The train is pulling into the city, or more accurately, under it.  I’m looking forward to getting home after a few days of working with others at the National Science Foundation – exhilarating but draining.

Looking out the train window, it looks like  converging rivers of red or white lights.  Everyone is heading home after a week of hard work.  I wonder how their week was – exhilarating but draining?  I would like to ask each passenger; where they are coming from, where they are going, what’s their job?  I’d like to ask the million people stuck in traffic on the road the same questions.

I, myself, teach about and study the living world, but today, if anyone asked, I was coming back from the National Science Foundation.

It’s all confidential, but I cannot help but reflect on what we did for the last few days.  We were deciding which, roughly, five scientists out of a hundred would get to do their work.

it’s amazing to me to consider what these scientists were hoping to do – work in countries where Ebola is on the rampage; climb the steep slopes of Andean mountains to understand how climate change is ravaging the delicate; beautiful communities of plants and animals that live there; traverse deserts to study fire, drought, mammals, birds, and lizards; wear bug suits to protect themselves from the swarms of mosquitoes in the tundra; and use 3-d printers, analyze images from satellites and use lasers and radar to look deep into forests, fly drones with sensitive sensor arrays to measure nature in great detail, and run complex mathematical and computationally intensive simulations.

That’s the exhilarating part.  There were so many brilliant ideas, whacky ideas, clever ideas, new views and new theories and perspectives and new thoughts about life on earth.

None of it, however, was funded.  That’s the draining part.

I’d like to tell you what was funded, but that’s all confidential too. What was funded was brilliant work, but not much different from the ton of stuff that wasn’t funded.

I asked the head honcho – why is it that out of 8.7 million species, half of which will go extinct by the end of this century, we spend next to nothing on nature.  We fund practically none of the young, intrepid, brilliant scientists who are willing to risk life and limb to study our world.

Brain science, on the other hand, is one of the most well-funded sciences in the world.  Campuses around the country, my own included, are having enormous buildings and well-funded institutions erected or being erected to study the brain.

The National Institute for Health announced a 4.5 billion dollar Brain Initiative.

The ENTIRE budget for biology in NSF is just a fraction (16%) of that NIH brain-science Initiative.

NSF’s whole budget, for which biology is just one part, is something like 7.6 billion while NIH, which funds medical research, is over 30 billion.  As if, somehow, all of science has just one quarter the value of health science.

One does not, of course, get straight answers from head honchos – the usual claim is that you have to talk to Congress – that’s where the initiatives come from.

I wonder if, one day, we will look back and ask, how could the Foundation have spent so much money on studying us and spent so little on studying the world we live in?

I imagine we’ll know enough about our brain by then to figure out the mystery.

Till then, we’re pulling into Penn Station, time to get off, and we all have a lot of work to do, though today is Friday, and it’s been a draining week.