A generation of early-career neuroscientists enters the field carrying genuine ambition and hard-won skills, only to find that the structures meant to guide them — mentorship, funding, institutional pathways — are thinning precisely when they are needed most. A survey of more than three hundred researchers, spanning undergraduates to newly minted lab directors, reveals not a crisis of passion but a crisis of support: the science attracts them, but the system struggles to hold them. In the long human story of knowledge-making, this moment asks whether institutions can honor the curiosity they c