How Things Work: Science Grad School

Christian Bale, seen here visiting shooting victims in Colorado, has not received a $26K grant from the NIH. He is Batman, however…

Your Gormogons have always been strong proponents of intellectual honesty, making our case with sound logic, reason, but laced with humor.

We also have our favorite sites that we like to read. And once in a while when they ‘get it wrong’ we speak up, just as we do whenever we see liberal ass-hattery.

Today’s silliness comes from the Drudge Report. Matt Drudge, who Dr. J. thinks rather highly of, posted the following headline on his site:

“‘Joker’ on $26K Federal Grant.”

While this is factually correct, his motive was to imply that the Federal Government is propping up a legion of James Holmes’s and is irresponsible as to whom it gives money to.

It is linked to an article by the CBS D.C. affiliate who writes:

WNEW News reports that Holmes was awarded a prestigious grant from the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. NIH is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

It gave the graduate student a $26,000 stipend and paid his tuition for the highly competitive neuroscience program at the University of Colorado in Denver. Holmes was one of six neuroscience students at the school to get the grant money.

Here, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the story.

If you enter a Ph.D. program in the sciences at a large institution, you don’t pay tuition. Your tuition is paid for by the department, and in addition your living expense are funded via a stipend, typically from the NIH or NSF.

Large departments at highly regarded academic centers will have what is called a ‘Training Grant’ which defrays the cost of educating future scientists. The competition is in being accepted to one of these programs. Once there, you are given a preexisting ‘slot.’ Once these ‘Training Grants’ are obtained, they are held onto very tightly, and are typically renewed unless there is major problems with a training program.

Now CBS DC probably had no clue how these things work.

Mr. Holmes probably earned his slot through a competitive application process to U. Colorado Denver. U. Colorado Denver did the hard work of competing for the training grant.

That being said, it is hoped, and at some institutions required that graduate students, after a year, or two, apply for their own National Research Service Award (NRSA) grant, which defrays the cost of their training in the later years of Ph.D. training (when they are exclusively in a mentor’s lab). Sometimes the mentor has funds to pay the Ph. D.’s stipend. There are also private foundations that offer similar grants.

Dr. J. knows this because he spent a few years in the lab back in the day. The first year was on a training grant similar to the one he suspects Mr. Holmes was on, and in the remaining years, he was the recipient of a private foundation grant.

Now that you know how things work, you can see how silly this headline on Drudge really is. While it is not nearly as negligent as Brian Ross’s suggestion that Mr. Holmes was a member of the Tea Party, it was pretty bad reporting and Dr. J. expects better from those on his side.

Mr. Ross’s reporting was so irresponsible that even Jon Stewart felt the need to pile on. Now that’s saying something.

Dr. J.