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.
Why go abroad first?
The state of play in Washington at the end of the 21st 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Discoverers and Discoveries 