Join the disruptors of health science

Thomas Insel left Verily, a health-science spin-off formed by Google's parent company, to co-found a start-up called Mindstrong Health this year. In early 2015, I testified with several other National Institutes of Health (NIH) directors at an annual hearing held by the US Senate. It was my 13th and final year as director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland. What struck me most was how the harsh fiscal reality tempered the passionate bipartisan support for the NIH. As one senator noted, with a federal deficit of nearly US$500 billion, there was little hope of any significant increase in funding. Six months after that hearing, I left the NIH for Silicon Valley, first working at Verily in South San Francisco, California, a health-science spin-off formed by Google's parent company Alphabet.