Reductionist ideology not only hinders biologists from thinking adequately about the phenomena we wish to understand: it has two important social consequences: it serves to relocate social problems to the individual rather than exploring the societal roots and determinants of a phenomenon; and second, it diverts attention and funding from the social to the molecular.
If knowledge is not democratized, power can never be.
The brain is biology's greatest challenge. Perhaps in a sense it is the greatest challenge for science as a whole, beyond moon landings, the ultimate particles of the physicist and the depths of astronomical space.
With its hundred billion nerve cells, with their hundred trillion interconnections, the human brain is the most complex phenomenon in the known universe - always, of course, excepting the interaction of some six billion such brains and their owners within the socio-technological culture of our planetary ecosystem!
