the last thing i would do is blame neuroscientists for the disfunctional US federal budgeting process that funds basic research at pennies on the dollar compared to war and subsidizing the rich. at the same time I also think we would probably have an easier time communicating to the public at large and building a political case for funding neuroscience if we focused less on publishing discrete papers and more on making our work into larger, cumulative projects that we could point to as a direct consequence of our funding. We should be able to say "here are all the things the BRAIN initiative funds and how they relate to one another" instead of having NIH Reporter and a handful of summary PDFs as the best resource at hand.
the Brain Initiative Cell Atlas Network, which is pioneering single-cell atlases for the human brain and the mouse brain, and the FlyWire Connectome project, which mapped every neuron in the fruit fly brain and spinal cord.
BICAN, which has a ton of work that you can point to, is great, eg the "knowledge explorer" but even then it suffers from public intelligibility even though i know there's a lot more there - eg. the "tools" link from the homepage - https://www.portal.brain-bican.org/ - goes to some unintelligible RRID page. FlyWire is great ( https://codex.flywire.ai/ ) but the dependence on google infra and identity is just a pointless footgun.
point being, scientific infrastructure isn't just a matter of 'nice to have,' but is probably increasingly important to the survival of the discipline. If we can't point to what we've done as a coherent picture, it's very easy to cut funding and have it fly under the radar.
I know of a ton of extremely good projects that the BRAIN initiative funds. I have no idea how i would go about communicating that to anyone who wasn't a neuroscientist.
It would be nice if "do good science and science communicators will do the communicating for you," were true, but I guess you do need to do "scicom" intentionally.
I think Complexly's SciShow represents some of the best in video-based scicom, and they cover neuro often. Maybe it's reasonable to build scicom partnership into a research plan? But probably the grant funds can't be used for it, so I don't know how it would fit into the existing system.
@blakeNaccarato
Yeah basically what im saying is that "doing random stuff and expecting other people to make it intelligible for everyone else" is a bad strategy if we want publicly funded science to keep existing. The idea of "scicomm" as optional, not as a byproduct of doing our work in such a way that it was already intrinsically part of an understandable whole is bad to me. The existing system is unsustainable, so we either change it or it gets gutted out of existence
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