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The Dangers of Being A Microbiologist
Anonymous Coward writes "Globe and Mail is running a story for all the paranoid conspiracy theorists among us: "Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months.... Throw in a few Russian defectors, a few nervy U.S. biotech companies, a deranged assassin or two, a bit of Elvis, a couple of Satanists, a subtle hint of espionage, a big whack of imagination, and the plot is complete, if a bit reminiscent of James Bond.""
Until you add in the part where the Anonymous Coward who submitted the news item was hired by the same biotech company who paid an editor at Globe and Mail to publish a story to scare the living crap out of their microbiologists.
Ahhhh, the simplicity of safe-guarding IP.
A "Pagan" is not a "Satanist". It makes me very angry when I hear those two terms interchanged.
Perhaps some of those deaths seem suspicious, but please: a murder-suicide by an associate of the deceased? I really do not see how the "spooks" could cause something like that.
WWJD? JWRTFA!
The assassin was *deranged*???! Not everybody lives on the East Coast, you guys. "License To Ill" isn't on out here for a while! A spoiler warning would be nice next time!
(apologies to the Beastie Boys)
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
Now, however, that it's a story on Slashdot, (along with several other Big Hot Button stories which have made Slashdot headlines over the past couple of days), we'll get to sift through all the Perfectly Logical Explanations.
Let the Paranoia and Head-in-the-Sand-'Rationality' begin!
-Fantastic Lad --The Truth is somewhere in between. .
I remember almost a decade ago, there was a rash of mysterious deaths in the UK of top programmers working on top secret military projects. That was also dismissed as a "statistical anomoly" and that working under such high pressures can cause suicidal tendencies.
Yeah, like the one guy who took a lamp cord, bared the two ends, and taped them to his metal fillings in his molars and plugged it in.
A lot of the deaths also occured in a brief span of time, and lots of strange and horrible ways to die.
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
is here
The author is an academic and lawyer who had a hand in drafting US anti-biowarfare laws - he knows the history, the players, and the reasons related to US biowar activities, the Gulf War Syndrome, strangely convenient anthrax attacks on the US Congress, and well-founded suspicions about what's going on here. It's authoritative and frightening.
Throw in a few Russian defectors, a few nervy U.S. biotech companies, a deranged assassin or two, a bit of Elvis, a couple of Satanists, a subtle hint of espionage...
I give up. Is this MTV's latest The Real World cast? Where's the loveable, misunderstood homosexual?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Woohoo! We Canucks'll crack Washington's BS yet!
m ic robio.html
On Nov. 24 a Swissair flight from Berlin to Zurich crashed on its landing approach. Of the 33 persons on board, 24 were killed, including the head of the hematology department at Israel's Ichilov Hospital, as well as directors of the Tel Aviv Public Health Department and Hebrew University School of Medicine.
on Oct. 4, a commercial jetliner traveling from Israel to Novosibirsk, Siberia was shot down over the Black Sea by an "errant" Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, killing all on board. The missile was over 100 miles off-course. Despite early news stories reporting it as a charter, the flight, Air Sibir 1812, was a regularly scheduled flight.the plane is believed by many in Israel to have had as many as five passengers who were microbiologists. Both Israel and Novosibirsk are homes for cutting-edge microbiological research. Novosibirsk is known as the scientific capital of Siberia, and home to over 50 research facilities and 13 full universities for a population of only 2.5 million people.
http://fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_14_02_
Now, I'm not sure this is anything more sinister than Washington doesn't want a cure or cheap treatment for AIDS found... read between the lines of the 1974 NSSM200 report and match it up with the extensions of drug patents and other well-known actions contrary to Washington's hand-wringing about this epidemic.
http://www.africa2000.com/SNDX/nssm200all.html
http://amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0937307041
> I remember almost a decade ago, there was a rash of mysterious deaths in the UK of top programmers working on top secret military projects.
To be precise, a total of 20 programers linked to Marconi Defense Systems or the Ministry of Defense died suspiciously between 1985-1987.
The first mainstream magazine to break this story was the April 30th 1987 edition of Computer News (UK), but unfortunately the article does not seem to be available online.
However, it gets a mention in the Risks Digest, as well as plenty of conspiracy sites such as this one.
Well let's play the game, what are the chances?
Reading the article one will observe that most of the deaths involved people between age 45-64. The death rate for this group from the disaster center is 708 deaths per 100,000 people for all causes. Subtracting out the death rates given for medical conditions that almost certainly don't apply, that leaves us 200 deaths per 100,000.
Now the article states that there are 20,000 microbiologists working in the US. Let us suppose that 1/2 of those are over 40. And perhaps 1/2 of those are "important" enough to attract attention. That's a pool of 5,000 people.
Based on the rate of 200 / 100,000 we would expect 10 deaths annually, or about 4.2 over a five month period. Applying Poisson statistics, the probability of seeing 11 or more random events when 4.2 are expected is about 0.2%. In other words this really is a strange occurence, probably having some underlying cause and not just a statistical aberration.
Of course, not knowing much about microbiology, I might be seriously underestimating (or overestimating) how important these scientists were. If they are in the top 5% of their profession, as opposed to the top half, then the coincidence would be even more startlingly unlikely.
Or, perhaps, it's just what Carl Sagan calls our "baloney detection kit". The essence of science -- and the reason it has lead to four hundred years of success, versus millenia of stagnation before -- is that it makes things rest on proof, not faith. What we can talk about, scientifically, may be a miniscule part of what's Out There. But what we say, can be said with confidence.
Maybe geeks and techheads are more doubting because (a) they are more trained in scientific ways; (b) they are in fields that require judicious doubt and problem-solving skills to look for the simplest explanation; and (c) they are disproportionately likely to have gotten their fantasy fix by actually reading (honest) fantasy and sci fi, so the mystical worlds spouted by paranormal believers -- worlds which IMHO are much less transcendant than the fiction I read, let alone the actual Universe as revealed through science -- simply do not offer anything worthwhile.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Really.
:)
The murder rate, US and britain together, is on the order of 5 in 100,000 per year (US it was 6.8 in '97, according to CNN.) I assume that it's about the same in Russia. The odds of seeing 7 (definitely murders) over the course of 9 months out of a group of about 30,000 people are small, but not preposterously small. Given the portion of my prominent colleagues who are, to be blunt, old men, I'm suprised only two of them died of strokes during that period.
Also, if you keep subdividing the population into little pieces, eventually you're going to find a subsection (young black men of course, but besides that) who got killed disproportionately in any given period.
If you keep taking different colors of bullets, and shoot each color fifty times, you will eventually find a color of bullet that is more accurate; if you insist on a higher "degree of significance," it just means you have to check more colors (blue isn't more accurate, but turquoise is!) before you "find one."
This is not to say that I don't think that there's a conspiracy related to biological weapons, especially anthrax, in the United States. I believe that there is, and I believe that the fellow who fell off a bridge may very well have been bumped off. It is entirely a credible suggestion that the microbiologists who died under somewhat odd suggestions where targeted for assassination for some reason; such has happened in the past. Last year's death toll for molecular biologists *may* very well have been substantially enriched by CIA hitmen. Now, I don't think this is true, and you cannot conclude that it is true (or even likely) from the body count. The body count is not itself any cause for alarm.
Just to be on the safe side, though, I'm installing a metal detector for federal employees who come by the lab.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Here are links to news stories on six of the deaths.
Dr Benito Que was beaten to death on Nov 12 by 4 unknown men Miami Herald. He was a cell biologist working on infection diseases at the University of Miami's School of medicine, and was killed as he left work.
Dr Don Wiley drowned under mysterious circumstances on Nov 16.
CNN.
Only a week after Dr Que, Dr Wiley disappeared after a dinner party. Criminal intent has been noted by the Memphis police. Dr Wiley was the foremost infectious disease research at Harvard.
Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik was found dead on November 23 Nytimes.
Dr pasechnik was a soviet defector from the Russian biological warfare who was an expert in Anthrax.
Dr. Robert M. Schwartz was stabbed to death on Dec 10. msnbc.
Dr Schwartz was an expert in DNA sequencing, 'cultists' are blamed.
Set Van Nguyen died in an airlock on Dec 14. Chemical incidents report center. He was in the field of animal diseases (anthrax) and died in an airlock filled with nitrogen. This is very odd since he should have been able to notice he was suffocating and open the door.
Steven Mostow died in a mysterious plane crash on March 25.Colorado 9news
One of the country's leading infectious disease and bioterrorism experts from the Colorado Health Sciences Center. Preliminary reports say the airplane engine failed. This is an extremely uncommon event, and does not necessarily lead to fatality. I am a pilot and can testify that the events of this death are highly suspicious.
I think the deaths have to do with a corporation that has a twenty-year-old pile of PCB transformers rotting in the middle of the Boston harbour, and has surreptitiously genetically engineered a bacteria that converts PCBs to salt water.
Either that, or I've been reading too much Neal Stephenson again.
- undoware.ca
This new generaiton of Spooks and Operatives dropped the ball again - people are finding out. The just need to keep it simple - a drowing here, a maiming there - and nobody notices. Just like it should be. By now-a-days, these whipper snappers have to get clever - swords, nudity, pagens and these new-fangeled aero-planes. Lets get back to business, and just do our jobs, and leave the 'flair' for the Operatives in San Francisco.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Of course, just keep telling yourself it's only a novel... ;-)
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Damn. What a death. "He entered an airlocked storage lab and died from exposure to nitrogen." Those unreactive gases sure are dangerous.
Surely those who write articles on such topics could do a little research. The author most likely saw that he died in a nitrogen environment and concluded that he died from the nitrogen. Silly writers. Nitrogen isn't a deadly gas! It comprises a huge portion of our atmosphere. It's the lack of oxygen that killed him. Next they're going to run a story about the deadly effect of H20 in our tapwater.
Yes, but if he was breathing only nitrogen, he would have died of oxygen deprivation, not "exposure to nitrogen." Every dive, I'm "exposed to" up to 4 atmospheres of nitrogen ;)
If the result only occurs 0.02% of the time, then it will almost always occur so long as I select 50,000 events (0.02% = 1/50,000).
You may have done well in you probability course, but you should probably go back and take some more statistics. Particularly study the Poisson distribution and how it can be used to calculate the odds of an event with a given rate of incidence occurring a certain number of times within a given time period.
The event with probability 0.2% was the occurence of 11 deaths in a period of time in which the expected average number was 4.2 (based on all those reasonable-sounding numbers the poster pulled out out of his hat). While it's true that in 50,000 trials the probability of an event with probability .002 occurring at least once is very, very close to 1, 50K trials would require watching a population of 20,000 microbiologists for 20,833 years, since each trial takes five months.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.