His résumé after he graduated
with honors in neuroscience from the University of California-Riverside in 2010
cites experience in the lab dissecting birds, studying their musculature and
analyzing data and graphs to measure molecules.
A video from a science camp he attended after high
school shows him making a presentation about temporal illusions, misfirings in
brain cells that lead to misreading the passage of time — the feeling that time
stands still. In the video, Holmes refers to "an illusion that allows you
to change the past."
He was one of six students admitted to the
University of Colorado's graduate program in neuroscience last year. He
received a $26,000 federal stipend.
But neuroscientist David Eagleman says Holmes'
credentials were no better than those of an average student. The suspected mass
killer is no elite neuroscientist, says Eagleman, of Baylor College of Medicine
in Houston.
"He was just a second-year grad student,"
he says. "He didn't know anything."
Aurora, Colo., police say Holmes, 24, entered a
midnight showing of the movie TheDark Knight Rises early Friday and opened fire
with a rifle, shotgun and 40-caliber handgun, killing 12 people and injuring
58. They found his apartment booby-trapped with explosives and chemicals set to
explode if someone entered.
Eagleman, a former researcher at the Salk Institute
for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., where Holmes attended the
eight-week summer camp when he was 18, said the young man had a reputation as a
"dolt."
Eagleman didn't know Holmes but says the teen
parroted his advisers' words in his presentation on temporal illusions. A video
of the speech was first reported by ABC News.
"He was just given the presentation to
read," Eagleman says. "He wasn't any sort of superscientist when he was
18."
Stacie Spector, a Salk Institute spokeswoman,
confirmed that Holmes attended a summer course at the institute but said that
she could not comment further because of privacy concerns. She said the
institute did not release the video.
John Jacobson, a former researcher at Salk whom
Holmes listed as his mentor during the camp, told the Los Angeles Times that
the teenager was a "mediocre" student who was stubborn and did not
listen to direction.
"I saw a shy, pretty socially inept
person," he told the newspaper. "I didn't see any behavior that would
be indicative of violence then or in the future."
Jacobson told the newspaper Holmes "should not
have gotten into the summer program. His grades were mediocre. I've heard him
described as brilliant. This is extremely inaccurate."
He said Holmes' high school transcripts showed Bs
and no advanced-placement classes. He was accepted to the camp because he had
done computer programming, Jacobson said. He was never Holmes' mentor, he said,
but Holmes worked in his lab to write a computer code for an experiment
Jacobson was working on. He told the newspaper Holmes never finished it.
"What he gave me was a complete mess,"
Jacobson says.
Holmes' résumé suggests he was trained in
dissection of birds and mice, performing chemistry tests and attaching small
gene tags to cells to target them for treatment.
"Recipe-book stuff, literally, that every
biology student should learn," Eagleman says. As for the grant, Eagleman
says, "Holmes is being depicted as some sort of brilliant researcher who
won a rare grant, but there are thousands of research students in this country
with such grants. Everyone has one. There is nothing elite about it."
Holmes had difficulty with a June 7 preliminary
exam, given orally by three university faculty members. It is designed to
evaluate students' knowledge at the end of the first year. Three days later,
Holmes dropped out.
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