosen turns of phrase, from me: “legal exposure” and from him: “peer review is over” conveyed an entirely different subtext, at least as important as the first. At that meta-level, the signaling and the conversation that accompanied it were about the future. For me, it meant the current Administration has a definite end date and that, in anticipation, key members might be lawyering up for the hearings and court cases that might come to pass if things don’t go their way. For him, that while he might leave his government job sometime soon, there was no such constraint on the policies that the Administration has been putting into place with such gusto: I should consider them permanent.

What I’m describing above happens many times over each day here in DC. Nominal conversations about policy and current events between individuals on the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of government that, in actuality, operate on two levels at once: the nominal level of information exchange and the other meta-level that sends prediction signals. What’s the purpose of those? Why bother?

The answer is that both sides aim to shape the other’s behavior, at least at the margins. My colleague’s ‘the policies are here forever’ is aimed at forestalling resistance, whether in the courts, legislative branches, or in the media. And mine was about reminding him that while the incumbents hold power and the cards today, that won’t necessarily be the case after the next election, and that they might want to think about some restraint, if only to avoid future oversight.

But all of that raises a larger question that, these days, is more important than ever here in the States: why, given political power, do individuals pretend it will never be lost? Any cursory reading of history reveals a constant dynamic: the Roman Republic became an Empire which eventually fell. Stalin eventually passed away, as did the USSR. And within America, over 250 years, the one relentless constant is change from the drafting of the Constitution to DOGE. So is the ‘we’re here forever’ schtick: a sincere, if misguided, belief, or something completely different. To my mind, it’s the latter: if you didn’t act as if your work would last forever- whether that be to rescue a large infrastructure project or to cap overhead rates- you would never have the energy required to put change into place in the first place. At some point, even as a neuroscientist, I became convinced that NSF’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) was critical to the future of Biology writ large. And…that NEON would last for at least its planned 30-year campaign. And the reason I began to think of NEON as ‘forever’? Because, if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had the internal motivation to fix it in the first place.

Earlier in my career, I had built the Krasnow Institute from a small, nearly broke non-profit into an internationally ranked academic unit of George Mason University, complete with an MRI brain scanner, wet labs, shared instrumentation, and degree programs in neuroscience and computational social sciences, all with the internal idea that it would be around long after I was gone. Today, only the building is left: Krasnow Hall. The academic departments, faculty, fundraising boards–they are scattered to the wind. If I’d known that when I got started, well, I’d have gone back to the lab bench or something else.

The point isn’t that the ‘forever fiction’ plays out well in some cases and not in others. NEON’s story is still playing out. Rather, it’s the idea that without some internal world-building exercise (like what some novelists do when they commit to rules that will end when the book does), humans have a hard time summoning the willpower to build new things. The intuitive realization of the second law- that entropy is constantly increasing- would lead to paralysis.

All principals create the internal fiction that they’ll be around for the long haul. It goes with the territory. And even if the long haul is term-limited (as it was in my case), their pet projects will last long after they’re gone. They will be immortal. Until, of course, they’re not.

Former NSF policy insider Joel Widder’s new take on NSF’s problems here. In his excellent piece, he argues that NSF has lost both “agency” and respect from its sister government agencies. That may be why NSF’s Brian Stone released this document here yesterday. My sense is that the current NSF non-boss bosses are doing their level best to define some lanes that still belong to the Agency, notably the STEM pipeline and curiosity-based science in some core areas subject to a version of ‘portfolio management’ that is blurred sufficiently to pass muster with OSTP and the community.

Neuroscience’s trajectory since 1980

Fewer than ten of us were in the cohort of new doctoral students. We were all budding neuroscientists, but at the time, the name of that field hadn’t fully permeated the academy yet, so we were in different, closely related programs: psychobiology, pharmacology, anatomy, and cell biology. When we headed out for beers at Don Vito’s, the local dive across from the still newly built UC Irvine campus, we discussed the synaptic organization of various brain regions like regular folks discussing professional sports teams. I loved the hippocampus and so did my closest friends. We were fans. Some of us liked neurotransmitters instead of brain regions, but it was more or less the same: fandom. The Rams and Dodgers couldn’t compete.

We were just starting out, so our professors were only loosely connected to us. We rotated between labs, and they checked us out the same way we checked them out. Committed mentor-mentee relationships would arrive in our second year. My first prof was the chair of the pharmacology department. He was kind of famous, but, honestly, he was kind of meh compared to some of the other faculty superstars. One prof was the provost and a world-class behavioral pharmacologist, and an accomplished jazz musician. Another was the charismatic shaman of a new model for learning and memory called Long-Term Potentiation. UC Irvine was the hot critical center of a new movement to understand brain function, and we students could feel it.

The first year was filled with challenging classes, which we mostly took together in one somewhat cramped, dingy space in a Brutalist monstrosity called Steinhaus Hall. When we weren’t in class together (or out at Don Vitos), we’d be in the lab. Early on, I blew up one of my prof’s precious Data General Nova minicomputers–it actually smoked when it went up. So I was in the doghouse. Computers in 1980 cost a lot. Eventually, I transferred to Ann Arbor to finish my doctorate not under a smoke cloud.

1980 was the beginning of a decade that would change the brain sciences. What had once been an ill-defined intersection between physiological psychology and neurobiology became a burgeoning new discipline with tens of thousands attending its annual meeting in cities like Los Angeles, Boston, and New Orleans. The expensive mini-computer that I blew up at the beginning of the decade was replaced wholesale by the almost commoditized IBM PC clone that I wrote my dissertation on. Noninvasive brain imaging of human subjects became routinized with positron emission tomography, and a new thing called the Internet made it possible to move large datasets from one site to another, thousands of miles away, in seconds.

And yet, the field’s inherent collective goals of delivering cures for brain diseases (such as Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia) and explaining the mind remained tantalizingly just out of reach over the 80’s and into the first two decades of the new millennium.

What gives? What went awry? To my mind, there are several inter-related strands:

First, biological brains (even simple ones) are far more complicated than either biology or psychology disciplinary frameworks can routinely handle. I enjoy showing students brain activity maps of living fish embryos as they behave, then revealing that even with the complete neural dynamics (the movie of all the neurons firing dynamically) and the behavior clearly visible, the mapping function between the two remains obscure. I also enjoy showing students the incredible 3-D reconstructions of actual complex brains at the electron microscopic level of resolution and then telling them that this wiring diagram is just a snapshot–real brain neurons literally dance and jiggle their connections all the time.

Likewise, beautiful cognitive frameworks with great explanatory power at the behavioral level become modular black boxes with arrows between them as soon as we try to map their modules onto real biology. Psychology feels solid to us because we experience consciousness and theory of mind. But where those two come from biologically is unclear. The simultaneous intuition of scientific relevance and inherent disconnection from the nuts and bolts of neurons creates the problems. Donald Hebb’s 1949 book, The Organization of Behavior, along with O’Keefe and Nadel’s 1976 work, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map, represent the high points of trying to bridge this gap. The chasm is still with us.

The second problem is one that I’ve dealt with in an earlier piece: neuroscientists have too often become enamored with their own pet hypotheses to the point of misconduct: discarding evidence and fabricating data when experimental results are at variance with the beloved. So that’s a structural problem, and it may be related to how urgently the field’s many stakeholders and investors feel about those diseases in their personal lives. If you believe–even irrationally–that you’ve discovered the cure, then it’ll be an easy and tempting sell to funders.

Finally, there is the attraction of consciousness as a phenomenon produced by brains (we think) but not tractable in the usual sense of other phenomena–we each experience it only individually, even as we lose it collectively through sleep. The usual armamentarium of Popperian science fails here. How are we to test hypotheses on this most salient and yet most personal of brain-based phenomena? And yet, for curiosity-based neuroscience (as opposed to the biomedical part of this discipline), this is the King of problems. Like the singularity at the center of a black hole, it remains unknowable.

We graduate-student brain-science fans from 46 years ago might feel pretty rueful about our career choices if we’d known where the trajectory was headed. But all fields have different seasons. AI has weathered two winters and is now at the top of the heap. Just because a set of problems is hard doesn’t mean that progress won’t be coming down the road. In 19th-century physics, Kelvin was rumored (perhaps apocryphally) to have said it had all been figured out: how wrong that would have been. And how wrong it might also be to write off neuroscience now.

Not everything on my list above warrants the same treatment. Nature’s hidden discoveries about brain complexity and the mind deserve patience. The hypothesis trap is the field’s own particular ‘illness’ and warrants immediate treatment.

Many of my readers already know this, but indeed, I am retiring from George Mason University at the end of this current Fall semester. It’s been a long excellent run of three decades or so, but it’s time to make room for the younger generation and to move on.

I will be continuing to publish both this blog and my Substack newsletter. And I’m hard at work on my new book about how culture affects technological design–particularly in the aviation industry. And I’ll continue to keep on learning–whether it be new languages or new domain knowledge, even beyond neuroscience.

My on-line homebase will move from the University to my github, here.

How America’s Dust Bowl is playing out again

After a clear Sunday morning in mid-April 1935, Oklahomans experienced a soil blizzard the likes of which would become legend. That day took on the moniker Black Sunday, and contemporary photographs reveal why: a tsunami of dust fills the entire horizon as it approaches. But the dust isn’t brown, as we usually associate with such events. It was entirely black. The soil of America, at a continental scale, was being airlifted east at 100 kilometers per hour.

I’ve been recently watching the Ken Burns PBS series on the Dust Bowl, and it brought back many memories of my years running NSF’s Biological Sciences Directorate, where we used that disaster as a cautionary example to build support for our investments in ecological sciences.

Black Sunday wasn’t a single unitary event. It was a sustained ecological collapse that had marked the entire early 1930s in America’s plains. It resulted from policy error: land designated for intense agricultural cultivation of wheat and corn was entirely inappropriate for that activity. Pulling up the native grasses and tilling the soil created a disaster that was waiting to happen. When drought inevitably came, the soil across some 40 million hectares was already loose. There was nothing to hold it down. With some wind, at scale, it lifted off the ground and into the air.

Why should we worry about a century-old disaster in America? Perhaps you’ve heard the news about the Colorado River basin running dry. Or about the drought that is boosting shipping prices on Europe’s parched rivers. Or the smoke on the US East Coast from boreal forest fires two thousand kilometers away. Drought-driven disruption is everywhere, and it is putting soil at risk.

I asked my scientific collaborator, Eugene Kelley–he’s a soil scientist from Colorado State University who previously headed up the National Ecological Observatory Network about the entire era–what we now call the Dust Bowl and how it applies to us now. Here’s the quote he emailed to me:

“The Dust Bowl taught us that soil is fundamental to national resilience; today, science makes clear that it is also central to climate stability, water security, biodiversity, and human health. As soil degradation now accelerates beyond Dust Bowl-era rates, we cannot meet a planetary-scale challenge with yesterday’s investments. We know what is at stake, we know how to act, and future generations will judge whether we chose – or failed to choose- to sustain the science and institutions needed to protect the soils that sustain life.” E. Kelley

The key here is Kelley’s idea of national resilience. The policy mistake that made the Dust Bowl a reality offered short-term profits to farming families at the cost of their resilience. The need for increased cereal crop production driven by the First World War combined with the allure of cheap land drove in-migration of farmers.

Many became refugees as a result of the event–they had lost everything. There was a massive migration out of the region (hence the term Okies) to my native state of California in search of agricultural work. Even starting anew in the West, those families had lost their resilience along with their land. Today, we see mass migrations globally, driven by wars, economics and, as with the Dust Bowl, environmental catastrophe.

When we put the land that we grow our food on at risk, we are mortgaging our national resilience. Food systems, even at industrial scale and abetted by the latest technologies, ultimately depend on the health of soils and their underlying microbiomes. Those microbiomes consist of soil bacterial and fungal ecosystems that benefit the plants that hold the soil together. They can fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and repel plant pathogens, all without human intervention. When we dig up the soil (e.g., tilling it to plant a large-scale cereal crop), we damage those ecosystems. Not only are the native plants killed, but the soil becomes less fertile because its microbiome has been physically disrupted. The soil’s resilience is consequently lowered. At a microlevel, the soil’s connection to the land becomes tenuous.

Black Sunday’s tsunami of dust has become one of the preeminent symbols of ecological catastrophe. When I’d go up to the Hill to explain why the National Ecological Observatory Network might be a really important NSF investment, it was the Dust Bowl culminating in Black Sunday that staff and members would have heard of. And then they got it.

And its core lesson for stakeholders (of all stripes) is that it was a failure of resilience driven by short-sighted policy and economic gain. But there is a lot more: while the Dust Bowl was a regional disaster, its underlying cause–the destruction of soil health for short-term profit–is now a global crisis. What’s going on now is a similar, albeit more widespread, threat to soil resilience, driven by modern ‘Big Agriculture’ and accelerated by disruptions from geopolitical dysfunction at all levels. To my mind, we must move beyond simply acknowledging the problem toward something more proactive: a scientifically informed strategy to rebuild our soil’s health and, by extension, our global resilience.

In one of my NSF slide decks, the cautionary story of the Dust Bowl is followed by a modern satellite image showing a Saharan dust extending as a unitary weather feature over Southern Europe and the Eastern Atlantic–a ‘storm’ extending some thousand or so miles. It’s to show a global dust bowl in the making–now. And that’s because drought stress is acting as a catalyst. What happened in Europe this past summer is an example of this dynamic producing more frequent extreme weather–not just extremely hot weather in Paris, but also drought and wildfires in Southwestern France. This is just one example of a pattern playing out across the globe: unprecedented stress on agricultural systems worldwide.

The scale of the current problem dwarfs the regional one of the 1930’s Dust Bowl. Current estimates put the scale of that soil degradation at 40% of our planet’s land. This is no longer an American problem; it’s a planetary one.

The human and economic costs also go beyond the scale of the Dust Bowl. The ‘Okie’ narrative now extends to over 3 billion people, according to the United Nations. And to put that number into some perspective, as a planet, we are multiple billions of people over the planet’s natural carrying capacity–all as a result of the Green Revolution and Big Agriculture.

We should be very grateful for the Green Revolution. But we should also be wary of our dependence on its food systems. And this extends to individuals–losing one’s land means losing one’s livelihood for farmers. And the modern version of Black Sunday is unfolding today with increasing regularity from Sub-Saharan Africa to Central America.

None of this is a mystery we’re still waiting to solve. We already know, and are already practicing at real scale in some places, a different way of farming. No-till or minimum-till methods leave soil structure and fungal networks intact instead of shattering them every season. Cover cropping keeps living roots in the ground between cash crops, feeding the microbiome through the off-season and holding soil in place against wind and rain the way native prairie grass once did. Crop rotation and diversification break the monoculture cycle, rebuilding biodiversity below ground by varying what the soil above is asked to do. And agroforestry and perennial cropping systems go further still, mimicking the deep-rooted, never-tilled permanence of a natural ecosystem rather than resetting the land to bare dirt every spring. None of these are exotic ideas. They are old ideas, validated by new science, waiting on the will to scale them.

This isn’t a problem an individual farmer can solve alone, no matter how committed. A single operation practicing regenerative agriculture in a landscape still organized around short-term extraction is swimming against a current set by policy, markets, and subsidy design. We need a systemic response, not just a virtuous one.

This is where Kelley’s warning hits hardest: “we cannot meet a planetary-scale challenge with yesterday’s investments.” Most of the world’s agricultural subsidy structures, including our own, were built to reward yield and output, not stewardship. A farmer who maximizes bushels per acre this year is rewarded; a farmer who spends this year rebuilding soil carbon for the next twenty is, more often than not, left to absorb that cost alone. That’s backward. We know how to price and pay for the outcomes we actually want — carbon sequestered, water filtered, biodiversity restored — the same way we’ve learned to price and pay for clean energy. What’s missing isn’t the mechanism. It’s the political will to point it at soil.

And underneath the policy sits the science, which needs sustained investment of its own, not a one-time grant cycle. This is where NSF infrastructure like the National Ecological Observatory Network matters — not because a single sensor tower or a single soil core tells us much on its own, but because sustained, continental-scale monitoring is the only way we’ll see a slow-motion Dust Bowl coming before it becomes a fast one. Black Sunday was, in a real sense, as much a data failure as a land-use failure: nobody was watching the whole system closely enough, early enough, to stop the mistake before it compounded across a decade. We have far better tools now. What we need is the discipline to keep funding them past the next budget cycle, and the humility to let the data — not the next quarter’s yield report — set the policy.

Kelley put the stakes plainly: “future generations will judge whether we chose — or failed to choose — to sustain the science and institutions needed to protect the soils that sustain life.” I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. It’s a fairly literal description of the choice in front of us. This isn’t only an environmental issue, filed away with the others. It’s a moral one, about whether the world we hand to our children can still grow their food.

So: policy error plus drought stress degrades soil, and degraded soil is lost resilience. That was the whole story of the Dust Bowl, written in dust across the Plains in 1935. Today the same story is being played out again, only the variables have grown — 40 million hectares has become 40 percent of the planet’s land, and a few hundred thousand Okies on Route 66 have become three billion people whose land is failing under them somewhere in the world right now.

I keep coming back to that photograph from Black Sunday — the black wall of a continent’s topsoil, a kilometer high, rolling toward a farmhouse. It was terrifying to the people who lived it, and it’s still the image that makes a room full of congressional staffers go quiet. I think of it as a warning we’ve already been shown once, in enough detail that we have no excuse for missing it a second time. We have the soil science, the regenerative practices, and the monitoring capacity to see this coming and choose differently.

How an Emergent Ventures meeting in the Danish capital produced optimism about our future

I was in Copenhagen this past weekend for a meeting of Emergent Ventures grant winners, most of whom were under thirty. I was the oldster among the group.

The whole thing was actually one intense conversation after another, ranging from projecting cellular phenotypes onto novel geometries to the drone innovation cycle in Ukraine. There was a 15-year-old French mathematical genius–we spoke at lunch using French so that he could explain more easily what he was working on. And there was a 22-year-old quant making her fortune in London. There was the Nigerian entrepreneur who lent me a USB-C cable to get me through an iPhone charging glitch. There was the dinner at the Odd Fellows Temple, an antique royal blue banquet hall filled with portraits of prominent…well…Odd Fellows from the 19th century–while I underwent the third degree about my neuroscience career from two twenty-something brothers who clearly were also pretty much geniuses at the intersection of math and maybe computer science. And finally there was the swim in the canal–perfectly clean and filled with Danish citizens as well as fish. I left the meeting on a real (non-drug-induced) high.

Emergent Ventures is a “fast grant” outfit led by my friend and George Mason Colleague, Tyler Cowen. Since its beginnings in 2018, it has awarded something on the order of 1500 grants, all of them without the overwhelming bureaucracy and overhead that consumes the more normative granting systems. I’m one of those awardees–my funding supports this Substack being free. So thank you, Tyler.

What is it about youthful optimism that is infectious? And is that feeling real? It reminds me of a debate a century earlier, also in Copenhagen, between Bohr and Heisenberg on what the quantum mechanical wave function actually was: a human-created tool with fantastic predictive capabilities, or an actual physical thing in the universe. A synthesis came out of those old conversations between geniuses that we now call the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics. What that is, in detail, is perhaps the subject of another Substack.

But for this week’s post, my question for you is whether the feeling that we humans can build a better world (still) is an artifact of that youthful energy from last week, or is it real? Well, reality can bite. As I was standing in a painfully long line at the airport to leave the Schengen Zone and return home to DC–each screening with camera, border agent, and fingerprints took what seemed to be 2-3 minutes–it seemed already that the answer to my question was no. It’s not real. The world is impossibly flawed. Even with AI tools, the technology world that we have built adds burden. But in that line, helpful airport workers were distributing water bottles and pulling folks out of the main line to make their departing flights. And when I arrived at Dulles yesterday evening, the Global Entry camera screen id’d my face and sent me on my way without human interaction, perhaps within 2-3 seconds. It was only in the taxi later that I had the queasy feeling of Big Brother watching and knowing all. So the immediate aftermath of the meeting was mixed.

Back at the meeting, I had gone to one session, primarily for the European attendees, about how motivated individuals can work together to make their governments function more effectively. The group was very eclectic. There were some folks from across the political spectrum. But what struck me was how seriously they talked to one another, sketching out their ideas on a large white pad, with none of the trolling and posturing we have come to associate with those interactions. And the ideas for novel ways to improve governance were really good. Nor were they single-issue framed: maybe an approach we could try here in the US more.

But the sessions themselves weren’t the secret sauce. Rather, it was the organizers who had set about using the meeting, technically an unconference, to create an entirely new social network–one that could never have emerged from the meeting participants’ own networks–and what emerged, to my mind, is entirely novel and potentially quite powerful.

Emergent phenomena are the stuff of complexity science and the Institute that I led for sixteen years of my professional career. Think of the schooling behavior of fish emerging from individual brains and consequent behaviors. Or of how market crashes emerge from individual agent decisions about their own portfolios. All of these phenomena share the characteristic that the network itself, rather than its constituent agents, produces the emergent order or pattern. Well, that’s not quite correct–it’s an oversimplification. The agents do act. But it’s their network topology with its nodes and edges that integrates the individual actions into one emergent output.

Most social networks among humans are somewhat fragmented. We hang with our friends. Occasionally, someone new joins our circle, but more often than not, it’s the same old same old. Novel social networks, such as the one created afresh in Copenhagen this past weekend, break this pattern of fragmentation and produce new possibilities. In this case, the possibilities–the potential–seem to me to be substantial. Why?

First, when older people, such as myself, interact directly with smart young people, it provides a bridge between the stuff of experience and the wisdom gained from it and the stuff of youthful energy and optimism. Above, I wrote about how I initially left the meeting feeling energized and positive about future outcomes. What’s interesting to me is that the WhatsApp feed from the group’s younger participants mirrors my own feelings.

Second, the group brought together non-traditional approaches to traditional problems ranging from cancer to political governance. One independent young researcher was pursuing an entirely novel (as far as I could see) approach to large-scale data from the life sciences with the idea of revealing new functional connections that would be invisible using more common approaches.

Finally, it strikes me that this new network may have some of the fundamental characteristics of ‘small world’networks–a subject for a future piece (stay tuned). If that were true, then my own view is that the fast information diffusion and resilience of this new network may be enhanced and the stuff that it produces as emergents might be all the more significant.

But back to the Copenhagen interpretation of 100 years ago. We still don’t fully know whether the wave function is physical reality. Those famous physicists somewhat punted on the issue–all while they debated furiously. And the reality of my own view for this group and the possibilities that might emerge? Also subject to debate. But my own contemporary Copenhagen Interpretation is that indeed the ingredients for positive real change are there.