On Student Training

As a former Office of Education staff member who was around for the launching of the Pre-IRTA program, I can't tell you how pleased I was to read in the January-February issue about the impact the Pre-IRTA program is having on its participants and NIH. During my three years at NIH (19911994), I became convinced that NIH had an immense capacity to mentor future scientists, and I was impressed by the number of scientists who willingly gave their time to mentor high school and college students.

Now, as director of admissions for 11 Ph.D. programs, I can tell you how important good mentoring is to development of a successful Ph.D. or M.D./Ph.D. applicant. It's obvious in reading letters of recommendation from NIH scientists that the program is achieving its goals--many participants are obtaining the type of experience that the program was meant to provide. That's saying quite a bit for a government program"

During my visits to 40 campuses each year, I strongly recommend the Pre-IRTA program in conversations with students. Those of us in the extramural community appreciate the experience NIH is providing to our future students.

I recently learned that NEI has launched a new comprehensive clinical trials database for NEI-funded studies. It is located at

We would like to give the correct CRISP Web address as

instead of the one given in the January-February 1998 NIH Catalyst. CRISP is the transinstitute database of funded extramural and intramural NIH projects and includes both clinical and nonclinical studies.

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