Cross-posted at Daily Kos
Scientists have an odd Holiday season–it comes every second week of October when the annual Nobel Prizes are announced. They receive the gifts when news stories on unalloyed triumphs of scientists beat out the usual media pablum about celebrity gossip and sports teams. By the third week of October, of course, all is forgotten.
This year was particularly special. Mario Capecchi, Oliver Smithies and Martin Evans won the Medicine Prize for genetically manipulating mouse embryonic stem cells, work that led to uncovering the causes of a host of human illnesses. I had the honor of hearing Capecchi give a seminar twenty years ago–a great and gracious man. His mother was imprisoned in Dachau by Mussolini for distributing anti-Fascist literature and Capecchi was a parentless street urchin for three years until his mother found him again after the war. What an amazing story!
This Nobel Prize was especially galling to fundamentalist rightists–who in many ways resemble Mussolini’s Blackshirts–since it highlights the potential for stem cell biology to help humankind.
In making the selection, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences derailed the politically-motivated machinations of the Bush administration that have imposed federal restrictions on stem cell research in the United States.
The Prize in Medicine was an upper-cut to the Republican War on Science but the knock-out blow came from the Norwegians who selected Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the Peace Prize. What a thrill! Again the Bush administration had belittled and suppressed reality scientists for six long years that warned of global warming. The international community stood up and said, “ENOUGH!”
So it was a fine week.
Except…
In today’s New York Times (see this link from Newsday, there is a little sidenote letting us know that Dr. Robert Ferrell plead guilty of wire-fraud so that his long-standing terrorism case can be closed.
Who is Bob Ferrell? He’s the Chairman of the Department of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh. A gentle man with a congenial Southern accent who wouldn’t hurt a fly–Drosophila excepted–who was suspected of terrorism. I’ve known Bob for several years and you will never meet a more unlikely villain. Not only is he a superb scientist, he is not afraid to bridge C.P. Snow’s two cultures by working with artists and anthropologists to apply molecular biology to their disciplines. A model scientist–all non-scientists wish the rest of us would be more like him.
Bob also has an indolent but incurable form of lymphoma and, after suffering three strokes, he physically can’t fight against the Buffalo US Attorney anymore. As his daughter said, “My dad opted to settle from pure exhaustion”. So much for the benevolent administration of justice. And we all know that the US Attorney’s office is impervious to politics. Right. Bob’s crime is that he worked with an artist in Buffalo named Steve Kurtz whose art is known for raising issues about genetically modified foods as well as other intersections between art and technology.
Many of you know this story described in the movie “Strange Culture” (trailer). The following background comes from the Critical Art Ensemble Website:
In May 2004 the Kurtzes were preparing to present Free Range Grain, a project examining GM agriculture, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA), when Hope Kurtz died of heart failure. Police who responded to Kurtz’s 911 call deemed the couple’s art suspicious, and called the FBI. The art materials consisted of several petri dishes containing three harmless bacteria cultures, and a mobile lab to test food labeled “organic” for the presence of genetically modified ingredients. As Kurtz explained, these materials had been safely displayed in museums and galleries throughout Europe and North America with absolutely no risk to the public.
The next day, however, as Kurtz was on his way to the funeral home, he was illegally detained by agents from the FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force, who informed him he was being investigated for “bioterrorism.” At no point during the 22 hours Kurtz was held and questioned did the agents Mirandize him or inform him he could leave. Meanwhile, agents from numerous federal law enforcement agencies – including five regional branches of the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, and the Buffalo Police, Fire Department, and state Marshall’s office – descended on Kurtz’s home in Hazmat suits. Cordoning off half a block around his home, they seized his cat, car, computers, manuscripts, books, equipment, and even his wife’s body from the county coroner for further analysis. The Erie County Health Department condemned his house as a possible “health risk.”
A week later, only after the Commissioner of Public Health for New York State had tested samples from the home and announced there was no public safety threat, was Kurtz allowed to return to his home and to recover his wife’s body.
Bob Ferrell had been working as a technical advisor to Kurtz, communicating by email, and supplied him with samples of Bacillus subtilis(in some reports B. atrophaeus) and Serratia marcescens–two common strains of bacteria used by high school students in their biology classes. Since Ferrell obtained his strains from a nonprofit company called the American Type Culture Collection that requires blanket materials transfer agreements, Kurtz and Ferrell were charged with mail and wire-fraud.
This is what happens when your President relentlessly jives up the fear level about terrorism–some of the Inquisadors take it way too seriously. Already one scientist has served 18 months in Federal Prison on trumped-up charges for a bioterrorism case that collapsed after superficial scrutiny (described in this diary here). The personal freedom and human rights of Steve Kurtz, Robert Ferrell and others means nothing to people who administer “justice” through political motivation.
I don’t know the latest twists in Bob Ferrell’s Kafka-esque decent into medieval darkness but if you want to help, please visit the CAE defense fund (PayPal). And if you think “It Can’t Happen Here”, you are wrong. If they can come after Bob Ferrell, they can come after you.