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Thursday, November 06, 2003In a statement released Monday night (November 3), Peter Agre, Sidney Altman, Robert Curl, and Torston Wiesel wrote that the Justice Department's determination to send Butler to jail sends a strong message to the scientific community 'that those scientists most involved in bioterrorism-related research are most likely to be victims of punitive attacks at the hands of federal authorities.' The group predicted that this message will intimidate 'precisely the scientists we need most in this effort of high national priority,' and they urged the prosecution and defense to agree to a plea bargain that does not include prison time. 'I think the four of us all feel just adamantly that this is turning out to be a gross miscarriage of justice,' Peter Agre, a Johns Hopkins University professor who won half of this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, told The Scientist. 'This is outrageous,' he said. 'It smacks of McCarthyism.' Dr. Butler, you may recall, lied to his university, and to law enforcement officials, about missing vials of plague bacteria. He reported them as missing or stolen, even though he knew otherwise. His university has rules about the handling of potentially hazardous biological materials, such as vials of highly infectious and deadly bacteria, to protect their workers and their students. Likewise the government. He felt himself above the rules of his university and above the law. So he handled his plague vials in any way he saw fit. Damn the rules, damn the laws. And then he lied to avoid the consequences of his actions. Happening as it did a year after 9/11 and the anthrax mailings, his lie touched off an investigation - a very serious and expensive investigation. After all, plague is one of the diseases that can be weaponized. Think this is McCarthyism? Try reporting false crimes to your local police department and see what happens. What he did was against the law, and for good reason. The details of his indictment give little cause for sympathy: ....between September 9 and 12, 2002, Butler is alleged to have illegally exported 30 vials of Yersinia pestis via Federal Express to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, utilizing Federal Express without obtaining an export. ...Two additional false statement violations are charged predicated upon Butler's alleged statement to the TTUHSC Responsible Reporting Officer for Select Agents which caused the submission of a false national inventory document to the CDC indicating that the TTUHSC facility [Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center -ed.] did not possess any Yersinia pestis in response to a Congressional mandate of the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002, and Butler's false statement on the Federal Express International Air Waybill that a package, which in fact contained Yersinia pestis being exported to Tanzania, was "laboratory materials. Maybe he had legitmate reasons for sending plague vials to Dar es Salaam. But why be so sneaky about it? Were the rules all that odious? And if so, were they so odious that circumventing them was worth imperilling the lives of Federal Express workers? Surely Nobel laureates could find better fights to fight. posted by Sydney on 11/06/2003 09:19:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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