An American microbiologist spent last Thursday night in custody after officials at Miami International Airport spotted a suspicious-looking metal canister in his luggage. It didn’t help that the 70-year-old scientist, Thomas Butler, had once been to prison for fraud and once lied to the FBI about missing vials of bubonic plague from his laboratory.
This time, officials found nothing amiss and released Butler on Friday morning. He was returning from a trip to Saudi Arabia, where he had taught a microbiology course to medical students, and was headed to Dominica to meet his wife. The airport was shut down for the evening after screening officials discovered the canister and thought it looked like a pipe bomb. Tests later turned up nothing suspicious, and Butler told the feds that the container was for research.[The Miami Herald]
Butler spent time in prison in 2004 and 2005 after being convicted of fraud and illegally mailing plague samples to Tanzania.
The charges stemmed from an investigation into his activities, after the microbiologist told the FBI in 2003 that 30 vials of plague bacteria were missing from his laboratory at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. The next day, however, Butler confessed to destroying the vials. A subsequent investigation led to charges for falsifying tax returns, transporting plague samples in his car to government laboratories, and receiving illegal payments from the drug companies with whom he ran clinical trials. However, Butler was convicted only for his financial dealings with drug companies and improperly shipping samples overseas.
During the ordeal, many scientists spoke out in defence of Butler and helped pay legal fees. “In the end, the moral victory has been achieved, but at a great cost. There are no winners in this case,” biochemist and Nobel laureate Peter Agre, a former student of Butler’s at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, told Nature News after the trial.
Butler is no longer at Texas Tech, but several reports identified him as a current or former professor at Ross University in Dominica. He is listed in a 2009-2010 academic catalogue as a member of a university medical facility in the Bahamas.
Image: Federation of American Scientists