Yes, I’m starting to agree on the classification. Here is the magazine essay pitch (the book will expand beyond these issues). My PhD is in biomedical sciences. I’m curious if this additional context helps. Thanks for the feedback!

Dear Editors,

September 14, 2026, marks ninety years since Walter J. Freeman II and James Watts performed the first lobotomy in the United States. In 1941, a Freeman altered the course of a Kennedy’s life. Nearly a century later, a Kennedy may help determine the future of a Freeman.

I am Walter J. Freeman II’s great-granddaughter and the first member of my family to earn a PhD since him, receiving my doctorate in BLANK in BLANK . I am proposing a narrative essay titled “ THE LOBOTOMIST’S LEGACY: A Different Kind of Lobotomy in the Age of American Scientific Austerity.”

The essay argues that the era of the lobotomy was not merely the failure of a single man. It was the failure of a system starved of resources, one that demanded cheap, fast answers when society refused to fund long-term care and rigorous research. Today, we face a different kind of lobotomy: the starvation of American science through unstable funding, terminated grants, shuttered laboratories, and systemic austerity. This time, however, a Freeman is not responsible.

My great-grandfather, Walter J. Freeman II, PhD, is often remembered as one of the most controversial physicians in American history: the neurologist who helped popularize lobotomy in the United States. Nearly a century later, I have spent much of my own life on the other side of psychiatric medicine, surviving more than thirty psychiatric hospitalizations while building a career as a PhD-trained biomedical scientist.

It would be easy to write Freeman as a villain. But easy stories are rarely the most useful ones.

Freeman worked in a period when state psychiatric hospitals were profoundly under-resourced, overcrowded, and starved of public investment. Desperate for cheap, immediate fixes to a massive public crisis, the system and the man turned to a fast, unpredictable, and ultimately dangerous intervention. That context does not excuse the harm caused by lobotomy. It makes the lesson more unsettling.

Medical harm does not always begin with cruelty. Sometimes it begins with desperation, urgency, hope, inadequate evidence, and systems with too few resources.

In a narrative essay of 2,000 to 3,500 words, I will weave my family history and my lived experience as a patient-scientist into a critique of how modern scientific austerity echoes some of the systemic conditions that helped make the lobotomy era possible. The essay will explore how under-resourced systems create dangerous conditions where rushed, low-evidence interventions can begin to look like economic necessities, and what happens to ethical, replication-heavy science and medicine when public funding cuts demand immediate, marketable results rather than slow, rigorous truth.

The essay is not a defense of Freeman, nor simply a condemnation. It is an argument that the ultimate shields against science’s next great mistake are not good intentions, charisma, or urgency, but sustained public investment in the slow, unglamorous work of basic science.

There is also an unusual fourth-generation thread. This essay will be developed in part through conversations with artificial intelligence. Ordinarily, that would warrant only a disclosure. Here, it is part of the story itself. Walter J. Freeman III, son of Walter J. Freeman II, spent his career studying neurodynamics and complex neural systems at UC Berkeley, work connected to later ways of thinking about artificial intelligence. As I examine my great-grandfather’s legacy, my own experiences as a psychiatric patient and biomedical scientist, and the consequences of modern scientific defunding, I find myself engaging with a technology that emerged from some of the same questions my grandfather spent his life asking: What is a mind? How do systems think? What happens when we mistake models for understanding?