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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