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.
