Author Archives: Ivan Semeniuk

Incoming chief scientist at Texas cancer agency discusses her role

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{credit}CPRIT{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman.

Margaret Kripke, the newly appointed chief scientific officer at the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) in Austin, took questions from reporters in a 25-minute teleconference this afternoon.  Kripke takes the job on 7 January, filling the shoes of Nobel laureate Al Gilman, who resigned in October. Since Kripke accepted the job a couple of weeks ago — a fact announced only yesterday — the agency’s chief commercialization officer has left, and today, the departure of its executive director, Bill Gimson, was announced. Thirty of its scientific reviewers have also resigned.  Here is a summary of today’s news conference

The following questions from reporters are paraphrased; Kripke’s answers are verbatim, except for the sections in brackets, which are paraphrased.

What is your reaction to Mr. Gimson resigning?

I haven’t had an opportunity to really digest it. I’m of course sorry to hear it because he seemed to be doing a reasonably good job. I’m waiting to see what the board will say about his letter.

Who will you be reporting to?

I have no idea at this juncture. Until the 17th of January [I will be reporting to] Mr. Gimson.

Will there be quotas or caps on research versus other kinds of grants, or quotas reflecting geographical distribution of grants?

I don’t think there will be geographical distribution quotas. …In terms of other uses…there is discussion about some kind of target for how much money would go to product development versus…research but those are actually in early stages of discussion… I certainly do [hope to have strong input into that].

What prompted you to accept this job amid all the turmoil?

There has been more turmoil since I accepted the position… The reason [I took the job] is I think the whole concept of CPRIT is just fabulous… I think it really has the potential to put Texas on the map in terms of cancer research… I have just been such a strong supporter and I felt that it’s being beleaguered at the moment and I want to do whatever I can to help.

Did anything in particular prompt you to take the job?

There’s another issue that’s very important to me. Following my service on the president’s cancer panel it’s become clear to me that there are things that can be done to accelerate the pace of cancer research.

Specifically?

I’m thinking really of just broadening the research portfolio and having a better balance between clinical, translational and basic research. And also putting more emphasis on prevention research and less …on trying to cure established, advanced cancer.

Did you see validity in Al Gilman’s concerns?

It’s hard for me to say because I wasn’t involved in CPRIT at that time.

How many scientific peer reviewers do you have and how many do you need to recruit to fill vacancies from those who recently resigned?

It’s going to be a real challenge. That will of course be my first challenge, to try to restore the credibility of the review process and to bring some new reviewers into the mix. I don’t know how difficult that will be.  There were a total of 30 or so resignations from the current roster.

Will you restore the system that was in place or do something different?

My intention is to try to restore the system that Dr. Gilman had set up. The peer review system that he has initiated is really terrific…. People that have been involved with it say that it’s highly respected. The structure was quite innovative. I hope that we can rebuild that structure.

Do you have specific reviewers in mind to try to recruit?

I certainly have people in mind. Whether I will be able to recruit them or not is another question.

There has been friction between MD Anderson and the University of Texas Southwestern, which so far has gotten the most money from CPRIT. Are you concerned about real or perceived bias favouring one institution?

It’s certainly a concern [that there could be bias involved. And] there will be a perception of some conflict of interest on my part. I hope to be able to dispel that. Once I commit to CPRIT as my number one priority, I hope people will see that. And also the peer review system which I hope to rebuild, under that system I would have absolutely nothing to do with the prioritization of grants or the review of grants.

Are you supportive of the agency’s commercialization arm?

First, I think commercialization was a very bad choice of term. I think what they’re really trying to do is develop products that would be beneficial to cancer patients. ….that’s an important part of getting things out of the lab and into patients….I’m not supportive of using all of the funds [for] that kind of activity.

The law that established CPRIT mandated that 10% of its budget go to prevention.  When you say you want more emphasis on prevention, are you saying that you want to boost that proportion?

What’s in the law is that 10% is to go to prevention activities. That is, getting people to have mammograms and colonoscopies [and the like]… population-based based work applying what we [already] know about prevention. There’s a whole field of prevention research and early detection research that tries to determine better ways to [prevent cancer.]

How much of CPRIT’s research spending has gone to prevention research so far?

Very little… I would like to encourage people who are doing prevention research to apply for funding from CPRIT. I have no idea how much is out there that could be funded.

Do you have an opinion on commercialization comprising 17% of total CPRIT funds disbursed to date? Is that the right amount?

I don’t [have an opinion]. The opinion has to come partly from people’s expectations. What did the voters want when they put [CPRIT] into place?… It’s very difficult to put a number on that at this point.

What in your career experience best equips you for the job?

I’ve had a lot of experience in science policy. I did a lot of work on science strategy for the EPA years and years ago. I was in charge of research at MD Anderson for a number of years. What really interested me about this position came from my experience on the president’s cancer panel, which every year looks at a different aspect of the cancer problem. It really changed my thinking… I came to the conclusion that just doing more basic science is not going to get us there.  [I am] very committed… to try to broaden the portfolio for research to try to move things from the [lab to the bedside].

Pre-Columbian fossil collectors unearthed

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Excavation pit houses at the Harris Archaeological Site in southwestern New Mexico.{credit}L.W. Falvey and B. McLaurin{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Sid Perkins.

Native Americans that lived in the Mimbres Valley of southwestern New Mexico more than a millennium ago are well known for their distinctive pottery, but now they may have a new claim to fame. They collected fossils — apparently for ritual use in their homes, and probably from a site dozens of kilometres from their village.

Lauren Falvey, an archaeologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and her colleagues have excavated more than a dozen of the ‘pit houses’ found at the Harris Archaeological Site located just east of the town of Georgetown. These structures, each about the size of a bedroom in a modern-day American home, were made by digging a 2-metre-deep pit and then lining the wall with adobe bricks. The home’s roof was supported by wooden posts placed at intervals around the inner edge of the pit. Residents entered the homes via a ramp dug into one wall of the pit. Homes were occupied for several decades before residents demolished them and built new homes nearby. The abandoned pits were then used as trash dumps, says Falvey. Previous studies suggest that the pit houses excavated by Falvey and her colleagues were built between 850 and 1000 AD.

One day, while digging out one of the village’s homes, Falvey, who also has a keen interest in palaeontology, noticed fossils in the rubble that didn’t match the stones or other material used to make the adobe walls. Besides appearing in limestone hand tools found at the site, 25 individual fossils — including a wide variety of marine creatures, such as corals, and shelled creatures, such as brachiopods — have been recovered from 14 of the 19 homes excavated thus far. The fossils, which came from limestone dating to between 318 million and 385 million years ago, stood out because they didn’t come from the rocks immediately surrounding the village, says Falvey.

Several of the fossils were found within the collapsed adobe walls of a pit house, sometimes alongside other objects believed to have ritual importance, such as crystals and bits of turquoise. These objects — but no fossils as of yet, says Falvey — have sometimes been found at the bottom of postholes. The intentional placement of such objects during the home’s construction may have been somewhat like embedding a lucky coin in the foundation of a new home today.

Although outcrops of limestone that once entombed the fossils are located within 4 kilometres of the Harris Archaeological Site, several clues hint that the fossils actually came from Cookes Peak, a mountain 43 kilometres away that was apparently revered by the people of the village. For one thing, says Falvey, all of the ramps leading out of the pit houses point towards the mountain, an orientation that ensures that residents departing their homes get a clear view of the distant peak. Also, she notes, rock carvings found on Cookes Peak suggest that the Mimbres people conducted rituals or ceremonies there. Detailed geochemical analyses of the fossils could help to determine where the fossils were originally collected, she notes.

Finding fossils at archaeological sites in the American Southwest is unusual, say Falvey and Brett McLaurin, a geologist at Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania and senior co-author of the GSA presentation. Nevertheless, Falvey notes, researchers excavating other sites — especially those without a background or interest in palaeontology — may not have not reported any such finds simply because they didn’t recognize the anomalous provenance, and therefore the ritual significance, of any fossils they had unearthed.

Correction: An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly stated that some of the fossils were found at the bottom of postholes.

New York research facilities feel Sandy’s wrath

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Posted on behalf of Brendan Borrell and Helen Shen.

It was sometime around 8:00 pm on Monday night when the surging East River, driven by Hurricane Sandy, broke its banks and a deluge of brackish water came pouring into the basement of New York University’s Smilow Research Center at 30th Street. For neurobiologist Gordon Fishell, who was weathering the storm at his home in Larchmont, New York, it was the worst-case scenario for his research.

The flooded basement houses the building’s animal care facility and its emergency generators.  Fishell lost 40 strains of mice in all — about 2500 individuals — the sum total of what he had developed over a decade of research on forebrain development, including a paper published last year in Nature. Today, the building reeks of diesel fuel, and dozens of Fishell’s colleagues in fields that range from cancer research to cardiology have yet to take full account of the magnitude of the disaster.

Although New York University (NYU) was clearly the research facility hardest hit by this week’s storm, others were also affected. Leslie Vosshall, who studies the olfactory system of mosquitoes at Rockefeller University, located about 35 blocks further up river from NYU, shut down a computer server in the basement on Sunday, but fears it could have been damaged from flooding. She has had to wait for the university to pump out the water, before she can check on it. “We do have some of the data backed up elsewhere, but it would set us back significantly.”

Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island was largely spared, but the evening was not without drama. Lanny Bates, assistant laboratory director for facilities and operations, says that the lab decided to keep one supercomputer online for international collaborations and power outages knocked out their cooling system for several hours. “We ran out of chilled water and the temperature rose from 43 degrees to 47,” he says.

Fishell says the one bright spot is that he has received calls and emails of support from colleagues at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Weill Cornell Medical College, who are offering to help him replenish his mouse colony. They can do that because he has always believed in sharing reagents and mice strains as quickly as possible after publication. “I don’t think there is a single allele that we had produced or transferred that is not in someone else’s hands,” he says. “If there’s a lesson in this, it’s why sharing in the community is so valuable.”

Egg freezing enters clinical mainstream

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{credit}RWJMS IVF Laboratory / Wikimedia Commons{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Charlotte Schubert.

Egg freezing is no longer an experimental procedure, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), which on 22 October issued new guidelines on the controversial practice. The change in policy is expected to accelerate the growth of clinics that offer egg freezing to women who face fertility-damaging treatment for cancer or other conditions,  and to women wishing to delay having a baby — although the society stopped short of endorsing the procedure for that purpose.

More than 900  babies have been born using the technique, which the ASRM called “experimental” in 2008.  With that designation, the society approved of the use of egg freezing only in clinical trials overseen by an institution review board (IRB).  Despite the ASRM policy, clinics have increasingly been offering the technique outside of this framework as a clinical service for a fee.  Now the society is effectively giving such clinics a green light, a development that is likely to  encourage consumer groups advocating for insurance providers to cover the procedure.

“This will open up the procedure for many, many people,” says Samantha Pfeifer, an associate professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia, who headed the committee charged with making the recommendation. She adds, “There are enough preliminary data to say that this technique is safe.”

The committee removed the “experimental” label after analyzing more than 100 studies assessing the health of eggs after the procedure and the outcome of births. The committee concluded that there have been no reported increases in chromosome abnormalities or birth defects among children born using oocyte cryopreservation, the technical term for the procedure.

But the committee also noted that the data so far are incomplete — only four randomized clinical trials have been conducted using the technique. And while those studies suggest that the technique results in successful pregnancy in young women at the same rate as assisted reproduction with “fresh” oocytes, observational studies suggest the success rate is lower. Because the technique of freezing the large and fragile cells is relatively new, nothing is known about long-term effects on offspring that result from the method. Some studies suggest that babies born using assisted reproductive technologies are at an increased risk for certain rare disorders — the neurological condition Angelman syndrome, for example — that result from changes  in the chemical modifications to DNA known as ‘epigenetic marks’.

The safety and success rates of the procedure have been the focus of heated debates among reproductive biologists.  At the ASRM annual meeting in San Diego this week, for instance, Pfeifer will be facing off against Nicole Noyes, head of a clinic affiliated with New York University that offers the procedure. The topic will be whether younger women should consider freezing their eggs for the future, says Pfeifer.

Despite the need for more research, the new guidelines will help clinicians counsel patients about the technique’s safety and potential to result in a pregnancy, says Theresa Woodruff, chief of the Division of Fertility Preservation at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University in Chicago, “It’s a good, measured step,” she says. The society announced its new policy on 19 October and published its new report yesterday in the journal Fertility and Sterility.

There were not enough data for the committee to recommend the procedure for women nearing the end of their reproductive years who wish to preserve their eggs for future use, says Pfeifer.  And the data so far suggest that the success rates of the procedure decline with maternal age. Nonetheless, the use of egg freezing for delaying reproduction is a potentially huge growth area — many clinics are already offering these services.

Cleared of misconduct, polar-bear researcher is reprimanded for leaked e-mails

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Posted on behalf of Eugenie Samuel Reich.

A US Department of Interior (DOI) researcher whose observations of drowned polar bears rallied advocates for action on climate change has been exonerated of scientific misconduct. But the public release, on 28 September, of an investigation by the DOI inspector-general (IG) reveals that the researcher, Charles Monnett, has been found guilty on another charge: leaking e-mails that helped environmental groups to sue the government over its approval of plans by Shell Oil to conduct oil and gas exploration in the Arctic.

The IG report was obtained under the US Freedom of Information Act and placed online by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a Washington DC-based advocacy group that is representing Monnett, who works for the DOI’s Bureau for Ocean Energy Management (BOEM). The report criticizes Monnett and one of his co-authors for using an incomplete data set when, in a 2006  article, they reported seeing four drowned polar bears that they suggested had died in a storm while swimming in search of sea ice. But a spokeswoman for the BOEM, Theresa Eisenman, says the agency concluded that the investigators’ findings “do not support a conclusion that the individual scientists involved engaged in scientific misconduct”. Continue reading →

Updated – Transgenic cassava armed with dual disease resistance

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George Osodi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Posted on behalf of Jeff Tollefson.

Long a food staple in Africa, the humble cassava may be poised to grow even more significant as other crops such as maize (corn) wither in the heat and drought of a warming climate. But agricultural scientists know that the hardy tuber has an Achilles Heel — disease — that could curb its future potential.

With that threat in mind, researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich this week report the development of a new transgenic cassava variety that is resistant to a pair of viral diseases that are common in different parts of Africa. Published on 25 September in PLoS One, the work is part of a broader effort by the ETH and other institutions to work with local scientists and farmers and then develop disease-resistant strains as well as expertise within African labs.

“If we want to get this going in Africa, we need to have local people on the ground interested in deploying this technology,” says Herve Vanderschuren, lead author on the study and head of a cassava research team at the ETH. In parallel with the his work on disease resistant crops, Vanderschuren has worked with researchers Tanzania, Kenya and South Africa to develop a process that allows for this work to be undertaken locally.

Cassava is an important food source for more than a billion people, from sub-Saharan Africa to Asia and Latin America. It is often planted alongside corn and other staples and acts as a kind of hedge against heat and drought. But farmers and industry have their preferred varieties, and promoting new cultivars is more difficult because the plant is propagated by cuttings, not seeds.

Cassava’s future as a major food staple in Africa and beyond could depend both on scientists’ ability to produce disease-resistant varieties and on farmers’ willingness to adopt them, says Andy Jarvis, a researcher at the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia. In a world of droughts and scorching temperatures, “cassava is the last crop standing,” Jarvis says. “But the big unknown is infective diseases.”

Vanderschuren is working with researchers in multiple countries to standardize a process that will allow this kind of work to proceed independently despite the sub-optimal lab conditions that have long hindered such work inAfrica. Scientists in Kenya and South Africa are already modifying local varieties of plants on a routine basis, he says.

One such scientist is Chrissie Rey at theUniversityofWitwatersrandinJohannesburg,South Africa. Rey says she started trying to modify cassava in an old chemical storage room nicknamed the “broom closet” around 2000. She was fresh off a sabbatical at theUniversityofCalifornia,Riverside, but her experience there didn’t quite translate when she and her students went about the same work inSouth Africa. Working with Vanderschuren, she has been able to establish some basic protocols and is now doing her own transformations. “There’s a slight art to it, but he has made that art a bit easier,” she says.

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US House nixes bill to increase visas for foreign scientists

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Posted on behalf of Helen Shen.

Lawmakers in the US House of Representatives have voted down legislation that sought to grant permanent residency —  commonly referred to as ‘green card’ status — to thousands of foreign researchers with graduate degrees in science and engineering from US universities. The measure, which required a two-thirds majority to pass, failed in a 257 to 158 vote on 20 September.

The bill is the first such initiative in recent years to be considered by the House for a full vote. Similar bills have been proposed by both Republican and Democrat lawmakers in the House and the Senate, indicating that there is growing support across the political spectrum for amending US immigration laws to admit a higher proportion of workers skilled in so-called STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Both parties’ candidates in the ongoing US presidential race have said that they favour increasing the flow of STEM immigrants to the US. But with legislators in gridlock over how to reform immigration policy more broadly, the bill was destined to falter.

“This flawed bill is one I cannot support,” said Zoe Lofgren a California Democrat who represents the Silicon Valley region, a high tech magnet for foreign STEM workers. Lofgren is spearheading a competing bill that is not expected to reach the House floor.

Currently non-US citizens who receive graduate level degrees in the US have a number of avenues for legally remaining after they graduate. About 15% of green cards each year are awarded through employers who sponsor foreign workers. Employment-based visas are divided into categories, including one for immigrants with advanced degrees that currently suffers from long wait times.

The defeated bill, sponsored by House Judiciary Committee Chief Lamar Smith of Texas, would have created 55,000 new STEM green cards by axing the diversity visa lottery — a program which currently awards those spots randomly to citizens of underrepresented countries. Lofgren’s bill sought to award the same number of STEM green cards without cutting other immigration programs. The diversity visa lottery currently accounts for about 5% of green cards awarded annually.

“Supporters of legal immigration would not have killed one immigration program to benefit another,” Lofgren said.

In a separate statement Smith said: “Unfortunately, Democrats today voted to send the best and brightest foreign graduates back home to work for our global competitors.”

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Canada moves to allay ozone monitoring fears

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Instruments measuring ozone in Antarctica and elsewhere are calibrated against a Canadian curated reference.{credit}Servicio Meteorológico Nacional, Argentina{/credit}

Posted on behalf of Hannah Hoag.

Atmospheric scientists can breathe a bit easier. The World Meteorological Organization’s ozone group is optimistic that it will work out a deal with Environment Canada over the handling of a global data repository on ozone and ultraviolet radiation.

At the Quadrennial Ozone Symposium in Toronto, Ontario,  in late August, scientists from around the world raised concerns over staffing changes at the World Ozone and Ultraviolet Data Centre (run by Environment Canada) that replaced a scientist with a data manager. The memorandum of understanding, which has yet to be drafted, will correct that and see that the global network of instruments that measure ozone will continue to be maintained by a team that includes scientists, says Johannes Stähelin, an atmosphere researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and chair of WMO’s Science Advisory Group for Ozone.

In September, Environment Canada dissolved its ozone and radiation research group and reassigned the person in charge of the WOUDC. Environment minister Peter Kent has repeatedly told parliament that the ozone monitoring program would continue in a “scientifically acceptable” way and that the WOUDC would continue to deliver “world-class service.” Scientists disagreed. “I think we’re not meeting the role we signed up for,” says Tom Duck, an atmospheric researcher at Dalhousie University, in Canada.

There have been no issues with the data entered into the database yet, says Christo Zerefos, an atmospheric scientist at the Academy of Athens, in Greece, and president of the International Ozone Commission. “But that is why we are urging them to try to avoid that situation.”

“[Environment Canada] may have thought they were just running an FTP site, but now they understand,” says Stähelin. “The [person managing the] WOUDC needs to look at the data and give the stations providing the data feedback on whether the data quality is good or not. This is a requirement.”

Environment Canada also keeps the Brewer reference triad, a trio of ground-based spectrophotometers that measures atmospheric ozone and sulphur dioxide and the reference for a global network of Brewer spectrophotometers. Stähelin says he is encouraged that scientists, as opposed to technicians, will be the ones who ensure the trio remains calibrated. “You need to be sure that your calibration is stable with a shift of less then 1% in 10 years. If that’s not the case, you can’t look at your data,” he says.

Still some remain sceptical. “I don’t know how you do world-class work if the scientists who have been doing it have been assigned to other duties. They have to rebuild this expertise and that will take years,” says Mark Weber, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Bremen, in Germany, and a member of the WMO’s ozone group.

 

US budget extension to keep research funds flowing

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Posted on behalf of Helen Shen.

As the clock runs out at the end of this month on the US government’s 2012 fiscal year and with no sign of agreement in Congress on a budget for 2013, the House of Representatives passed a bill on 13 September that would maintain funding — including for key science agencies and departments — until 27 March, 2013.

If the measure passes the Senate, as expected, and is signed into law by President Barack Obama, it will effectively put off a showdown over the 2013 budget process until after the upcoming federal election on 6 November.

The so-called ‘continuing resolution’ provides temporary funds to run the federal government with most functions remaining frozen at their 2012 budget levels.

One exception of consequence for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) allows for additional funding for continued work on the Joint Polar Satellite System and the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite system — designed to monitor weather and climate data, with the first of two launches scheduled for 2017.

Yet, for cash-strapped agencies anticipating funding increases in the 2013 budget, the continuing resolution spells six more months of austerity.  That includes the National Science Foundation, which is slated for a roughly $300 million or 4.3%  increase in Obama’s 2013 budget request and the relevant House bill covering the granting agency’s 2013 appropriation.

The status quo resolution could be even more painful for the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), which lost nearly one-third of its budget in 2012 after director John Holdren clashed with House Republicans over his meetings with Chinese science officials. The House has passed a 2013 budget that, when enacted, would restore Holdren’s funding to a more robust level. But under the continuing resolution OSTP must continue to make do at its current skin-and-bones allocation.

For the National Institutes of Health (NIH), maintaining the current budget may delay some unwelcome measures that the House is aiming to impose in 2013.  For instance, House legislation that covers next year’s NIH budget also includes a provision that would require the agency to demonstrate to the Secretary of Health and Human Services that the money requested for each grant fund research of “significantly high scientific value” and measurable impact on human health. Biomedical research advocates argue that the agency’s internal grant review process already ensures value-for-dollar and that the new provision would simply slow the disbursement of funds and over-regulate NIH. In a 5 September letter to the House Appropriations Committee, the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB) expressed concern that the measure would severely limit NIH-funded research.

The continuing resolution represents a mixed bag for researchers, according to FASEB legislative relations director Jennifer Zeitzer. “NIH needs stable funding, and operating under these temporary agreements is not good for them,” she says. But the stopgap measure also stalls progress on new and possibly more restrictive NIH funding rules, “so, that’s the good news,” says Zeitzer.

The continuing resolution also ignores another looming deadline, an enforced across-the-board budget cut or ‘sequester’ that would severely slash science agencies across the government if it goes into effect as scheduled in January 2013, with similar consequences for other science agencies. Separate House legislation introduced on 10 September could dodge the draconian cut, but the negotiations with the Senate and White House that would be required to stop the chop are not expected until after the election.

Biologist pleads guilty to murder

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Posted on behalf of Meredith Wadman.

Amy Bishop, a biology professor who gunned down her department chairman and killed two other colleagues during a shooting spree in February 2010, pleaded guilty today in an Alabama courtroom.

The plea agreement will send Bishop, a 47-year-old biologist and mother of four, to prison for the rest of her life, but it means that she will avoid the death penalty, according to this story by Brian Lawson of the Huntsville Times.

Bishop initially pleaded not guilty, “by reason of mental disease or defect”, to murdering three colleagues during a biology faculty meeting at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. A jury trial for Bishop had been set to commence on 24 September.

Nature wrote about the aftermath of the shootings in 2010 and reported in 2011 on the biology department one year after the shootings.

On 12 February 2010, several months after she was denied tenure, Bishop used a 9-millimetre pistol to systematically murder department chairman Gopi Podila and biologists Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson as they sat gathered around a table at a faculty meeting in a tiny conference room. She also wounded colleagues Luis Cruz-Vera and Joseph Leahy, and Stephanie Monticciolo, a staff assistant. The last two were grievously injured.

Bishop’s killing of her 18-year-old brother in their home in Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1986 was ruled accidental. Since the Huntsville shootings, a Massachusetts grand jury has indicted Bishop for murder in that shooting.