Colorado suspect’s rarefied world of study
Neuroscience grad students and instructors describe a field that is rigorous and often isolating.
AURORA, Colo. — James Holmes inhabited an academic world so wondrous it could unlock the chemical code to human behavior, so complex that few outside the nation’s brilliant cloister of neuroscientists could begin to comprehend it.
The graduate neuroscience program at the University of Colorado-Denver’s Anschutz Medical Campus ranks among the top third of graduate programs in neuroscience — the study of the brain, its 100 billion nerve cells, and the connections among those cells that control thought and action.
“If I go to a bar and somebody asks me what I do, all I say is research,” said David Cantu, who got his doctorate from the program. “If I’d tell people I was specializing in mitochondrial reactive oxygen species and how it pertains to cell deaths … people’s eyes would start to glaze over.”
It’s the same program that Holmes, suspected of killing 12 patrons and injuring 58 at a movie theater last week, recently dropped after his first year.
Interviews with top directors of the university’s graduate program, and others outside the school, provide a glimpse into the lives of those who choose such a rigorous course of study. The Colorado program has been largely shuttered to public view since Holmes’ arrest July 20, a month after he announced plans to abandon his graduate studies there.
The interviews on that campus were conducted on the basis that Holmes not be discussed, but what
emerges is a vivid portrait of the intense world in which the 24-year-old student lived over the last year.
In this rarefied and often high-pressure environment, students who are already near the best of their game are asked to exponentially expand their capabilities, frequently under stiff competition, and often in isolation. An expanding field of research
The $126-million-a-year neuroscience program, which includes a new Center for NeuroScience, in recent years has developed the basis for drugs for the treatment of Down syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease and discovered that eating disorders such as bulimia can trigger alterations in the brain’s reward circuits. It has also revealed that the brains of mice can be profoundly affected by the kind of cages in which they’re kept, raising questions about some of the most fundamental experiments in biological science.
Housed in gleaming new research buildings on the Aurora campus, the program is one of dozens that have multiplied across the country over the last 20 years as researchers have begun to develop the modern tools needed to scrutinize and measure the inner workings of the brain.
“A lot of the effort prior to 1970 was just trying to define, to map the nervous system…. But once a lot of that was defined, it required all these other disciplines to come into the community of neuroscience to take the next step,” said Barry Shur, dean of the University of Colorado-Denver’s graduate school.
Just 35 students are enrolled in the doctoral training segment, an intense, five-to-six-year journey through the dense frontiers of neuroanatomy, cell biology, genetics and pharmacology. First-year students are plunged into fundamental course work accompanied by a trio of lab rotations designed to help them select an area of research.
“The transition from the student to the researcher is the whole goal,” said Diego Restrepo, co-director of the neuroscience center. “The student has to demonstrate the independence, the curiosity, the creativity to ask questions that can be translated into an experiment that will produce data that will … give you an answer to your question.”
Students are closely monitored but, at Denver and at most top schools, quickly begin to take ownership of their own progress. “We’re taking really, really smart students who have a pretty good idea of what they want to do and making sure they have the tools to start out, and then we set them loose,” said John Ngai, director of the graduate program in neuroscience at UC Berkeley.
The pace rapidly becomes robust and the competition severe, as students jockey for the best-funded labs, aim to have their work published in scientific journals and spend long, sometimes exhausting hours in the lab endlessly repeating and redesigning experiments.
“I think my first student got away with a 40-hour week, though most students spend significantly more than that, probably 50 or 60. And some of them much more,” said Louis F. Reichardt, neuroscience program director at UC San Francisco.
“There are experiments where you have to have data points every half hour, and when that happens, you put acot in the lab and you check it all through the night — I’ve done that,” said Shur. “What we expect is the students to be self-motivated, passionate, and not have to be told to go into the laboratory.”
The work can be isolating drudgery. Graduate students’ lab hours are often spent alone in tiny, sterile rooms — rats and mice their only companions — before the students go home to study. Some spend years breeding rodents to develop needed models to study memory conditions; others take days to recover information using electrophysiology from the brain of a single rat after an experiment.
“There’s a lot of time when you’re just alone, [and] it’s very easy to get lost in those periods of isolation,” said Shawn E. Nielsen, a fourth-year doctoral student at UC Irvine whose interest in neuroscience began when her then-13-year-old sister began suffering epileptic seizures and associated memory losses.
At Denver, program graduate Cantu said, students are expected to publish and put in occasionally grueling hours, but the pace is cyclical and the university emphasizes the need for students to have time outside the lab.
“There’s definitely a certain amount of pressure to be successful. But I feel like, at this particular university, people have a very good understanding of life and work balance. People are working nights and weekends, but people from my experience in Denver really know that you’re not going to be a lab rat. You have a life, and people do go out and enjoy the sunshine,” he said. “Sometimes.” Perseverance and passion required
Neuroscience students often talk of having had no intention of embarking on so demanding a field until, somewhere in an undergraduate biology class, they stumble upon a little-known aspect of the brain that jolts them with its mystery and potential.
For Anna Geraghty, a 24year-old doctoral student at UC Berkeley, it was a sophomore endocrinology class that set her on her current path, researching how stress hormones in the brain can interact with reproductive hormones to reduce fertility. “I found that I really love coming up with experiments and finding different ways to answer questions that work at a very basic science level,” she said.
Holmes, who had graduated with honors as a neuroscience student at UC Riverside in 2010, appeared to be interested in the physiological and genetic underpinnings of mental illness. At a science camp at Miramar College when he was 18, Holmes made a presentation on “temporal illusions,” the inaccurate perceptions of reality that can occur due to lags in neural processing.
University of ColoradoDenver officials have declined to discuss Holmes’ record but said that fewer than 10% of doctoral students drop out of the program during their first year. His announcement in June followed the rigorous oral examination that concludes the first year of course work and lab rotations, but Angie Ribera, director of the graduate program in neuroscience, said students are almost never “flunked” because of shortcomings on that exam.
“I want to make it perfectly clear that the exam is not something we’re looking to as a screen,” she said. “They’ve passed all their course work, and the goal of this oral exam is to see how they can integrate that material and communicate their knowledge to a group of faculty. It’s to identify where they are as they transition into the laboratory, and if there are deficiencies, we recognize them right away and can take steps to address them.”
The main hurdle, graduate neuroscience program directors say, is finding students whose passion for science will be deep enough to withstand the rigors of study, creative enough to translate their knowledge into new discoveries, and patient enough to do the work to get there.
“There are a lot of people who are outstanding undergraduate students but graduate work is not for them.… It’s a very different thought process, being a student in a classroom and this passive vessel of information, and translating it into an experiment where sometimes it just doesn’t work, and you have to determine if it didn’t work because you didn’t have all the controls to make sure it was done correctly,” Ribera said.
“It requires someone with enormous perseverance and an underlying passion for the science to get them through it: ‘I have to do this experiment again, and again, and again to find out if it’s right or wrong,’ ” Shur said. “A lot of people get worn down.”