What Does It Mean to Be a Scientist

Earlier this month, I received the following essay in an e-mail from Dr. Kathy Pike. Dr. Pike is the CEO of One Mind, a mental health advocacy organization that funds early career scientists. Her essay was an announcement of the 2025 Rising Star Awards for these scientists. But it is much more. I was inspired by her reflections on what it means to be a scientist at this moment. I hope you will be as well.

Dear Friends,

Dr. David Foster Wallace, in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address, observed that he didn’t know who discovered water, but he was pretty sure it wasn’t a fish. For much of my career, I was that fish. I swam in the water of science without pausing to consider what it really meant to be a scientist. I absorbed its methods, lived by its standards, and trusted its promise. Only later did I surface long enough to ask the question: what does it actually mean to do this work?

In the 1980s, when I trained as a clinical psychologist, science felt unstoppable. The foundation for The Human Genome Project was being built. MRI was transforming medicine. Personal computers were reshaping daily life. We swam in waters that seemed limitless. In mental health, the excitement was palpable. We optimistically anticipated breakthroughs in brain science that would transform people’s lives for the better.

Times have changed. Even in the best circumstances, the waters of discovery can be choppy. Experiments fail; results confound. But today the climate is especially fraught, and the U.S. scientific enterprise, once the crown jewel of the world, is at risk. Budgets have been cut, clinical trials halted, training grants eliminated, and public trust eroded. In mental health, the funding gaps are especially stark, even as the burden of illness continues to grow. These pressures make clarity of purpose and investment in science more critical than ever. Science is how we learn. Science is how we discover the complex mechanisms of the brain. Science is how we improve the human condition.

To persist as a scientist requires conviction and imagination always, especially now. Scientists need both to look to the horizon and keep swimming. We need to be both dreamers and empiricists. How else do we invent treatments for cancer or uncover the biology of depression? Scientists accept that what we know today may be overturned tomorrow. I have no problem with challenging general consensus. In fact, progress depends on doing so. After all, societies once believed the world was flat and that the planets orbited Earth. The essential point is that when we challenge the status quo, we must do so as scientists, and we must “follow the science” as the saying goes.

Funding brain science and advancing mental health research is the genesis and enduring DNA of One Mind. This month, we celebrate twenty years of the One Mind Rising Star Awards Program that supports early-career scientists whose vision and discipline are transforming how we understand and address mental health. Our fifty-four Award recipients have dared to ask audacious and unorthodox questions about the brain and mental illness. Their work is already reshaping our understanding of neural circuits, driving new treatments, and promoting prevention and recovery.

So, what have I learned over the years? Being a scientist requires imagination, persistence, patience, and impatience! It means asking bold questions, designing rigorous experiments, and moving forward through trial and error. It means building knowledge others can trust and advancing discoveries that ripple outward to improve lives. And just as mental illness touches all of us in one way or another, good science serves all of us regardless of gender, race, creed, or politics.

A better future for all of us depends on scientists who keep swimming - through calm and stormy waters alike - toward discoveries that change lives. Most scientists will remain strangers to us even though their discoveries help us, our families, and our communities. That is the quiet heroism of science. That is why we all need to rally around our scientists. That is why One Mind is proud to celebrate twenty years of our Rising Star Awards Program and the scientists whose vision and determination are transforming the mental health landscape and improving people’s lives every day.

With resolve and hope,

Kathleen M. Pike, PhD
Chief Executive Officer, One Mind