Challenges for Black Colleges’ Brightest in the Lab

On the June morning when James Lucas first met Stephanie E. Sen outside the research laboratory she oversaw, he made one request. “Don’t put me on a project that’s too important,” he said. He could already envision himself botching an experiment and losing Professor Sen a lot of money. He worried that after all the hype about what a prodigy he was in chemistry, he wouldn’t measure up.

In her polite and genial way, Professor Sen spurned his plea. The reason Mr. Lucas had come to the joint Indiana University-Purdue University campus here was to do important work. The entire point was that a promising 18-year-old be dropped into a lab populated by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Mr. Lucas, barely a year out of high school, was supposed to be awed by the mechanical menagerie, the instruments for spectrometry, liquid chromatography, nuclear magnetic resonance.

One other bit of personal history applied. Mr. Lucas had just completed his freshman year at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and he had been selected this summer as part of a new program intended to bring gifted science students from the archipelago of historically black colleges and universities in the South to two major research universities farther north for an eight-week immersion.

All are, in the self-effacing phrase of the laboratory, “working at the bench.”

“It’s been a great challenge, understanding the concepts and the vocabulary of research chemistry,” Mr. Lucas said during a break from his experiment. “I haven’t gotten to this level in my classes. And on TV, when someone’s working in a lab, you don’t see how they’re tearing their hair 24 hours a day.”

For all of Morehouse’s renown — it is the alma mater of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the film director Spike Lee, and the term “Morehouse man” is lofty praise in black educational circles — the college has been geared primarily to undergraduates. The multimillion-dollar cost of equipping and sustaining research laboratories exceeds the wherewithal of nearly all the historically black colleges...

This from the New York Times.