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.

How I was able to retain a superstar under less-than-ideal circumstances

Some details here — names and offering institutions — have been changed. The dilemma is real; the disguises are mine.

She had two NIH RO1 grants and a written job offer from an extremely prestigious Bay Area academic medical center. And she was in my office explaining the side deals that included subsidized housing and virtually zero teaching load. And my job? I needed to retain the human talent. As her dean at George Mason, at the time, not even an R1, I needed to persuade my nascent superstar that she should stay in Northern Virginia, with its awful summers and hellish traffic in her undersourced lab with its retrofitted offices and hallway alcoves. As a native Californian, I was well-versed in both the positives and negatives of the Golden State. But this really wasn’t about lifestyle. It was about the future–both hers and our suburban state school on the make.

But I had a plan. And it got to the essence of the matter: job security versus prestige. It also depended on the accuracy of my assessment of her ambition.

“Jim, they’re offering a one-million-dollar start-up.”

“And tenure,” I responded, having read the letter myself.

“And tenure, yes.”

“And a condo overlooking the Presidio,” I added.

“Yes, with the same square footage as our house in Fairfax,” she answered enthusiastically.

“That sounds great, Kari. I don’t think we can beat it on paper. But I do have one question for you.”

Silence for maybe ten seconds.

“OK, so what’s your question?”

“What do you think tenure means in that letter?” 

This was the hook. I knew that tenure at the California offer was conditional. She’d get her goodies as long as she had ample grant support. With her two NIH grants, Kari was in great shape–for now. Best case, she’d go on to win the Nobel Prize with a lab with all the bells and whistles. In the worst case, if for some reason her grants were ended, the Bay Area institution would terminate her employment and evict her from the nice housing.

She responded, “It means tenure, like here. Job security. Not having to worry about my family, our kids.”

“No dice, Kari. If you lose your grants here, you can always teach more college kids.” You’re a great teacher, and your course load can pay your salary.”

“But that has nothing to do with my tenure,” she answered indignantly.

“Well, it kind of does. It allows us to offer you a tenure that you can take to the bank–just like you’re thinking about. We’re not going to go bankrupt on whether you have grants or not.”

A half hour later, I was pretty sure that I’d won. Kari wasn’t willing to take the gamble on the prestige. She understood that “tenure” is a squishy term and that one of the key advantages of staying was that it meant what she thought it meant.

So let’s zoom out. Academic tenure in the United States is an endangered species these days. But, even so, there are three different variants out in the wild. The first, the lifetime job-security one, is increasingly rare. Ultimately, it depends on an Institution, having some sort of collateral on your salary. At my place, the university can require me to teach more classes (with more tuition-paying students) until my salary is covered. If I were at the academic medical center as a physician professor with tenure, my place could require me to see more patients. But ultimately, the job-security version of tenure requires some financial backup in a situation where there is no grant success.

The second variant of tenure (a bit more common), especially for PhD’s at teaching hospitals, is tenure as a hunting permit. In this version, tenure means you get to ‘eat what you kill.’  This was the package that Kari was looking at. So, if you can pay your salary with grants, great. If not, then no money. And if you have half your salary from your grants–then that’s what you get. This formula is actually pretty similar to the professional business world of lawyers and lobbyists. 

And there’s a final variant, where tenure is an honorific. You get to say that you’re tenured to your friends and maybe put it on your CV. But it means nothing in terms of financial obligations from your employers.

How can the same word, ‘tenure’, have such different meanings across our science ecosystem? Ultimately, it’s an accident of the history of science here in the US. When tenure was first rolled out in the 1940’s, at many public and private universities engaged in STEM, the budget model was fundamentally based on tuition revenue (and state appropriations for public universities). These institutions were among the earliest to put tenure in place as a protection for faculty academic freedom, and they were able to do so because of their budget models. Later, as academic medical centers entered the equation, faculty salaries were much more dependent on ‘soft money’ (grants). In addition, such medical institutions often have a high velocity of cash flow (from Medicare/Medicaid reimbursement for procedures) that makes faculty salaries a significant risk factor, one that can only be mitigated for those with M.D.s who can see more patients if required. When mandatory retirement at 65 was eliminated in 1994, the tenure equation became much more fraught for universities as there was no guaranteed end-point for the employment guarantee. Some places responded by changing the meaning of the term to purely a title rather than job security.

Kari was unaware of the extant tenure variants when she came into my office to play hardball. This was a crucial problem for her job negotiation strategy. Since I was very aware of her compensation package priorities, simply informing her of what the California package really entailed served my purposes: we retained her.

The social ecology of tenure is as important for Institutions as it is for people. There was no way our place could compete with the California institution on most concrete aspects of the compensation package: salary, benefits, start-up. But we could compete on the question of job security, and that turned out to be the critical factor. 

It’s worth pointing out that what happened with Kari wouldn’t necessarily work in other cases. It was the intersection of her priorities with our ability to meet those needs. In a sense, I got her to articulate what she really needed: for tenure to mean what she thought it meant. 

I stated earlier that tenure is endangered here in the States. The deal that I was able to make with Kari probably won’t be available to deans in the future. In that future, institutions like George Mason are going to have a tougher time of it. As with the private sector, the market for talent will become a lot more transparent. And maybe that’s a good thing.

The 100 + page document is here. I’m still reading the report and will eventually react to it here on the blog (and not on my Substack). There are plenty of quick takes (no doubt aided by AI) out there.

July 23, 2026 After 24 hours to digest….

Every science policy document since 1945 has to decide what to do with Vannevar Bush. This one, Michael Kratsios’s new report to the President, pays Bush constant tribute while quietly taking aim at the institutions his 1945 report built. Strip away the “endless frontier” homage and what’s left is a fairly direct hit on Research 1 universities and academic medical centers — the two pillars of the postwar system.

The report doesn’t say this outright. It doesn’t have to. The R01, the workhorse grant of American biomedical research, is described as a source of “systematic blind spots.” NSF is dinged for organizing itself “around academic disciplines, much as it did in the 1950s,” as though disciplinary depth were the disease rather than one input among several. And indirect cost recovery — the mechanism that keeps AMCs and R1 physical plants standing — gets reduced almost entirely to administrative bloat, with barely a nod to the clinical and research infrastructure it actually funds. That’s not a subtle target. Indirect costs are the financial bloodstream of every academic medical center in this country, and this report treats them as a tax to be cut rather than infrastructure to be understood.

None of this is argued against directly. Instead, the report builds a parallel architecture — X-Labs, FROs, ARPA-style program managers, golden tickets — and lets that architecture do the work of making the R1/AMC model look slow, captured, and unaccountable by comparison. It’s redirection of gravity, not a demolition charge. But gravity redirected long enough is still demolition.

I’m not reflexively defensive of the status quo here. I’ve run a research institute, sat on both sides of the review table for decades, and I know the diagnosis is largely right — the twenty-month grant timelines, the graying PI pool, the incentive to armor good science in whatever language currently survives review. That’s real.

What bothers me is the sleight of hand in the prescription. The report wants to restore “merit” against the politicization of peer review, while simultaneously proposing to reorganize the whole federal portfolio around a different set of political priorities — national security, reshoring, great-power competition. It never explains why one externally imposed priority corrupts science and the other doesn’t. That’s not an oversight. It’s the whole argument, left conveniently unresolved.

The one piece I’d take without hesitation is the golden ticket: let a single reviewer stake real conviction on an unconventional proposal, blind the review to institutional pedigree, and you might actually rescue the ideas that consensus panels are built to kill. I’ve watched strange, brilliant proposals die by committee for exactly this reason. Of everything in this report, that’s the one line item I’d install tomorrow.

So: a genuinely interesting vision of AI-catalyzed, mechanism-diverse science funding, built by quietly hollowing out the R1 and AMC model that has carried American research since Bush. Whether that’s a feature or a bug probably depends on which side of the review table you’ve spent your career sitting on.

My dinner with Ronald Reagan yielded an unexpected lesson

The future POTUS refused the interview request. I was phoning up to his room from the dated lobby of the Lord Jeffrey Inn, a place named after an alleged British war criminal, now renamed the Inn on Boltwood. It was my chance for a huge scoop — he was visiting Amherst College with his son, on the grand tour that some American parents take their teenage children on in anticipation of higher ed.

The dejection immediately dissipated when he invited me to dinner instead. Dinner with Ronald Reagan: a two-fer — the Inn’s restaurant was the best place in town, and I had a feeling that the former California governor, now in the thick of his primary challenge against Gerald Ford, was headed for higher office. But ten minutes later, when I dumped my Caesar salad in my lap out of sheer nervousness, I was back in the bad place I’d started.

There was a five-second gap, and then the future President gave me a huge grin.

“I hope that’s a big napkin,” he said.

This wasn’t what I’d been expecting. The version of Reagan that I’d carried into the lobby was that of the ex-actor-turned-Governor of my home state, who’d taken a hard line against protesting students at San Francisco State and was now President Ford’s challenger from the right. And this wasn’t just the consensus on the campus. It was my own considered view based on being a former constituent and coming of voting age in Southern California.

“Where are you from, son?”

Note the reversal — the college junior who had come to interview him was now the interviewee. There was no audience and no notebook out.

He asked what I thought of his time in Sacramento leading the state. I answered honestly: I told him that his administration had been extremely right-wing and against most of what I believed in. In retrospect, that was pretty nervy. But I was nineteen, and it didn’t register. In any case, I’d been straight with him to his face.

Reagan didn’t rebut me. There was no defensiveness at all. He just asked if I knew about his earlier role in the labor movement as head of the Screen Actors Guild. No argument — just an inconvenient truth, to use a term ahead of its time: cognitive dissonance with my simple view of the man. He let me do my own arithmetic. My grandfather had also been a union man earlier in his life, before he became the chair of FDR’s Federal Power Commission. The watch I was wearing was engraved as a gift to him from his union brethren. Reagan didn’t know any of that, but I did, and the parallel landed.

On the subject of higher education — the project I was supposedly there to report on — he volunteered his views on the flagship University of California system. Many would now view his optimism as anachronistic, but he was convinced the UCs were critical to California’s economic health. It was the same move he’d made with the SAG detail: pragmatic, unbranded, not the stump-speech version. He knew his audience was one nineteen-year-old kid from LA, and he played it straight.

The dichotomy inside my teenage brain: a right-wing governor who once ran a union and talked about a public university system as economic infrastructure rather than an enemy camp. Neither fact erases the easy label — he was a conservative, and he did fight with California college kids. But it was more complicated than I had thought.

I never got the interview. I got something harder to file.

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The Pattern I Kept Watching Fail

Zoom out forty-plus years. NSF. The BRAIN Initiative. NEON. Krasnow. A career spent in rooms where consequential decisions about science get made, and where the instinct to label — to sort the players into allies and opponents before the meeting starts — is nearly universal, and nearly always costly.

I keep going back in my mind to that dinner. Reagan didn’t argue with my characterization of him. He didn’t rebut it, didn’t get defensive, didn’t produce a list of counterexamples. He just handed me one fact that didn’t fit and let me sit with it. That’s how complicated people actually behave. They don’t refute their labels. They occasionally, almost casually, hand you evidence that the label is incomplete, and if you’re not listening for that evidence, you miss who you’re actually dealing with.

The instinct that made nineteen-year-old me sure I had Reagan figured out is the same instinct I watched policy professionals apply, decades later, to program officers, university presidents, appropriators, and committee staff — with the same blind spot, and sometimes with serious consequences.

At NSF, I watched that same pattern with bemusement, as we fought off an NIH initiative for using PubMed as a data repository on the basis that we had already labeled the White House champion of the initiative as an adversary (clearly, we had no idea what a real adversary at that level would look like), at great political cost. At the time, he had argued in writing that, by sharing data platforms, we would strengthen our position with Congress as good stewards of the taxpayers’ money. We won the battle of the platform – we went with DOE’s platform – but lost the war. The champion of PubMed turned out to be a very real champion of basic science research over the long haul. And by turning away from NIH, we left ourselves (especially NSF Biological Sciences) open to the critique that we were undermining the country’s much larger biomedical research enterprise.

A position on a data-sharing platform isn’t a person’s whole orientation toward science, any more than “right-wing governor” was the whole of Reagan. This seems obvious, stated plainly. It is apparently not obvious in practice.

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The Better Heuristic

Science policy runs on multi-year, cross-administration coalitions. You work with people across election cycles, across ideological shifts, across reorganizations that change who has power and who doesn’t. The temptation to fall into the mislabeling trap compounds over time. You stop updating your priors. You route around them at great cost, and you miss out on evidence that’s sitting square in front of you.

The heuristic I’ve landed on is simple, if hard to practice: listen for the fact that doesn’t fit, not the one that confirms. A lot of times, a potential ally doesn’t bother to argue back about how you’ve labeled them — they just let the contradiction sit there. If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss it entirely and walk away thinking your prior was confirmed because it wasn’t challenged.

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Back to the Salad

I’m heading into a new chapter — the union wristwatch now worn by my nephew, more time in Paris, a little more distance from the rooms where these decisions get made. It’s a reasonable moment to look back at what I got right and what I got wrong, and the Reagan dinner sits near the top of the second list.

I had him wrong. Not completely — the easy-label version of Reagan captures real things about him. But I had him simpler than he was, and I knew it by the end of that dinner, even if I couldn’t have articulated it at nineteen. What I didn’t do, for a long time afterward, was draw the connection between that evening and the professional habits I was developing in parallel: the tendency to sort quickly, to file people under a heading, to stop listening once I thought I knew what I was dealing with.

The salad was embarrassing. The grin and the napkin line were generous. But the real story was sitting right across the table, and I was too busy being nineteen to fully hear it.

I’ve been trying to do better arithmetic ever since.

I had a plan for neuroscience funding. It meant redirecting money Congress had already promised to someone else. My deputy had a plan too.

I did have a plan for neuroscience funding. It was a piggy bank which had $150M in it dedicated to studying the molecular biology of plants. I coveted a big chunk of that money for the neuroscience programs that I had been brought in to curate and grow. There were two small problems. The first was Congress had created the Plant Genome Program. The second slightly more personal: my deputy at NSF Biological Sciences was its champion. Discounting both problems, I instructed our budget people to move the money for next year’s spend. I expected resistance. I did not expect what I got.

Let’s be clear. I had been recruited specifically to grow neuroscience at NSF BIO as part of President Obama’s BRAIN initiative. The mandate came from the NSF Director herself and indirectly through OSTP. My own background at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (part of NIH in Bethesda), was part of the value-proposition from my recruitment that would yield coordination and synergies with NIH’s own ambitious BRAIN plans across all of its Institutes and Centers. The budget move wasn’t freelancing. It was part of my mission.

The Plant Genome program, as I saw it then, was a roughly $150M quasi-congressional earmark with its own community (including some of very close colleagues and friends) and infrastructure. From my standpoint, as incoming neuroscience champion, it looked like an entrenched incumbency in a directorate that needed to better align with the President’s priorities.

This type of budget move wasn’t at all unusual at NSF. Program officers and Directorate executives move money across accounts routinely (an activity that’s getting a lot of attention these days). So, what I was doing wasn’t structurally unprecedented. But it was extremely politically naive.

I told the budget people to move the money and then I waited.

The budget cycle rolled forward, and the reallocation simply hadn’t taken place. There was no memo paper trail explaining why. There was no pushback at all from my deputy. It’s just that the numbers were the same as before.

I felt like I was living in an episode of Black Mirror. I wasn’t angry. There was no feeling of being upset at all. It was much more disorienting. When a direct instruction doesn’t produce a result, before you know why, there’s a strange administrative vertigo. You gave an directive. It produced no effect. That doesn’t happen often at the NSF directorate-head level.

I started asking some questions. Not just in my own front office, but throughout the Agency and of my colleagues and friends at universities across the country. And that’s when a fuller picture emerged.

My Deputy had moved on three fronts. First, she didn’t execute the instruction. I knew this of course, but it became clear that it wasn’t an oversight or a delay. It was her decision. She had decided to play her hand.

Second, she had notified the plant genome community. The scientific community had been alerted that their pet program was under threat. Letters were already moving, calls had been made, informal networks activated. By the time I found out about this second move, the external mobilization was already complete. The fight had left the building without me knowing that there was one.

Her third move was notifying Congress. This move changed the stakes entirely. Going to Congress—even informally, even as a heads up to a staffer—is a move of a different order. It signals that she was willing to invite external oversight of an internal decision that was still nominally mine to make.

What does this mean structurally? Congress created the Plant Genome Program. Alerting them to a threat to it is not merely informational — it is, functionally, an appeal to the program’s founding authority over the head of its current steward. I learned of this, not a via confrontation, but through the budget process and third parties. The absence of a face-to-face reckoning is notable. She didn’t come to me and say I did this. I assembled the picture from pieces.

So, this was indeed the case of the dog that didn’t bark. Here is why that matters:

There was no showdown at the OK Corral. No meeting where I dressed her down or she defended herself. The outcome simply became a fact: the money hadn’t moved, the community was mobilized, Congress had been notified, and the reallocation was effectively dead.

That absence of confrontation became a long-term thing because I chose not to push it once I’d understood that this was a fait accompli. The external moves made confrontation pointless. This wasn’t a policy battle anymore. It was a political bullfight and I’d been gored badly. I’d already lost the plant genome community and with other issues facing the Directorate (like NEON), I couldn’t afford further attrition of my biological community base.

Truthfully, there was an unspoken acknowledgement between the two of us, that the matter had been settled. We both moved on.

I did manage to find a plus up path for neuroscience. The NeuroNex program ended up funding roughly $50M worth of innovative projects aimed to produce accelerative tools for the neuroscience field to move forward within the larger context of BRAIN.

But it didn’t all work out either. As I’ve written elsewhere, it’s not clear to me that the massive brain science investments have paid off. Certainly, they haven’t to the degree we promised our stakeholders at the beginning.

I’m still sitting with this whole story. There is the chain-of-command question. She went around me, not through me. She didn’t argue with me, file a grievance or resign in protest. She acted unilaterally and externally. And was that so different in kind from what I did—acting unilaterally to redirect a congressionally created program?

And then there is the institutional design question. NSF has checks for exactly this kind of situation—Congress, the scientific community, the budget process itself. My deputy didn’t invent those levers. She used the ones that already existed. So, was that insubordination?

NSF had anticipated me. I had not anticipated it.

A decade later, and long after I have left government, the piggy bank balance is a shadow of what it was. But the bank itself stayed where it was. The plant genome community kept its money. Congress kept its program. And my deputy kept her silence, leaving me to figure out what happened on my own.

The piggy bank is there, unbroken, sitting exactly where I found it.

Dan’s spot on, as always, here. I remember one time, the bunch of us had fun making ChatGPT (early version) write NSF non-technical summaries as Sonnets and Haiku. Those were the days. Now, it’s eating the agency budget with its buddy Quantum.

Three weeks into a new job, I got blamed for a sustainability plan I didn’t write. It turned out the Board was right to be angry

I’d been in this room quite a few times. It was on the 12^th floor of the old Arlington NSF headquarters and housed a 15-meter-long conference table and chairs for an audience of perhaps fifty. But on this November day in 2014, it was my first time in the hot seat. I was giving a report to the US National Science Board on progress with the troubled iPlant Cooperative—a large cyberinfrastructure investment of my directorate at the University of Arizona to serve the plant biology community.

Before I was more than a couple of paragraphs into my presentation, there was trouble. There was something called a ‘sustainability plan,’ and apparently, the iPlant people had not taken it seriously. As far as they were concerned, the money would keep flowing (from NSF or somewhere) forever. It got heated. I was three weeks into my new job as the head of biological sciences and had no clue that the Board took its oversight role seriously. I’d spent the previous 16 years as a university institute director (with decanal rank) and had absolutely zero experience with either large cyberinfrastructure projects or sustainability plans.

Under direct questioning, my lack of experience and preparation became obvious. A board member was so angry that she told me to my face, in front of the assembly, that my responses were “personally offensive to her.” I apologized, calmly, but she didn’t look appeased.

It turned out that the Board was incensed not only because the plan was bad—there was no credible revenue model, no institutional home identified, and no transition timeline. The Board was furious because it was clear that the plan wasn’t serious. Rather, it was a cynical box-checking. If it had been in the present day, there would have been accusations of using ChatGPT. So, it wasn’t a communication failure. It was a substance failure. The iPlant team hadn’t taken the instructions seriously.

It took two more years, but the story does have a happy ending. The iPlant team at Arizona took the feedback seriously and reorganized the project, rebranding it as CyVerse to serve a much larger scientific community beyond plant biology. Crucially, the team brought in leadership beyond Arizona and rethought the value proposition. The expanded team added science-education expertise from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and HPC capacity from TACC, the Texas Advanced Computing Center. The NSF remains the key investor, but the funding base has broadened beyond the Biological Sciences Directorate. The focus these days is on democratizing high-performance computing, providing access to US researchers who need compute power but lack it at their home institution. The box-checking exercise from 2014 eventually became a real institutional commitment. And even while I was still at NSF, the results became clearly visible, not only to those of us in NSF leadership, but also to the community.

The iPlant case wasn’t an anomaly. I’ve watched the same scene play out at two other $50M+ projects since.

How does this happen? Why spend months working on a grant renewal only to deliver a package with a fundamental scale mismatch? What produced the delusion that $10M+/year operations can land softly without years of serious groundwork?

It turns out that most academic scientists don’t plan for endings. At the psychological level, sustainability planning feels like admitting defeat. From a cultural standpoint, the grant cycle rewards acquisition rather than stewardship. And there’s always the deferral pattern: “We’ll figure that out in year 8.”

All of this results from a fundamental skills gap: excellence in STEM grant writing (what we commonly call ‘grantsmanship’) differs from business case writing. In fact, none of these domains— institutional negotiation, stakeholder development, or revenue modeling—are present in the science training pipeline. PIs face what Donald Rumsfeld would have called the unknown unknown: they don’t know what they don’t know.

So, what would good look like here? First, on projects like iPlant, with a typical ten-year lifespan, sustainability should be a priority for a dedicated team in year 3, not year 8. That team should include a named senior transition role with real authority — someone whose job is explicitly to plan for the project’s end, not its continuation — analogous to a Chief Risk Officer. In the NSF ecosystem, a midpoint review should have real teeth — a required external review panel with a go/no-go funding decision — long before things reach the National Science Board for oversight. Finally, there are models worth borrowing from: the nonprofit sector and major research infrastructure projects like CERN and the Vera Rubin Telescope have learned, sometimes painfully, how to plan for institutional continuity at scale.

The Board member who chastised me wasn’t wrong — even if she came very close to ending my tenure at NSF three weeks after it began. She was angered by cynicism born of ignorance — and that sequence matters. The box-checking comes second. The failure to understand why the box exists comes first. It’s part of why I took the Chief Risk Officer role on my current NSF-funded project seriously.

The problem is very real. All current large-project PIs should be asking themselves what happens to their project when the federal funding ends — and they should have a real answer, not a paragraph of verbiage.

The Board was watching then. Someone always is.

The Vietnam era sent some of America’s best young scientists to Canada. It’s happening again.

Kyoto, Japan, 2016. There was a break between sessions, and I was out on the patio of the conference center venue talking with the President of York University in Ontario. We were both at the STS forum, one of the premier global science policy events, held each October in Japan.

“You know, most of my most senior neuroscience faculty immigrated from the United States,” he said.

I was pretty skeptical. With brain science powerhouses like Toronto, McGill, and the University of British Columbia, that didn’t make sense.

“Surely, that’s not the case,” I responded. “Canada is historically a leader in brain research. Look at McGill, alone.”

“I’m not talking about all my faculty,” he responded. “Just the most senior ones. They came over during Vietnam to avoid the draft.”

That conversation was ten years ago. Now it’s resurfaced in my memory for obvious reasons. Every time I visit an embassy here in D.C., the question comes up about my views on who should be on a list of up-and-coming young American neuroscientists open to emigrating.

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I was a teenager in Pasadena when the unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the draft sent a remarkable cohort of American scientists to Canada. Among them were people I knew well: Harvard classmates of my older sister, trainees in my Dad’s Caltech lab, teachers at my school. Many of them weren’t marginal figures. They were disproportionately elites in the STEM labor pipeline, self-selected for their willingness to leave the familiar behind for a principle. Canada didn’t just absorb them; it built around them. McGill, Toronto, UBC, and, yes, York, became genuine centers of excellence in part because of this infusion of talent. And most importantly, many did not come back. After President Carter provided amnesty, analysis from the 1986 Canadian census suggests that of the 30-50 thousand individuals who migrated to Canada to avoid the draft, roughly one-half stayed on. Careers, families, and institutions had taken root. The lesson from this era is important today: a brain drain isn’t a temporary loan. It’s a transfer of capital—human, intellectual, and institutional.

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How does what’s happening now connect to what happened in the 1960s and 70s? Then, a single acute shock — the draft — produced a discrete, visible cohort exodus. The border helped: a U.S. driver’s license and a few cursory questions got you across. Physical migration was nearly frictionless, which is why the movement happened quickly and in plain sight.

Today, the mechanism is almost entirely different. There’s no single precipitating event — instead, a slow-motion but accelerating pressure system. NIH and NSF funding cuts and organizational disruption to grant infrastructure. Indirect cost cap threats destabilizing university research budgets. Uncertainty around F-1 and J-1 visas is choking the graduate student pipeline. Political targeting of specific institutions and research areas. None of these is like the Vietnam-era draft. But, together, they are changing the calculus.

Also, there is considerably more friction than in the Vietnam era. A lot of it is in the decision itself. Scientists considering a move are embedded in a complex institutional infrastructure: active grants, dependent trainees, and long-standing collaborations. Leaving requires dismantling all of that. But that same complexity means that those who do make the move are deeply committed to staying on after they move.

The cumulative effect is that the expected value of an American academic science career has declined sharply, especially for early- and mid-career researchers. This isn’t a single push — it’s a dozen smaller ones, which makes it harder to see as a pattern, but no less real.

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I should be precise about what I mean when I describe my embassy visits. These aren’t casual social calls. Over the past year, I have been contacted by representatives of several foreign governments — European countries foremost among them, but not alone — with a request that has become almost formulaic: could I identify promising young American neuroscientists who might be open to conversations about positions abroad?

The request is always framed diplomatically. No one uses the word recruit. But that is precisely what it is — organized, deliberate, and sophisticated. These aren’t opportunistic conversations at conferences. They are structured efforts, backed by government resources, to identify and cultivate specific individuals at a specific moment of American institutional vulnerability.

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Canada isn’t simply waiting for Americans to show up. It has been actively building the infrastructure to receive them. The Canada 150 Research Chairs program, launched in 2017, was explicitly designed to recruit exceptional researchers from around the world and drew heavily on talent from the United States. The Canada First Research Excellence Fund has made major institutional infrastructure investments that give Canadian universities genuine competitive standing. These created an ecosystem in which the positions are not consolation prizes for Americans who couldn’t land a U.S. position but are first-choice destinations.

There is also a factor that rarely surfaces in policy discussions but matters enormously at the individual level: healthcare. American researchers who leave academia lose employer-tied health insurance. Canadian researchers face no such risk when moving between institutions. In a country where a family health crisis can be financially catastrophic, this is not a minor consideration.

The result is that Canada is playing a long game while the United States is, at the moment, folding its poker hand.

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The temptation is to imagine today’s American scientific emigrants as the disaffected — unhappy postdocs, marginal researchers, people who were already looking for the exit. That is not who I am being asked about, and it is not who is going.

The concerning cohort is mid-career: people with established labs, active grants, graduate students, and reputations built over a decade or more of productive work. When they move, they don’t move alone. They take their entire ecosystem — trainees, collaborators, years of accumulated institutional relationships. One full professor emigrating may represent fifteen or twenty years of American scientific investment walking out the door. And the trainees they bring with them, or recruit once they arrive, will become foreign scientists. The pipeline reorients.

The Vietnam parallel holds here with uncomfortable precision. It wasn’t the marginal figures who left and stayed. It was the most able.

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This brings me back to the York president’s implicit lesson — the one he wasn’t even trying to teach. Many of the Vietnam cohort didn’t come back.

After Carter’s amnesty, some did return. But roughly half had built lives, careers, and families in Canada, and they stayed. The institutions that had grown around them stayed too.

Why would the current cohort be different? If you have rebuilt your lab in Toronto, enrolled your children in Canadian schools, secured stable funding through one of the Canadian funding agencies, and watched from a distance as American science policy lurches from disruption to disruption — what exactly are you returning to?

Political conditions in the United States may eventually stabilize. But institutional damage takes a generation to repair. The graduate students being trained in Canadian labs today will become Canadian faculty. The networks being built now will be Canadian networks. The scientific culture that is quietly relocating will not quietly relocate back.

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The United States has long treated its research enterprise as a fixed asset — something that could be drawn down, disrupted, and defunded without permanent consequence. Brain drain is the market’s verdict on that assumption. Scientists, like capital, move toward expected returns. When the expected return on an American academic science career declines — through funding uncertainty, political interference, and institutional instability — talent moves elsewhere. This is not a political statement. It is an observation about how labor markets work.

What would reverse it? Restored and predictable federal research funding. Visa stability for international students and researchers. A federal posture toward universities that treats them as assets rather than adversaries. None of that is imminent.

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I think about the York president on that Kyoto patio, reporting what he had observed without alarm, almost as a casual aside. He wasn’t issuing a warning. He was describing the outcome of a natural experiment that had played out over decades, visible only in retrospect.

I am watching a second such experiment begin, in real time, from an unusual vantage point. And unlike the York president, I’m not describing it in retrospect.

The current cadre of science policy folks in this country worries about research security—stolen intellectual property, occult foreign funding, and the like. They’re not seeing the tsunami: when the human talent isn’t there, research security is airtight. But there aren’t any discoveries, because there aren’t any discoverers.

How a global roadshow built the political cover for America’s brain initiative

It had been a long haul from Newark — eighteen hours plus, but something is clarifying about the final approach into Changi. The city materializes out of the South China Sea, improbably ordered, all reclaimed land and green corridors, a small nation that has collectively decided to simply will itself into a planned, successful future. I took a photograph out the window with my 2009-era iPhone, a gesture that now looks hilariously lo-fi in my photo archive. It was my first return to Singapore since a childhood trip with my parents, and I was arriving this time not as a tourist, but as a science entrepreneur.

The goal: pitch the Decade of the Mind as a global neuroscience initiative. The thesis — which I hadn’t yet fully articulated to myself — was that the road to funding success in Washington ran through foreign capitals first.

I demonstrated the limits of that thesis approximately twelve hours later when I showed up for my appointment at the Prime Minister’s office in a business suit.

“Lose the jacket and tie,” said the science liaison officer, not unkindly, when I arrived. Equatorial Singapore is always the same: very hot, very humid, approximately the temperature of a sauna with better architecture and excellent mass transit. The boss was in short sleeves when we walked in. The suit, I realized, was doing exactly what American assumptions often do in foreign capitals — arriving with confidence about what the situation requires and getting it wrong.

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Why go abroad first?

The state of play in Washington at the end of the 21^st century’s first decade was this: our Big Neuroscience concept had genuine champions — neuroscientists such as Mort Mishkin and Jay McClelland, and even celebrities like Oprah Winfrey — but it lacked political traction. The idea that we should mount a coordinated national effort to understand how human brains produced the thing we call “mind” was scientifically compelling and strategically murky. Who would lead it? Which agencies would own it? What would it cost? These were questions that tended to produce long meetings rather than commitments.

The insight — and I’m not sure whose it was originally, though I’m happy to take credit if no one objects — was that American science initiatives gain real leverage when they can claim global momentum. This is not cynical; it’s accurate. Policymakers respond to the sense that history is moving. A proposal that arrives as “we should do this” is a harder sell than one that arrives as “this is happening, and here’s where America stands.”

We’d seen versions of this playbook before. The Human Genome Project was in many ways a response to international competitive pressure — the fear that if the United States didn’t lead, someone else would. The framing of a race, even a friendly one, is extraordinarily useful when you’re trying to move bureaucracies. We see this most recently in the context of AI and quantum computing.

The decision, then, was to build genuine international excitement before making the full domestic ask. Not to manufacture enthusiasm — you can’t fake that for long, and scientists especially see through it — but to find the real partners, have the real conversations, and come back to Washington with something tangible.

Singapore was the first stop, and not by accident.

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The roadshow

Singapore made sense for several reasons simultaneously. The scientific capacity was real — DSO and A*Star — and the government’s receptivity to big science concepts was well-established. Singapore had been making deliberate bets on research infrastructure for years; they understood the genre. There was also a strategic symbolism to starting in Asia. This wasn’t going to be a European initiative with Asian endorsement bolted on afterward.

The pitch itself was a particular kind of performance art. You’re asking for commitment before you have anything to commit to. You’re offering a partnership in something that doesn’t yet fully exist. The skill is making that feel exciting rather than embarrassing.

What I was asking for varied by stop. In some capitals, it was matching funding, or at least a signal of funding intent. In others, it was scientific leadership — names attached to something, which is its own form of currency. In others, frankly, it was the meeting itself: a photograph, a letter, a line in a future proposal that said officials in Singapore, Sydney, and Seoul have expressed strong interest.

You learn quickly on a trip like this to tell the difference between genuine excitement and polite diplomatic interest. Both can look identical in the room — the nodding, the questions, the expressions of enthusiasm. Genuine excitement has a different texture: people start proposing things. They say, ” What if we involved Professor X?” or “There’s a funding mechanism that might work for this”. Polite diplomatic interest stays at the level of the concept. It’s warm, and it goes nowhere.

I got both. The ratio varied by city.

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The cultural translation problem

The suit was a metaphor, but, like most metaphors, it pointed to something real.

Americans arrive at international science meetings with American assumptions baked in. We assume that “global initiative” means something that America conceived and now invites others to join. This is understandable — we have historically been the largest funder of basic research, and the model has usually worked — but it lands poorly in rooms where the people across the table are sophisticated enough to recognize the structure.

What we had to learn, stop by stop, was that genuine partnership required genuine co-creation. Not of the science — the science could be international on its merits — but of the meaning of the enterprise. Why did this matter to Singapore specifically? To South Korea? The answer couldn’t just be that it mattered to the United States.

Later that same year, in Berlin, I heard about a nascent competitive European idea: the Human Brain Project, which was being put forward entirely independently of our own efforts. Folks were happy to hear about our ideas, but they had their own. The European effort would be, in some ways, more ambitious than what we were proposing: simulating the human brain in silico using computational neuroscience models.

In Japan, we heard about a different idea that would take advantage of sophisticated animal models in neurobiology, going beyond the then-dominant American view that a mouse is just like a small human being. The Japanese also had an advantage in using advanced spectroscopy techniques, such as nuclear magnetic resonance.

I left some of those meetings having said things I would not have said, at the time, in Washington. More accurately: I left certain meetings having heard things that changed what I said in subsequent meetings in D.C. This is how science diplomacy works — not as the export of American ideas, but as a genuinely iterative process that changes the ideas themselves.

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The leverage moment

Returning to Washington with something tangible is a different experience from returning with nothing but optimism. I had letters. I had commitments, or near-commitments. I had names attached to the concept — serious names, from serious places.

And this, I found, changed the domestic conversation in ways I hadn’t fully anticipated.

When I got back, it was at a dinner with NSF’s leadership that I found real resonance: the host invited us to submit a two-page white paper that eventually made its way throughout the US government. Importantly, the paper had no author. It practically invited any decision maker to adopt it as their own. And, the framing was the global moment.

Part of what international buy-in provides is cover — a way for cautious domestic actors to justify enthusiasm that they might otherwise suppress. The political logic runs something like: if Asia and Europe are interested, we can’t afford not to be. This is not a beautiful logic, but it is an operational one.

The other thing it provides is a proof of concept for the pitch itself. If you can walk into a room in Singapore and make a compelling case, you can probably walk into a room on the Hill and do the same. The roadshow is, among other things, practice.

The Decade of the Mind didn’t become the BRAIN Initiative instantly or cleanly. The Obama administration recast the idea, initially as something called the Brain Activity Map Project. But the international groundwork was part of what made the domestic momentum possible. When the BRAIN initiative finally had its launch moment three years later. it arrived with the credibility that only genuine global interest can provide.

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What this tells us about how big science gets done

The official history of a science initiative tends to emphasize the science: breakthrough papers, visionary proposals, legislative milestones. The unofficial history involves an enormous amount of what I’d call pre-political work — the meetings that don’t appear in any record, the relationships built on conference sidelines, the carefully calibrated sequence of who gets approached in what order.

The international roadshow is one piece of this. It is, at its core, an exercise in creating the conditions for a political decision that hasn’t been made yet. You can’t force that decision. You can make it progressively easier to say yes.

Science diplomacy as a practice is genuinely undervalued and undertheorized. We train scientists to do science and administrators to administer, but the hybrid skill — understanding both the science and the diplomatic register well enough to move between them — tends to be developed ad hoc, by people who find themselves in rooms they weren’t fully prepared for. That ad hoc aspect is certainly how I found my sea legs.

Looking back on the Singapore trip — my suit, their short sleeves, the PM’s office, the iPhone photograph — what strikes me is how little I understood about what I was doing while I was doing it. I had an intuition that the path ran through international buy-in. I didn’t have a theory of why. The theory came later, assembled from the specific failures and specific successes of the trip itself.

Which is, I suppose, how most things that work work. You do the thing imperfectly, and then you understand the thing.