Amy Bishop, neuroscientist, inventor, murder suspect, has become bigger than life, a symbol for those who think that genius is close to madness, or that women cannot get ahead in science, or that tenure systems in universities are brutalising - or even that progress against fatal diseases is so important that someone like Bishop should be set free to pursue cures - writes Gina Kolata for The New York Times.

At least that is what emerges from hundreds of comments on the internet about Bishop, the assistant professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville charged with shooting six colleagues - three of them fatally - at a faculty meeting on 12 February.

In fact, scientists who have looked at Bishop's résumé said they saw no evidence of genius, no evidence of a cure for diseases like amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), no evidence that she even could have gotten tenure at a major university. Most of her work was on nitric oxide, a gas that can transmit signals between nerves. High levels of nitric oxide, she proposed, might set off degenerative diseases like ALS, and cells treated with low levels of the gas might build resistance. But that is far from proven, scientists said, and the idea was not original with Bishop.
Full report on The New York Times site

Not long after Amy Bishop was identified as the professor who had been arrested in the shooting of six faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on 12 February, the campus police received a series of reports even stranger than the shooting itself, write Shaila Dewan, Stephanie Saul and Katie Zezima for The New York Times. Several people with connections to the university's biology department warned that Bishop might have booby-trapped the science building with some sort of 'herpes bomb' designed to spread the dangerous virus. Bishop had done work with the herpes virus as a post-doctoral student and had talked about how it could cause encephalitis. She had also written an unpublished novel in which a herpes-like virus spreads through the world, causing pregnant women to miscarry. The anxious warnings reflected the fears of those who know Bishop that she could go to great lengths to retaliate against those she felt had wronged her. Over the years, Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her.
Full report on The New York Times site

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