7

Fighting with Colleagues

“Yes, it’s egoistic, you want to help your child,

but you’re also helping other children.”

A French restaurant in Lausanne: a couple sit in a booth. He is slender, with thick brown hair, small eyes, and such a smooth, soft voice that she leans in to hear him. She has the roundest eyes, lending her face an almost childlike quality, but her gaze is bright and clear, and her voice is full and throaty. She flags down the waiter. Henry orders oysters with Tabasco, and a steak. She orders fish and a bottle of white wine. A long day is behind them. A babysitter is looking after Olivia and Charlotte. Kai’s in Israel. Now there’s time to talk, relax. Luckily, Kamila was on time today.

HENRY: That’s the biggest source of disagreement between us. I have autistic traits myself. One of my compulsions is that I am always on time. Kamila, meanwhile, isn’t exactly a stickler for punctuality. She’s more Spanish in that respect.

KAMILA: Well, I did live in Mexico for two years.

HENRY: When you say 10 a.m., it usually ends up being 11. My brain is different that way. She has a Spanish brain.

KAMILA: Mexican, darling, not Spanish.

HENRY: When it comes to punctuality, you certainly don’t act like that you grew up in Germany. If I have an appointment at 7 p.m., I’m there at 7 p.m. and not a minute later. Being a minute late is already unacceptable.

KAMILA: When we have plans, he’s tense 24 hours before because he knows I’m going to be late. He’s like Kai in that way. He is obsessed with the question: How do I get her to be on time? (Laughs.)

HENRY: Today, I had a doctor’s appointment at eight in the morning. And I knew: there’s not a chance she’ll be on time. Why would she even make an appointment for eight a.m., then? So, at 6:30 a.m., I turn on the light, take a shower, make as much noise as possible so she wakes up—and still she’s late. These are the things we fight about.

KAMILA: That’s your autistic streak. When we met, Henry was very reclusive. He still is, in fact. It’s in his genes.

HENRY: I’m more autistic than Kai in that way.

KAMILA: What do you do when you’ve been together for a while? You meet people. We kept to ourselves for a long time.

HENRY: We did socialize with people.

KAMILA: We visited my parents and my friends. And what did Henry do? Sat there and wouldn’t talk at all.

HENRY: But then I would. I wouldn’t let you talk. That was the phase, when you started kicking me under the table, so I would stop talking.

KAMILA: In everyday life, he is actually very sensitive. He’s good at listening. But in the scientific context . . . At conferences, he’s almost hyper. If you talk to him there, it feels a bit like you’re talking to yourself.

HENRY: At work, I don’t have a lot of sensitivity. In that context, I’m like a bulldozer. I set my goal, and everyone else better get out of my way. That’s not sensitive at all. It’s almost arrogant. “This is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong—that’s how I am then.”

KAMILA: But not intentionally. In a naive way.

HENRY: No. I am aware of it.

KAMILA: You can’t do that in business meetings.

HENRY: I had to learn that. I had important meetings for the Human Brain Project. I sat down and said, “Okay, here’s our topic. Let’s go.” No “How are you?” No “How was your flight?” That wasn’t part of my thinking. We weren’t there to talk about each other, after all, but about the mission. However, particularly in Switzerland, you need to spend the first ten minutes building a rapport with people. Kamila had to coach me to sit down, calm down, ask questions, make small talk. (Both laugh.) That’s another thing I have in common with Kai, but I’ve learned to do that now. He hasn’t gotten past that point yet. He starts talking and just won’t stop.

KAMILA: He does ask you how you’re doing and what you’ve been up to, but after a minute he’s done with that and tells you a story. And it doesn’t matter if you fall asleep.

HENRY: Like him, I have a million tics. In school, I had reading and spelling difficulties. I mixed up letters. To this day, what I write is hard to decipher. But I developed coping strategies. It doesn’t slow me down.

Unfortunately, Kai did not inherit that coping ability. Or he just didn’t have his father’s luck. Perhaps autism was never triggered in Henry because he received the right therapy, the Kalahari therapy, which perfectly lines up with what his research suggested: no television, no computer games, no bright colors, no noisy streets, no sirens, no movie theaters, no crowds—just the calm vastness of the savanna and its predictable cycles. The sun and the cows set the pace. It wasn’t until Henry was ten years old, after his “critical periods,” that a bit of movement came into his life, the rubber tires that propelled him down hills, the uncles who sat him behind the wheel, the bush pilots who took him to school in Durban. . . . Unwittingly, his parents and grandfather had done everything right. They had protected him from the noisy, fast world, had given Henry structure and endless possibilities to withdraw.

In the past, millions of people had the same good fortune. Though genetically they may have been predisposed to autism or another mental disorder, they just happened to grow up in the South African savanna or in the Texas boonies, in a world that naturally fulfilled all the recommendations of the intense world theory. Like Kai, millions of people are now unlucky enough to have been born into a noisy, fast world, which also finds its way into everyone’s pockets. This may be enriching for ordinary people, but it is tragic for autistic children, who absorb everything until it all gives way.

Science is puzzling over why so many people in our time are autistic. One reason, surely, is that doctors have a better idea of what they’re looking for. But the rise is too steep for this to account for it alone. It may be simply because so few children grow up with that natural backwater therapy.

When Lynda examined Kai, she also examined his family. Henry, she noted, “exhibits many characteristics of a hunter mind,” which is what she calls Asperger’s. One of the characteristics: “He is extremely attentive.”

Henry was doubly lucky. After childhood, when he was ready and willing to get out, his parents and grandfather unknowingly continued this course of therapy. They challenged and encouraged him. His autism turned to his advantage. His super-columns catapulted him to the top of the scientific community. If Henry didn’t carry this autism in him, he wouldn’t have had the choice between elite universities like MIT or the EPFL. He wouldn’t have developed the intense world theory, wouldn’t be on a TED stage, and wouldn’t have led the Human Brain Project.

When the TED producers announced Henry as a “frontiersman,” they meant that he combines medicine and computer science. Henry is a frontiersman in another sense as well: he’s at home in the world of autistic people as well as ours. This has its pitfalls. In her case history, Lynda wrote about Henry’s ambition and what it meant for his family. When Henry helped his children study, it could never be fast enough. He overwhelmed Kai. Henry didn’t wait for his son, and he lost him along the way. This, incidentally, is how he would lose many of his colleagues as the head of Human Brain Project. A top executive must also sometimes behave like a father and alleviate fears.

New ideas are always met with resistance, aversion—and the Human Brain Project was no exception. Eighty-five universities and hundreds of scientists were involved. Before long, two opposing camps formed within the massive project. Henry’s people on one side; the traditionalists on the other. The latter wanted to do scientific research like conventional biologists: measuring brainwaves, tallying the results, and deriving laws. They considered Henry’s plan fantastical. They resisted incorporating so much computer science into medicine. “Should Europe be spending one billion euros to support the passionate quest of one man?” one critic asked in Nature magazine. What if Henry was wrong?

The concerns were justified. Pioneers fail much more often than they succeed. The opponents, however, were ignoring an important point: the European Union had chosen this flagship project because they wanted to support a daring venture. A project in the traditionalist mold would never have received the grant money.

“Many were grateful to Markram for bringing in the money, but they nevertheless thought that they could sway the project in their favor,” a scientist later told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. These tacticians clearly didn’t know Henry very well. They e-mailed him their concerns and received harsh responses. Their anger flared. “This is an IT project!” an opponent exclaimed.

Of course, it is. A scientist who thinks that’s a bad thing hasn’t understood the new era. If that person had lived in the late nineteenth century, he probably would have chastised Ehrlich for his “chemistry project!”

Amazon is an IT project, and it has changed the way we do business.

Facebook is an IT project, and it has changed how we communicate.

Airbnb is an IT project, and it has changed how we travel.

Google Cars is an IT project, and the car manufacturers fear it for good reason.

Classic neuroscience has existed for a century. It is important and will continue to exist for another century. But now the new wave demands its place. Biochemistry alone will not lead medicine into a new age—IT projects will. The question is not whether it will happen, but how. The traditionalists should consider this. Pioneers have a habit of moving like bulldozers. What benefits society in the long-term can hurt it in the short-term. Ford and Vanderbilt were not concerned about environmental protections or working conditions; that required unions and political action. And our new overlords are every bit as ruthless. Airbnb creates housing shortages. Amazon employees regularly report how overworked they are. Facebook shocks us with their data use. Google has paid billions in fines for unfair competition practices. Digitized medicine threatens our privacy. How does one protect the data of sick people—particularly the mentally ill and unstable, who have a long history of being stigmatized? How does one use clinical data anonymously? What other ethical questions does one have to ask, which the pioneers, the geeks, don’t consider, because they only see progress, opportunities, rather than dangers, risks? These are questions demanding answers.

In an open letter, hundreds of scientists attacked Henry. His goals are illusory, they said, his leadership style authoritarian. They accused him of poor management. The criticisms were simultaneously right and wrong. Yes, his leadership style is authoritarian, his management style questionable. He should have held more conversations, been more considerate of people’s doubts. He could have made more compromises, but that would have stripped his project of its radicalism, its risk, and thus of its meaning, its value. Indeed, the possibility of its failure was always great; but the promise of its success was immeasurable.

Henry didn’t even consider the possibility of failure. In that way, he’s wired like those Silicon Valley pioneers. They may have a lot of shortcomings, but they do understand a thing or two about making the seemingly impossible possible. Some years ago, I spoke to Ben Horowitz, who has a legendary reputation in Silicon Valley. The famous angel investor founded a company and later sold it for $1.6 billion. He writes a blog that reaches ten million readers. His business partner is one of the great internet pioneers, Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, who was considered the man of the hour at the outset of the internet revolution. The two manage billions of dollars, holding shares in Skype, Facebook, Pinterest, Airbnb, Twitter. In short, they have invested in everybody who is anybody in the Valley. From a small buy-in, they earned a hundred million dollars with Skype alone. Failure, Horowitz says, is the rule in the Valley. Ninety percent of companies crash; the other 10 percent fly, making him and his business partner rich. They seek out that risk.

Traditional investors are only concerned with past achievements and profits. Investors in the Valley, on the other hand, look to the future, the potential profit. If it’s 1 percent likely that a startup will eventually make $100 billion, then—arguably—it’s worth a billion dollars.

What is to be gained from the Human Brain Project? No money, certainly. It was about so much more.

“I demanded top speed. If someone came to me with a solution that took a long time, it was no good. Even if it was a great solution—that wasn’t good enough. Of course, one can accuse me of doing all this to help Kai. Yes, that’s egotistical. I wanted to help my child, but its success would benefit all children. What drives me crazy are people like that Nobel Prize winner, very well-known, very influential, who tells everybody that maybe, one day, his great-great-grandchildren will understand the brain. And he calls himself a neuroscientist. He might as well quit.”

And so, Henry conducted himself like a Jobs or a Bezos, who were also known for harsh e-mails and furious zeal. But a Bezos could do things his way: his investors demanded it; his employees expected it. The higher the risk, the higher the possibility of everyone getting rich off company shares. By comparison, the world of committees, of professors and politicians, eschews all risk. Henry never had a chance. He was deposed as director. The project today does good, solid scientific research. Henry’s dream is beyond its purview.

And yet: his entrepreneurial spirit, that first step he took, has made a difference. It encouraged China and the United States to do their own research in the same direction. Not content to let Europe leave them in the dust, they’ve started similar projects. Neuroscience is speeding on into the future.

Henry still leads the Blue Brain Project that took him to the TED conference. He still wants to simulate the brain, starting with the animal brain. But then! “I will make it.”