In recent months, a quiet but profound shift has occurred in the landscape of frontier science. With the passing of personalities like Charles Tart, Bill Bengston, David Moncrief, Damien Broderick, and Steven J. Lynn, we have lost not just individuals, but entire intellectual ecosystems—constellations of inquiry, courage, and care that once helped illuminate the edges of what science dared to ask. Their deaths are more than personal or disciplinary losses; they are existential reminders of a truth both tender and terrifying... that our time to make a difference is not only finite but actively running out.
These were thinkers who stood not at the center of their fields, but defiantly at the edges—precisely where revolutions often begin. Charles Tart gave us a language for states of consciousness that science still struggles to measure. Bill Bengston, through both curiosity and controversy, chased the mystery of healing across experimental thresholds. David Moncrief, often behind the scenes, held together fragile interdisciplinary bridges. Damien Broderick fused science fiction and science fact, stretching the limits of epistemic imagination. And Steven J. Lynn brought rigorous empirical clarity to domains—hypnosis, dissociation, suggestion—that others dismissed or distorted.
To be a pioneer in these fields isn't just to research what's marginal; it's to live with marginalization. These men did so with remarkable persistence. They withstood ridicule, isolation, institutional indifference. And they did it not for prestige, but because they believed that somewhere, beneath the anomalies, the anecdotes, and the absurdities, something essential about the human condition was waiting to be understood. That commitment—to look deeper, ask harder, and stay longer in the discomfort of uncertainty—is the kind of intellectual courage we often forget to honor until it's too late.
Now it's too late for them...but not for us.
Their passing invites a reckoning, not only with grief, but with our own relationship to time, purpose, and proximity. We tend to imagine that the great projects of our lives—our collaborations, our writings, our paradigm shifts—will have room to grow at their own pace. We fool ourselves into believing there will always be another grant cycle, another conference, another long lunch with a mentor. And then, suddenly, the email arrives, or the news filters in through the grapevine, and we’re left with an unfinished draft, a list of unasked questions, or a heart still waiting to say "thank you."
The lesson isn't just that life is short, but that its most important opportunities are perishable. Ideas are a relational phenomenon; they need exchanges, counterpoints, and embodied presence to thrive. So too with our professional lives. How many times have we deferred a collaboration because we were “too busy”? How often have we stayed silent in a meeting, waiting for someone braver to speak first? How long have we waited to begin the project that we secretly hope will outlive us?
There's no more time for waiting. These passings remind us that the frontier isn't a place, it’s a people. And that frontier is vanishing, one wise and weathered voice at a time.
Let's not mourn them merely with tributes, but with action. Pick up the phone. Send the draft. Reach out to the colleague you admire but have never emailed. Finish the chapter you keep rewriting in your mind. Begin the experiment you’re afraid won’t work. Say what you really mean in your next article. Ask questions that scare you. Push back when it matters. Mentor someone who doesn’t remind you of yourself. Recommit to your highest curiosity, even when it's unfashionable, even when it seems futile.
Above all, cherish the people doing this work with you—those still breathing, still wondering, still struggling to find language for the unspeakable. None of us are guaranteed a long arc. But we can choose, now, to bend the arc we have toward meaning.
There's still a frontier. But it's smaller than we thought. And our names are already being whispered across it.
