Academic medicine, and academic science, doesn't work that way. No one assigns a "lead" to a lab.
It is all about the grant money. Only faculty members can be principal investigators (PIs) and
apply for grants. The lab exists only because there is grant money to pay for the research and the
salaries of all the personnel. The university will skim 40-50% off the top to pay for overhead expenses.
Nobody "owns" the research. Any patent rights arising from the research will be shared between UTSW,
the inventors, and possibly the funding agency (NIH). I think the grants currently in place will keep paying
until they are exhausted. After that new grants will have to be obtained. That is why PIs spend so much
of their time writing grant proposals. In today's environment the rate of success is low. Someone
like Thorpe who had a long history of grants may have an advantage. Going forward, what was Thorpe's
lab will not exist because it was only "Thorpe's lab" because of the grants that Dr. Thorpe received.
Here is a list of the people in Thorpe's lab.
Dr. Huang will have to establish his own lab now. Everyone else will scatter. The grad student will
need a new faculty member as advisor, the postdocs will need to find another lab with grant money
available, the research associates and assistants will have to find another lab that has money
to pay them, etc. In short, this is the end of the Thorpe lab.
Thorpe Lab Members
Gustavo Barbero - Research Associate
Olivier Belzile, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Researcher
Annie Best - Graduate Student
Xianming Huang, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor
Janie Iglehart - Research Assistant
Lisa Li - Research Associate
Shuzhen Li - Research Scientist
Kristi Lynn, Ph.D. - Postdoctoral Researcher
Stacey McCabe - Senior Administrator
Alan Schroit, Ph.D. - Adjunct Professor
Dan Ye, M.D. - Senior Research Associate
Yi Yin, M.D., Ph.D. - Instructor
However, that does not mean that the research will disappear. Dr. Thorpe published many, many
papers over the last 20 years. This area of research will survive, but it will be in other labs spread
around the world. Maybe someone at UTSW will carry forward with some of it, maybe not. It all depends
on whether or not they can get funding for the research. I know these things because I work in a
research lab in a university medical school. I never met Dr. Thorpe, but I had communicated with him
over the last 5 years. He had given me good feedback for ideas I had sent to him. He will be missed.
This has been a very sad time for me.
"By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out." - Richard Dawkins
