Explorer or Entrepreneur

In grad school I started a company called Fontis Biotechnology.

Aileen Huang-Saad taught me to reimagine how an academic lab could operate and how the next generation could be trained. We raised $60K as graduate students to test and validate a prototype. Built a business plan. Filed and received a patent. Hired workers and volunteers.

Then came the decision. Drop out and scale the company. Or close it and finish the PhD.

🚀 I chose to be an explorer.

Not because the company was failing. Because discovery was the thing only I could do. The questions I wanted to ask, why the brain rejects technology, why electrical stimulation produces one perception and not another, why chronic interfaces fail for biological reasons no amount of engineering solves, those required a life at the interface of neuroscience and engineering.

🧠 In 2016 I was offered a co-founder position at Neuralink. I declined on scientific principle. Elon Musk builds devices. That matters. But building without understanding the biology is why brain-computer interfaces fail. My "Why BCIs Fail" series has been documenting that thesis.

I traced the first half of this story in our Micromachines perspective, "The History and Horizons of Microscale Neural Interfaces." What we have built. The second half is in our new JNE perspective, "Solving the Problem of Inception." What must we discover.

🔬 The system does not reward people who live at this boundary. A study of 55,497 academic evaluations found that the penalty for being multidisciplinary increases with performance. The highest-performing boundary-spanning scientists were punished the most, because high-performing outsiders threaten the identity of the discipline. The gatekeepers are not confused. They are defending ‘purity' territory (Fini et al., Organization Science 2022).

I have lived this. Proposals scored as "too basic" by engineering panels and "too applied" by neuroscience panels. A collaborator who used my student's labor and my biosketch to secure a grant, then redirected funds and excluded us from the paper.

🌱 I stayed anyway. Because a lifetime of navigating worlds that would not claim me taught me that the most important problems live in the gaps neither side will own.

Now I train explorers. The students and postdocs in my lab. The trainees of UP NExT (University of Pittsburgh Neural Engineering Cross-Translation) Program. The emerging community around bidirectional translation. They will close the loop between human experience and biological mechanism.

But only if the system survives.

Every post in this series has been about the same thing. The enterprise that turned a kid who couldn't buy lunch in middle school into a scientist building the future of brain-computer interfaces is under attack by people who have never needed it.

We came out of the single electrode. We looked over the hill and saw the foreign body response. We crossed the species barrier from rodent to primate to human. Discovery is what's next.

I chose to be an explorer. I am asking you to fight for exploration.

#NeuralEngineering #Neuroscience #BrainComputerInterface #WhyBCIsFail #ScienceAdvocacy