Yesterday I had lunch with Sam Barondes, author of Better than Prozac, Mood Genes and Molecules and Mental Illness near his home in sunny Sausalito.

I was fortunate enough to meet Sam along with Sol Snyder at the 2003 Staglin Family Music Festival for Mental Health a few weeks ago. Given Sam's fifty plus years of biopsychiatric research, he quickly appreciated the neurosociety concept. At the same time, he challenged my assumptions about the potential to develop neuroceuticals at the level of specificity that I am suggesting will be possible in the coming decades. Unable to counter Sam's depth of knowledge in psychopharmacology, I turned to history to help support my case.

Using several examples from previous techno-economic waves, I shared that most leaders at the cutting edge of their disciplines have not been able to conceive how far their particular discipline would advance in the decades to follow.

In particular, I mentioned that the case of computer scientists in the 1960s who couldn't see a way, or even a reason why, there would be computers in every home, car and telephone just a few decades later. This sparked an example from his own past about the many conversations he had with his friend, mentor and later Nobel Laureate, Marshall Nirenberg, at the NIH during the 1950s about how they could not conceive of how people would ever be able to read the genetic code. Yet with "Poly U" they did!

Sam is having a birthday party for an old post-doc of his today (to whom he gave E.O. Wilson's original Sociobiology several decades ago). After that he is off to Singapore to celebrate the opening of the Biopolis Centre (see photos) and then to the Society for Neuroscience conference in New Orleans. I look forward to sharing more of my future conversations with Sam around our emerging neurosociety.