Marietjie Botes

While listening to the FDA’s public hearing on the possible future therapeutic use of psychedelic drugs, I expected to hear mainly about molecules, dosage, purity, clinical endpoints and adverse events. Those questions were certainly present. But the conversation kept returning to a person. The person who prepares the patient, remains in the room while ordinary […]

I began Wormwood, the Netflix documentary series, expecting a Cold War story about LSD, secrecy and a suspicious death. By the final credits, however, it had become a larger question: What happens when an institution meant to protect us treats the human mind as a site of operations and controls the evidence needed to understand

Earlier this month, I attended the NIH BRAIN Initiative Conference in Washington, DC, where I presented my poster on advancing neurodata stewardship for secondary analysis. At the centre of my poster was a deceptively simple proposition: technically portable data are not necessarily governably reusable data. A dataset may be downloadable, stored in a recognised format

Some books entertain us. Others quietly rearrange the furniture in our minds. And then there are books like East of Eden, which seem to walk into the room, pull up a chair and demand an argument. I finished John Steinbeck’s great, unruly family saga feeling exhilarated, unsettled and slightly bereft. I wanted to return immediately

The first book we read together in the Pestilli Neuroscience Lab at UT Austin was Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun. It was an almost perfect choice for a neuroscience lab, quiet, unsettling, tender, and deeply preoccupied with the question that sits beneath so much of modern science and technology: What makes a human being

A few years ago, while visiting Barcelona, I stood beneath the soaring columns of Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família. Like millions before me, I was captivated by its extraordinary beauty. Sunlight poured through stained-glass windows, the stone columns rose like giant trees, and every surface reflected the imagination of a visionary architect. At the time, I

For centuries, governments decided which technologies could be developed within their borders. Today, we may be witnessing the beginning of a profound reversal. Increasingly, it is not governments choosing innovation. It is innovation choosing governments. That possibility struck me while reading reports that Preventive, a biotechnology company reportedly backed by Sam Altman, had explored conducting

There are books that entertain us, others that educate us, and a rare few that quietly change the way we see the world. I recently experienced the latter while reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot. Although first published in 1869, I repeatedly found myself reflecting on its unexpected relevance to twenty-first-century debates about neuroscience, artificial intelligence

Every generation believes it will recognise the future when it arrives. We imagine dramatic breakthroughs, newspaper headlines, and unmistakable moments that divide history neatly into a before and an after. We expect a single invention, a single law, or a single announcement that tells us everything has changed. But technological revolutions rarely announce themselves that