THE present scholarship offered by A*Star, where an A-level applicant must make a decision to undertake a life-sciences PhD, assumes that just because one enjoys studying the life sciences one will enjoy doing research. This reasoning is potentially misleading.

Fundamentally, the difference between a bachelor's degree and a graduate degree is that, for the former, one learns to appreciate current research results, mostly through textbooks. For the latter, one studies how current results were formulated and how one might go on to produce new research results.

There is a vast difference between loving the results of current research and loving the job of producing new results.

To use an example from my own interests, I love reading about economic results, I love reading works by economists like John Maynard Keynes and even the current Nobel Prize winners in economics, Edward Prescott and Fynn Kydland.

However, only the top economics professors produce these results. The results we see in the media are almost always dazzling and unusual - because they are newsworthy. But the work itself is almost always tedious. A single result may be months or years in the making. Reproducing the work, just to be sure, takes even more time.

Thus, I feel that the present life-sciences scholarship scheme could be improved by separating the bachelor's-degree scholarship component from the PhD component.

Asking an 18-year-old whether he is 'passionate about the life sciences' is not a useful question to determine whether the person is 'passionate about the work of a life scientist'. It is almost impossible at that age to know which aspect one is really passionate about.

It would be a shame and potentially a waste of public funds for a recipient of that scholarship to realise, after graduating with a bachelor's degree, that he is not really interested in doing research in the life sciences. If he is forced to continue on to the PhD just because he is afraid of paying compensation, no one, not himself, and certainly not Singapore, would benefit.

Kelvin Tan Tuan Wei