Joseph J. Fins and Alexandra Suppes Brain Injury and the Culture of Neglect: Musings on an Uncertain Future social research Vol. 78 : No. 3 : Fall 2011 731 A TWO-CULTURE PROBLEM by the time scientist and novelist c. p. snow gave his famous 1959 Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures (Snow 2007 [1959]) memories of the Platonic Academy, the Renaissance polymath, or the Newtonian theolo- gian-physicist were long gone. It was such synergisms that Snow sought to restore as he described the lack of communication between the two cultures at mid-century Cambridge, the culture of the sciences, which seek to develop technological advances and to make sense of the world through the objective rigor of the scientific method, and the culture of the humanities, whereby knowledge is constructed by language and culture. As medical ethicists, we find ourselves at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences, a confluence that is too often underpopu- lated and an intellectual space that needs more engagement. Following in Snow’s tradition (Fins 2009; Fins and de Melo-Martin 2010; Fins 2010), we see the two-culture divide as a barrier to solving challenging questions such as those posed by severe brain injury. So in the spirit of reconciling these two cultures, we hope to employ both the tools of the sciences and the insights of the humanities in our description of disor-