HeyJaredsciencepolicyinsider
Former head of NSF's Biological Sciences Directorate: I explain how science policy works--from someone who's been inside NIH and NSF.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 6
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- Sep 24, 2026
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- Jul 16, 2026
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Acting As If It Lasts Forever (opens the original)
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I had lunch recently with a friend at a small Italian place in DC near Sibley Hospital. We gossiped a bit and then got down to business. Our agenda? Intelligence – the medium of exchange here in Washington – and a set of public facts on which the two of us had completely different perspectives. His was an active framework: take the constraints and work from within to do something substantially new on the science front, albeit with less money. Mine was more positional: block where you can, wait f
Psychobiologists Reunion at Don Vito’s (opens the original)
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Fewer than ten of us were in the cohort of new doctoral students. We were all budding neuroscientists, but at the time, the name of that field hadn’t fully permeated the academy yet, so we were in different, closely related programs: psychobiology, pharmacology, anatomy, and cell biology. When we headed out for beers at Don Vito’s, the local dive across from the still newly built UC Irvine campus, we discussed the synaptic organization of various brain regions like regular folks discussing profe
History Rhymes: April 14, 1935 (opens the original)
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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 Burn
The Copenhagen Interpretation (opens the original)
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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-ol
But Wait, There’s More… (opens the original)
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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 t
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