Tag: NSF

How Will You Know You’ve Succeeded? A BRAIN story

Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

August 2008: A summer day in Mountain View California. The previous year, In 2007, The Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study, which I was leading at George Mason University, had developed a proposal to invest tons of money in figuring out how mind emerges from brains and now I had to make the case that it deserved to be a centerpiece of a new administration’s science agenda. Three billion dollars is not a small ask, especially in the context of the 2008 financial crisis that was accelerating.

Before this moment, the project had evolved organically: a kickoff meeting at the Krasnow Institute near D.C., a joint manifesto published in Science Magazine, and then follow-on events in Des Moines, Berlin and Singapore to emphasize the broader aspects of such a large neuroscience collaboration. There even had been a radio interview with Oprah.

When I flew out to Google’s Mountain View headquarters in August 2008 for the SciFoo conference, I didn’t expect to be defending the future of neuroscience over lunch. But the individual who was running the science transition for the Obama Presidential Campaign, had summoned me for what he described as a “simple” conversation: defend our idea for investing $3 billion over the next decade in neuroscience with the audacious goal of explaining how “mind” emerges from “brains.” It was not the kind of meeting I was ready for.

I was nervous. As an institute director, I’d pitched for million-dollar checks. This was a whole new scale of fundraising for me. And though, California was my native state, I’d never gone beyond being a student body president out there. Google’s headquarters in summer of 2008 was an altar to Silicon Valley power.

SciFoo itself was still in its infancy then – the whole “unconference” concept felt radical and exciting, a fitting backdrop for pitching transformational science. But the Obama campaign wasn’t there for the unconventional meeting format. Google was a convenient meeting spot. And they wanted conventional answers.

I thought I made a compelling case: this investment could improve the lives of millions of patients with brain diseases. Neuroscience was on the verge of delivering cures. (I was wrong about that, but I believed it at the time.) The tools were ready. The knowledge was accumulating. We just needed the resources to put it all together.

Then I was asked the question that killed my pitch: “How will we know we have succeeded? What’s the equivalent of Kennedy’s moon landing – a clear milestone that tells us we’ve achieved what we set out to do?” You could see those astronauts come down the ladder of the lunar module. You could see that American flag on the moon. No such prospects with a large neuroscience initiative.

I had no answer.

I fumbled through some vague statements about understanding neural circuits and developing new therapies, but even as the words left my mouth, I knew they were inadequate. The moon landing worked as a political and scientific goal because it was binary: either we put a man on the moon or we didn’t. Either the flag was planted or it wasn’t.

But “explaining how mind emerges from brains”? When would we know we’d done that? What would success even look like?

The lunch ended politely. I flew back to DC convinced it had been an utter failure.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Five years later, at the beginning of Obama’s second presidential term, we began to hear news of a large initiative driven by the White House called the Brain Activity Map or BAM for short. The idea was to comprehensively map the functional activity of brains at high spatial and temporal resolution beyond that available at the time. It was like my original pitch both in scale (dollars) and in the notion that it was important to understand how mind emerges from brain function. The goal for the new BAM project was to be able to map between the activity and the brain’s emergent “mind”-like behavior, both in the healthy and pathological cases. But the BAM project trial balloon, even coming from the White House, was not an immediate slam dunk.

There was immediate push-back from large segments of the neuroscience community that felt excluded from BAM, but with a quick top-down recalibration from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a whole of government approach that included multiple science agencies, BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) was born in April of 2013.

A year later, in April of 2014, I was approached to head Biological Sciences at the US National Science Foundation. When I took the job that October, I was leading a directorate with a budget of $750 million annually that supported research across the full spectrum of the life sciences – from molecular biology to ecosystems. I would also serve as NSF’s co-lead for the Obama Administration’s BRAIN Initiative—an acknowledgement of the failed pitch in Mountain View, I guess.

October 2014: sworn in and meeting with my senior management team–now here I was, a little more than a year into BRAIN. I had gotten what I’d asked for in Mountain View. Sort of. We had the funding, we had the talent, we had review panels evaluating hundreds of proposals. But I kept thinking about the question—the one I couldn’t answer then and still struggled with now. We had built this entire apparatus for funding transformational research, yet we were asking reviewers to apply the same criteria that would have rejected Einstein’s miracle year. How do you evaluate research when you can’t articulate clear success metrics? How do you fund work that challenges fundamental assumptions when your review criteria reward preliminary data and well-defined hypotheses?

Several months later, testifying before Congress about the BRAIN project, I remember fumbling again at the direct question of when we would deliver cures for dreaded brain diseases like ALS and Schizophrenia. I punted: that was an NIH problem (even though the original pitch had been about delivering revolutionary treatments. At NSF, we were about understanding the healthy brain. In fact, how could you ever understand brain disease without a deep comprehension of the non-pathological condition?

It was a reasonable bureaucratic answer. NIH does disease; NSF does basic science. Clean jurisdictional boundaries. But sitting there in that hearing room, I realized I was falling into the same trap that had seemingly doomed our pitch in 2008: on being asked for the delivery date of a clear criterion for success, I was waffling. Only this time, I was the agent for the funder: the American taxpayer.

The truth was uncomfortable. We had launched an initiative explicitly designed to support transformational research – research that would “show us how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact” in ways we couldn’t yet imagine. But when it came time to evaluate proposals, we fell back on the same criteria that favored incrementalism: preliminary data, clear hypotheses, established track records, well-defined deliverables. We were asking Einstein for preliminary data on special relativity.

And we weren’t unique. This was the system. This was how peer review worked across federal science funding. We had built an elaborate apparatus designed to be fair, objective, and accountable to Congress and taxpayers. What we had built was a machine that systematically filtered out the kind of work that might transform neuroscience.

All of this was years before the “neuroscience winter”—where massive scientific misconduct was unearthed in neurodegenerative disease research—which included Alzheimer’s. But the modus operandi of BRAIN foreshadowed it.

Starting in 2022, a series of investigations revealed that some of the most influential research on Alzheimer’s disease—work that had shaped the field for nearly two decades and guided billions in research funding—was built on fabricated data. Images had been manipulated. Results had been doctored. And this work had sailed through peer review at top journals, had been cited thousands of times, and had successfully competed for grant funding year after year. The amyloid hypothesis, which this fraudulent research had bolstered, had become scientific orthodoxy not because the evidence was overwhelming, but because it fit neatly into the kind of clear, well-defined research program that review panels knew how to evaluate.

Here was the other side of the Einstein problem that I’ve mentioned in previous posts. The same system that would have rejected Einstein’s 1905 papers for lack of preliminary data and institutional support had enthusiastically funded research that looked rigorous but was fabricated. Because the fraudulent work had all the elements that peer review rewards: clear hypotheses, preliminary data, incremental progress building on established findings, well-defined success metrics. It looked like good science. It checked all the boxes.

Meanwhile, genuinely transformational work—the kind that challenges fundamental assumptions, that crosses disciplinary boundaries, that can’t provide preliminary data because the questions are too new—struggles to get funded. Not because reviewers are incompetent or malicious, but because we’ve built a system that is literally optimized to make these mistakes. We’ve created an apparatus that rewards the appearance of rigor over actual discovery, that favors consensus over challenge, that funds incrementalism and filters out transformation.

So, what’s the real function of peer review? It’s supposed to be about identifying transformative research, but I don’t think that the real purpose. To my mind, the real purpose of peer review panels at NSF, the study sections at NIH, is to make inherently flawed funding decisions defensible—both to Congress and the American taxpayer. The criteria, intellectual merit, broader impacts at NSF, make awarding grant dollars auditable and fair seeming, not because they identify breakthrough work.

But honestly, there’s a real dilemma here: if you gave out NSF’s annual budget based on a program officer’s feeling that “this seems promising”, you’d face legitimate questions about cronyism, waste and arbitrary decision-making. The current system’s flaws aren’t bad policy accidents; they are the price we pay for other values we also care about.

So, did the BRAIN Initiative deliver on that pitch I made in Mountain View in 2008? Did we figure out how ‘mind’ emerges from ‘brains’? In retrospect, I remain super impressed by NSF’s  NeuroNex program: we got impressive technology – better ways to record from more neurons, new imaging techniques, sophisticated tools. We trained a generation of neuroscientists. But that foundational question – the one that made the political case, the one that justified the investment – we’re not meaningfully closer to answering it. We made incremental progress on questions we already knew how to ask. Which is exactly what peer review is designed to deliver. Oh, and one other thing that was produced: NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services,  got a trademark issued on the name of the initiative itself, BRAIN.

I spent four years as NSF’s co-lead on BRAIN trying to make transformational neuroscience happen within this system. I believed in it. I still believe in federal science funding. But I’ve stopped pretending the tension doesn’t exist. The very structure that makes BRAIN funding defensible to Congress made the transformational science we promised nearly impossible to deliver.

That failed pitch at Google’s headquarters in 2008. Turns out that the question was spot on we just never answered it.

Why Transformational Science Can’t Get Funded: The Einstein Problem

Proposal declined. Insufficient institutional support. No preliminary data. Applicant lacks relevant expertise—they work in a patent office, not a research laboratory. The proposed research is too speculative and challenges well-established physical laws without adequate justification. The principal investigator is 26 years old and has no prior experience in physics.

This would have been the fate of Albert Einstein in 1905, had the NSF existed as it does today. Even with grant calls requesting ‘transformative ideas,’ an Einstein proposal would have been rejected outright. And yet, that year 1905 has been called Einstein’s miracle year. Yes, he was a patent clerk working in Bern, Switzerland, without a university affiliation. He had neither access to a laboratory nor equipment. He worked in isolation on evenings and weekends and was unknown in the physics community. Yet, despite those disadvantages, he produced four revolutionary papers on the Photoelectric Effect, Brownian motion, Special Relativity, and the famous E=mc2 energy-mass equivalence.

Taken as a whole, the work was purely theoretical. There were no preliminary data. The papers challenged fundamental assumptions of the field and, as such, were highly speculative and definitively high-risk. There were no broader impacts because there were no immediate practical applications. And the work was inherently multidisciplinary, bridging mechanics, optics, and thermodynamics. Yet, the work was transformative. By modern grant standards, Einstein’s work failed every criterion.

The Modern Grant Application – A Thought Experiment

Let’s imagine Einstein’s 1905 work packaged as a current NSF proposal. What would it look like, and how would it fare in peer review?

Einstein’s Hypothetical NSF Proposal

Project Title: Reconceptualizing the Fundamental Nature of Space, Time, and the Propagation of Light

Principal Investigator: Albert Einstein, Technical Expert Third Class, Swiss Federal Patent Office

Institution: None (individual applicant)

Requested Duration: 3 years

Budget: $150,000 (minimal – just salary support and travel to one conference)

Project Summary

This proposal challenges the fundamental assumptions underlying Newtonian mechanics and Maxwell’s electromagnetic theory. I propose that space and time are not absolute but relative, dependent on the observer’s state of motion. This requires abandoning the concept of the luminiferous ether and reconceptualizing the relationship between matter and energy. The work will be entirely theoretical, relying on thought experiments and mathematical derivation to establish a new framework for understanding physical reality.

How NSF Review Panels Would Evaluate This

Intellectual Merit: Poor

Criterion: Does the proposed activity advance knowledge and understanding?

Panel Assessment: The proposal makes extraordinary claims without adequate preliminary data. The applicant asserts that Newtonian mechanics—the foundation of physics for over 200 years—requires fundamental revision yet provides no experimental evidence supporting this radical departure.

Specific Concerns:

Lack of Preliminary Results: The proposal contains no preliminary data demonstrating the feasibility of the approach. There are no prior publications by the applicant in peer-reviewed physics journals. The applicant references his own unpublished manuscripts, which cannot be evaluated.

Methodology Insufficient: The proposed “thought experiments” do not constitute rigorous scientific methodology. How will hypotheses be tested? What experimental validation is planned? The proposal describes mathematical derivations but provides no pathway to empirical verification. Without experimental confirmation, these remain untestable speculations.

Contradicts Established Science: The proposal challenges Newton’s laws of motion and the existence of the luminiferous ether—concepts supported by centuries of successful physics. While scientific progress requires questioning assumptions, such fundamental challenges require extraordinary evidence. The applicant provides none.

Lack of Expertise: The PI works at a patent office and has no formal research position. He has no advisor supporting this work, no collaborators at research institutions, and no track record in theoretical physics. His biosketch lists a doctorate from the University of Zurich but no subsequent research appointments or publications in relevant areas.

Representative Reviewer Comments:

Reviewer 1: “While the mathematical treatment shows some sophistication, the fundamental premise—that simultaneity is relative—contradicts basic physical intuition and has no experimental support. The proposal reads more like philosophy than physics.”

Reviewer 2: “The applicant’s treatment of the photoelectric effect proposes that light behaves as discrete particles, directly contradicting Maxwell’s well-established wave theory. This is not innovation; it’s contradiction without justification.”

Reviewer 3: “I appreciate the applicant’s ambition, but this proposal is not ready for funding. I recommend the PI establish himself at a research institution, publish preliminary findings, and gather experimental evidence before requesting support for such speculative work. Perhaps a collaboration with experimentalists at a major university would strengthen future submissions.”

Broader Impacts: Very Poor

Criterion: Does the proposed activity benefit society and achieve specific societal outcomes?

Panel Assessment: The proposal fails to articulate any concrete broader impacts. The work is purely theoretical with no clear pathway to societal benefit.

Specific Concerns:

No Clear Applications: The proposal does not explain how reconceptualizing space and time would benefit society. What problems would this solve? What technologies would it enable? The PI suggests the work is “fundamental” but provides no examples of potential applications.

No Educational Component: There is no plan for training students or postdocs. The PI works alone at a patent office, with no access to students and no institutional infrastructure for education and training.

No Outreach Plan: The proposal includes no activities to communicate findings to the public or policymakers. There is no plan for broader dissemination beyond potential publication in physics journals.

Questionable Impact Timeline: Even if the proposed theories are correct, the proposal provides no timeline for practical applications. How long until these ideas translate into societal benefit? The proposal is silent on this critical question.

Representative Reviewer Comments:

Reviewer 1: “The broader impacts section is essentially non-existent. The PI states that ‘fundamental understanding of nature has intrinsic value,’ but this does not meet NSF’s requirement for concrete societal outcomes.”

Reviewer 2: “I cannot envision how this work, even if successful, would lead to practical applications within a reasonable timeframe. The proposal needs to articulate a clear pathway from theory to impact.”

Reviewer 3: “NSF has limited resources and must prioritize research with demonstrable benefits to society. This proposal does not make that case.”

Panel Summary and Recommendation

Intellectual Merit Rating: Poor
Broader Impacts Rating: Very Poor

Overall Assessment: While the panel appreciates the PI’s creativity and mathematical ability, the proposal is highly speculative, lacks preliminary data, contradicts established physical laws without sufficient justification, and fails to articulate broader impacts. The PI’s lack of institutional affiliation and research track record raises concerns about feasibility.

The panel notes that the PI appears talented and encourages resubmission after:

  1. Establishing an independent position at a research institution
  2. Publishing preliminary findings in peer-reviewed journals
  3. Developing collaborations with experimental physicists
  4. Articulating a clearer pathway to practical applications
  5. Demonstrating broader impacts through education and outreach

Recommendation: Decline

Panel Consensus: Not competitive for funding in the current cycle. The proposal would need substantial revision and preliminary results before it could be considered favorably.

The Summary Statement Einstein Would Receive

Dear Dr. Einstein,

Thank you for your submission to the National Science Foundation. Unfortunately, your proposal, “Reconceptualizing the Fundamental Nature of Space, Time, and the Propagation of Light,” was not recommended for funding.

The panel recognized your ambition and mathematical capabilities but identified several concerns that prevented a favorable recommendation:

– Lack of preliminary data supporting the feasibility of your approach – Insufficient experimental validation of your theoretical claims
– Absence of institutional support and research infrastructure – Inadequate articulation of broader impacts and societal benefits

We encourage you to address these concerns and consider resubmission in a future cycle. You may wish to establish collaborations with experimentalists and develop a clearer pathway from theory to application.

We appreciate your interest in NSF funding and wish you success in your future endeavors.

Sincerely,
NSF Program Officer

And that would be it. Einstein’s miracle year—four papers that transformed physics and laid the groundwork for quantum mechanics, nuclear energy, GPS satellites, and our modern understanding of the cosmos—would have died in peer review, never funded, never attempted.

The system would have protected us from wasting taxpayer dollars on such speculation. It would have worked exactly as designed.

The Preliminary Data Paradox

The contemporary scientific grant review process implicitly expects foundational work in transformative science to present preliminary data, despite knowing that truly groundbreaking ideas often do not originate from such tangible evidence but instead evolves through thought experiments and mathematical derivations, as Einstein did. This unrealistic expectation stifles innovation at its core – the process essentially forces researchers like Einstein to abandon pure theoretical exploration and confine them to a narrow experimental framework, where they cannot freely challenge existing paradigms, even when their work holds no immediate empirical validation yet promises to revolutionize our understanding fundamentally.

The Risk-Aversion Problem

Often, in grant reviews, I see a very junior reviewer criticize work as being too risky—dooming the proposal to failure—while simultaneously sensing their admiration for the promise and transformative nature of the work. The conservative nature and risk-averse mentality of modern grant review panels are deeply rooted in the scientific community’s culture that values incremental advances over speculative leaps – a bias born from career motivations wherein funding decisions can make or break one’s professional trajectory. Reviewers often exhibit reluctance to invest support into proposals like Einstein’s, as they pose potential controversy and may not align with personal research interests due to the associated risks of failure – a reflection of how science has traditionally evolved through evolutionary rather than revolutionary processes within academic institutions.

The Credentials Catch-22

To secure funding in today’s scientific landscape, one often needs institutional affiliation and an impressive publication record that reflects strong research credentials – a catch-22 scenario wherein groundbreaking innovators with no formal backing or prior experience find it challenging to gain the trust of reviewers. This requirement discriminates against fresh perspectives from individuals such as Einstein, who was working outside established institutions and did not have access to mentorship, which is typically deemed necessary for academic recognition – a stark contrast in how transformative outsider thinkers with unconventional backgrounds historically nurtured science.

The Short-Term Timeline Problem

Einstein developed special relativity over years with no milestones, no quarterly reports, no renewals. How would he answer, ‘What will you accomplish in Year 2?” The funding cycle durations set forth by major grant agencies, such as NSF’s typical three to five years for regular grants and the NIH’s maximum of five years, do not accommodate the long periods necessary for fully developing foundational theories that require time-intensive evolution. Such timelines impose an unfair constraint on researchers like Einstein, whose transformative ideas did not evolve within strict milestones but unfolded in an unconstrained fashion – showcasing the incompatibility of this model with truly revolutionary scientific discoveries where a linear progression is unrealistic and even counterproductive.

The Impact Statement Trap

Requirements for demonstrating immediate “broader impacts” or societal benefits pose significant obstacles to transformative research proposals that often envision far-reaching implications beyond their direct applications – an aspect Einstein’s work exemplifies best with its foundational role in advancing physics. The trap lies when reviewers, fearing potential misuse of speculative science or unable to perceive future benefits due to cognitive biases, force research proposals into a mold where immediate practical impact takes precedence over visionary scientific contributions, further marginalizing transformative studies that could potentially unlock new dimensions in various fields.

The Interdisciplinary Gap

The inherent disciplinarity of current grant funding schemes disconnects them from the interdisciplinary essence required for revolutionary research proposals like Einstein’s – a reality where transformative work frequently transcends conventional academic boundaries by merging concepts across multiple fields. This approach often results in an exclusion not only based on institutional affiliation but also because of its challenge to compartmentalized funding models that struggle with the non-linear, cross-disciplinary nature integral to truly transformative science – a significant obstacle for proposals inherently interdisciplinary yet unable to fit neatly within program structures or expertise.

The hypothetical funding scenarios for transformational science, as presented through the lens of Albert Einstein’s groundbreaking work, illustrate the inherent challenges faced by revolutionary ideas. To further highlight this problem, let’s take a look at other seminal discoveries that may have been overlooked or deemed unworthy of support under current grant review criteria:

Copernicus’ Heliocentric Model: In a contemporary setting, Copernicus’ heliocentric model might face skepticism due to its challenge to the widely accepted geocentric view of the universe. Lacking preliminary data and facing resistance from established religious beliefs, his proposal would likely be rejected under modern grant review criteria, despite its ultimate validation through observation and mathematical proof.

Gregor Mendel’s Pea Plant Experiments: The foundation of modern genetics was laid by Mendel’s pea plant experiments, yet his work remained largely unnoticed for decades after its initial publication. A grant reviewer in 1863 would likely have dismissed Mendel’s findings as too speculative and without immediate practical applications, thereby overlooking the fundamental insights he provided about heredity and genetic inheritance.

mRNA Vaccines: Katalin Karikó spent decades struggling to fund mRNA therapeutic research. Too risky. Too speculative. No clear applications. Penn demoted her. NIH rejected her grants. Reviewers wanted proof that mRNA could work as a therapeutic platform, but without funding, she couldn’t generate that proof. Then COVID-19 hit, and mRNA vaccines saved millions of lives. The technology that couldn’t get funded became one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the century.

Why does all of this matter now? First, the evidence is mounting that American science is at an inflection point. The rate of truly disruptive discoveries—those that reshape fields rather than incrementally advance them—has been declining for decades, even as scientific output has grown. Both NSF and NIH leadership recognize this troubling trend.

This innovation crisis manifests in the problems we cannot solve. Cancer and Alzheimer’s have resisted decades of intensive research. AI alignment and safety remain fundamentally unsolved as we deploy increasingly powerful systems. We haven’t returned to the moon in over 50 years. In my own field of neuroscience, incremental progress has failed to produce treatments for the diseases that devastate millions of families.

These failures point to a deeper problem: we’ve optimized our funding system for incremental advances, not transformational breakthroughs. Making matters worse, we’re losing ground internationally. China’s funding models allow longer timelines and embrace higher risk. European ERC grants support more adventurous research. Many of our best researchers now weigh opportunities overseas or in industry, where they can pursue riskier ideas with greater freedom.

What Needs to Change

Fixing this requires fundamental changes at multiple levels—from how we structure programs to how we evaluate proposals to how we support unconventional researchers.

Create separate funding streams for high-risk research. NSF and NIH need more programs that emulate DARPA’s high-risk, high-reward model. These programs should be insulated from traditional grant review: no preliminary data required, longer timelines (10+ years), and peer review conducted by scientists who have themselves taken major risks and succeeded. I propose that 10 percent of each agency’s budget be set aside for “Einstein Grants”—awards that take the view opposite the status quo. Judge proposals on originality and potential impact, not feasibility and preliminary data. Accept that most will fail, but the few that succeed will be transformational.

Protect exploratory research within traditional programs. Even standard grant programs should allow pivots when researchers discover unexpected directions. We should fund people with track records of insight, not just projects with detailed timelines. Judge proposals on the quality of thinking, not the completeness of deliverables.

Reform peer review processes. The current system needs three critical changes. First, separate review tracks for incremental versus transformational proposals—they require fundamentally different evaluation criteria. Second, don’t let a single negative review kill bold ideas; if three reviewers are enthusiastic and one is skeptical, fund it. Third, value originality over feasibility. The most transformational ideas often sound impossible until someone proves otherwise.

Support alternative career paths. We should fund more researchers outside traditional academic institutions and recognize that the best science doesn’t always emerge from R1 universities. Explicitly value interdisciplinary training and create flexible career paths that don’t punish researchers who take time to develop unconventional ideas. Track where our most creative researchers go when they leave academia—if we’re consistently losing them to industry or foreign institutions, that’s a failure signal we must heed.

Acknowledge the challenge ahead. These reforms require sustained political will across multiple administrations and consistent support from Congress. They demand patience—accepting that transformational breakthroughs can’t be scheduled or guaranteed. But the alternative is clear: we continue optimizing for incremental progress while the fundamental problems remain unsolved and our international competitors embrace the risk we’ve abandoned.

The choice before us is stark. We can optimize the current system for productivity—incremental papers, measurable progress—or we can create space for transformative discovery. We cannot have both with the same funding mechanisms.

The cost of inaction is clear: we will miss the next Einstein, fall further behind in fundamental discovery, watch science become a bureaucratic exercise, and lose what made American science into a powerhouse of discovery.

This requires action at every level. Scientists must advocate for reform and be willing to champion risky proposals. Program officers must have the courage to fund work that reviewers call too speculative. Policymakers must create new funding models and resist the temptation to demand near-term results. The public must understand that breakthrough science looks different from incremental progress—it’s messy, unpredictable, and often wrong before it’s right.

In 1905, Einstein changed our understanding of the universe while working in a patent office with no grant funding. Today, our funding system would never have let him try. We need to fix that.

Jasons ordered to close up shop

This is an interesting development. The Jasons Group is an elite cadre of academics who have conducted research studies for the DOD on a variety of topics over the last 60 years or so. More recently NSF has been interested in hiring the Jasons to look at the increasingly challenging climate for international collaborations between US scientists and their foreign counterparts (something that I have written a bit about). Now this news, that the Jasons contract with DOD is to be terminated. Given the views of the Administration on international collaborations of any kind, I wonder if the two things are related?

Mid-term election: science implications I

Most of the results of the mid-term election are now in and can be reviewed on-line. Jeff Mervis at SCIENCE has a nice summer of what the changes in the House mean, here. My own sense is that with Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX) as the likely chair for House Science, the tenor of that Committee’s relationship with the non-biomedical US Science R&D agencies is going to improve significantly. Specifically with regards to Climate Change, and more generally with regards to a less adversarial oversight role. I think that’s probably a good thing.

NASA and probably also NSF lost a key advocate in John Culberson (R-TX) as chair of CJS, the appropriations committee responsible for the two agencies. On the other hand, NASA will probably be able to finesse the timing of when they send a probe to Europa and NSF’s contacts with Chinese science may be a bit less fettered (although the one from the White House is still pretty hawkish).

Barbara Comstock’s loss in Virginia is complex. While she could be a thorn in the side of NSF (e.g. NEON), she was extremely supportive of the DC metro area federal workforce and this benefited science agencies who depend on expert staff to keep the wheels moving.

My sense is that NIH is still coming out of this smelling like a rose. A more conservative senate may put the brakes on some hot-button research topics, but in general, I am pretty  optimistic about the biomedical sector.

 

One proposal per year…

I’m hearing a lot about NSF BIO’s new policy of one proposal per year for each Principal Investigator. In general, I’m hearing complaints from more senior investigators and positive interest from younger ones. This is somewhat counter-intuitive for me since I’d expect junior PI’s to be quite anxious to get as many proposals as possible in within the time window of their tenure clock. But I suppose they also see this new policy as potentially reducing the competition from the old fogies (an aside, this is the same logic of those who rejoice when NSF or NIH have funding downturns because they see those as driving out the competition).

In any case, I’m agnostic about this. It is certainly good that NSF is discouraging the recycling of proposal failures. I find it annoying that I can only be PI on one proposal for the coming year–although it will incentivize me to make it as excellent as possible. I do think that the rather negative report on this new policy in SCIENCE was insufficiently nuanced and would be happy to discuss with the reporter.

The latest from NEON

NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network, is a major research instrumentation asset that the NSF has built for scientists investigating how the environment and ecosystems interact at a continental scale. Here is the latestIMG_1104.jpg from Observatory Director and Chief Scientist, Sharon Collinge. It’s really good to see that this project is coming to a successful fruition.

There’s no photo credit on the image because it’s my photo. I took it at the NEON tower at Harvard Forest in central Massachusetts. Among many data products being produced, one of the most exciting are carbon flux measurements using the eddy-flux methodology. These are important because they provide a window into an ecosystem as it essentially breathes, just like we do. And that has enormous implications for climate change.

The location of this particular NEON tower (one of many across the United States) is particularly interesting because there is also a very long time series (25 years or so) of such measurements produced by the Ameriflux Network. If NEON can take advantage of such older measurements in a way that calibrates rigorously between the two systems, the power of continental scale (3-dimensions) will be enriched by a fourth dimension, time.

A bit about my new gig….

The summer break here at George Mason is coming to an end, classes begin in about two weeks and I thought it would good to write a bit about my new life as a plain old professor here at the Schar School. When I left NSF in January, I had negotiated my return to the University to reflect the public policy experience involved in running the Biological Sciences Directorate. Additionally, it had become clear to me that after 23 years in one administrative role after another, I wanted a change in the direction of more time to teach and do research. So when it was approved that my faculty line would be moved from the Krasnow Institute to the Schar School here in Arlington I was really jazzed. There was the additional benefit that the commuting distance would be halved.

I did start though with some trepidation. I had effectively been out of academia for more than three years—that in spite of NSF’s program for supporting rotator to stay involved with research at their home institution. That might work at the Program Director level at NSF, but it’s really not practical when you are responsible for an entire directorate. As a result, I was very rusty from the standpoint of both teaching and research—the two things I would be expected to do as a professor. Hence, it was a real confidence builder to get a grant in the first weeks that I was back and to actually jump back into teaching (rather than worrying about it).

 

I find that these past months have been some of the most satisfying of my life from a professional standpoint. The sheer pleasure of quiet time to think about science rather than have to instantly react to some crisis is something not to be underestimated. And I have found that my interests extend across a much wider landscape than before I left Mason for NSF. My current grant is on AI. The next one will probably be on metagenomics. Who knows what will come next!

Rules of Life: SBE Version

Many readers are aware of NSF’s 10 Big Ideas. One of them, Rules of Life: Predicting Phenotype originated in the Biological Sciences Directorate while I headed it up. We also used a similar set of words to frame all of the Directorate’s investments—from scale of an individual ion channel up to that of an ecosystem: Understanding the Rules of Life (URL). The intellectual idea here was that simple rule sets can, on the one hand, constrain nature and yet on the other produce vast complexity. An example of a very simple such rule is the Pauli Exclusion Principle from Chemistry. Pauli constrains atomic configurations by requiring electrons occupying the same orbital to have opposite spins. That simple rule produces the Period Chart of the Elements and by extension carbon chemistry (i.e. organic chemistry, the backbone of living things).

 

Biology itself has many such examples. Evolution itself consists of a rule involving history and contingency. Neuronal synapses (the connections between nerve cells) in the brain are constrained by the tree-like morphology of neurons: if branches of adjacent neurons aren’t close enough, then there is no possibility for the formation of a new synapse. The DNA dogma itself is a compact rule set that leads from base pairing through the genetic code to the construction of polypeptides that we call proteins.

 

The NSF has another Directorate for Behavioral, Social and Economic Sciences (SBE). It deals with all things human, particularly the emergent properties of human beings interacting with one another in constructs such as cities or, in a more abstract example, markets. Wars, mass migrations, stock market crashes and the World Cup are the types of emergent properties that are referred to here. They are concrete, consequential and produced as a result of many individual human agents behaving together in the biosphere. The current climate disruption on the Earth is thought by many of my colleagues to be anthropogenic in nature, an emergent of human development since the Industrial Revolution.

 

Not surprisingly, SBE was (and presumable is) enthusiastic about the Rules of Life Big Idea at NSF. After all human beings are living things, embedded and integral to the biosphere. If you are investing in social, behavioral and economic sciences, then by definition, you must be curious about the rules that govern these disciplines. And I think such an outlook can only strengthen the social sciences (writ large). Rules of Life as a framework can help create a theoretical scaffolding for the SBE fields in the same way that quantum mechanics does for physics and chemistry. Scientists seek to do more than collect and describe. Above all, they seek to predict and generalize.

 

A larger question though is, what are the rules that govern the production of human societal emergent properties? Is it possible that we could write them down in a compact fashion as we can for the game of Chess?

 

As I look out over the global political landscape these days, with the populist electoral success extending from the Philippines to Brexit Britain…and certainly including my own country…. I am curious whether there is a hidden rule set that relates these movements to a certain societal incivility that seems to be spreading as a social contagion. Another phenomenon that seems to be recently emergent is an increasing acceptance of lying on the part of political leaders. Instead of being viewed as shameful, such actions seem to viewed by many as reflecting strength and genuineness. Is there a human societal rule set that governs the acceptance of deception?

 

I had lunch yesterday with a colleague from our economics department yesterday and we both wondered whether the decline of organized religion had something to do with the recent political landscape, however humans have been in such dark places before in times when organized religion was very strong. In any case, a lunchtime conversation is not the way to elucidate a rule set for human societal behavior.

 

What would be the way to reveal such rule sets? One notion is to use agent-based modeling. In this approach, human beings are modeled in silico as software agents. The agents interact according to rule sets created by the experimentalist (a computational social scientist) in a massive manner, limited only by Moore’s Law. The emergent behaviors of the whole system are what is measured and the idea is to understand the relationship between the designed social rule set for the agents and the resultant emergent behavior of the model. The problem with this approach is that humans are very complex—much more complex that the modular pieces of software that comprise agents.

 

Another approach is to use college students as experimental subjects in behavioral economic experiments. This was the invention of another former colleague, also an economist, who won the Nobel Prize as a result of this idea. In such experiments, human subjects are paid real money as they interact with each other or computers under designed rule sets, similar to those used in agent-based modeling. The famous Prisoner’s Dilemma is an example of such a designed rule set. Here, the experimental results are quantifiable (how much money each student has at the end of each experiment) and the agents are real human beings (albeit a bit young). A neuroscientific bonus to this type of research is that the human subjects can be brain scanned as they interact revealing the neural substrates for their actions. The problem with this approach is that the number of experimental subjects is orders of magnitude less than the number of human agents interacting in real social phenomena such as stock markets. Hence, in general, such behavioral economic experiments are statistically under-powered relative to the social behavior they try to explain.

 

I think it’s time for by SBE friends to invent a new rule discovery approach. The timing is ripe: the relevance of such rule sets to our survival on the planet is clear. With the advent of ubiquitous AI, such rule sets will be of crucial importance to the engineering of ethical, legal and social frameworks for robots and the like as they interact with human beings. And it would be interesting to discover how human history relates to our social natures, not just in a qualified way, but one that is predictive and generalizable.