Charismatic and Visionary Leaders

Charismatic leaders play fascinating roles in society, for good and for ill. In the United States, we are aware of the power of Martin Luther King and John Lewis in the fight for equal rights, and every country will have its heroes in its struggles for freedom. And, we are equally aware of the impact of despots who have led to terrible miscarriages of justice. We are less accustomed to think of the roles of charismatic leaders in our scientific communities, as we prefer to believe that we all “follow the science” rather than the scientist! Nonetheless, my eyes were opened to the impact of personal charisma in science at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting in 1980. I was chatting with a very fine membrane biophysicist when Eric Kandel walked by and my colleague said, “Kandel is my hero. ” I was surprised, as the work my friend did was detailed characterization of membrane currents, far from the grand sweep of Kandel’s work. And when I asked my friend why he revered Kandel, he said that he didn’t dare to dream to big picture questions but restricted himself to elucidating the details of cellular mechanisms precisely because of his own lack of visionary courage. My friend valued Kandel, not for the details of his experiments, but for articulating that someday it would be possible to establish the molecular and cellular bases of learning and memory. I learned from this conversation that scientists add value or are destructive to our collective enterprise in disparate ways. Henry Markram is one of these fascinating individuals who dared to set himself and our community the most ambitious of goals. I first met Markram early in his career when he was doing breathtaking and virtuoso work in brain slices, first as a postdoc and then as a beginning faculty member. Years later, I was in the audience for Henry Markram’s talk at the 2012 FENS meeting in Barcelona. I experienced Henry’s Barcelona talk as I imagine some people experience an evangelical prayer meeting. The screen was floor to ceiling, and filled with extraordinarily stunning images of neurons. Markram, in a very low-key voice, articulated the goal of building a model that would lead to enlightenment (an understanding of how the brain works). I sat there and was captured by his spell, as the beauty of the biological images made it easy to fall in line with his vision. At the same time, my logical self asserted that the scientific program he was advocating and implementing could never lead to enlightenment because it was constructed on a series of questionable premises. Consequently, I was deeply frustrated, as Markram’s program was both awe-inspiringly ambitious, meticulous, and on the surface elegant but combined with many systematic oversimplications that, for me, invalidated the enterprise. What were my scientific objections at that time as I remember them? First, Markram’s initial goal was to build a model of a cortical column and to validate it using slice data. I understood the benefits of trying to capture the dynamics of a column-sized piece of brain, but columns in the brain do not function alone, and neurons within one column receive and send information to many other brain areas. So what kind of output could one measure from a cortical column in a slice, or for that matter in the brain to constrain the model? Or even to know if the model was producing a sensible output? Second, Markram started his career as a cellular and synaptic patch biophysicist (Markram and Tsodyks, 1996; Markram et al., 1997, 2004). By 2012, Markram’s group was collecting data that were rich in detail and complexity in large quantities. Then, the proposed process was to average these data and build the model from mean data. By this point, we and others had come to understand the dangers of using mean data (Golowasch et al., 2002), as the mean of a population can have properties quite different from the individual measurements that were used to calculate the mean. I was particularly sensitive to this, as we had been systematically measuring the variability in channel gene expression in the same identified neurons across animals Received March 24, 2021; accepted March 25, 2021; First published April 30, 2021. This paper is part of the Epistemological Lessons from the Blue and Human Brain Projects Collection. To view all of the papers in the Collection, please visit the Epistemological Lessons Collections page at eNeuro.org. The author declares no competing financial interests. Author contributions: E.M. wrote the paper. This work was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health Grant MH46742 and the Steven J. Cloobeck Fund. Acknowledgements: I thank Larry Abbott for comments on an early draft. Correspondence should be addressed to Eve Marder at marder@ brandeis.edu. https://doi.org/10.1523/ENEURO.0125-21.2021 Copyright © 2021 Marder