Reply #22: Once more, with feeling... [View All]

Oy, it seems like I post on this at least once a month...

1) Not all those people are microbiologists. Wiley wasn't. I'm not sure Schwartz was either. Nor Mostow, nor Holzmayer/Huang for that matter...Wiley was an X-ray crystallographer, who published all of 2 papers on the CRYSTAL STRUCTURE of an Ebola protein, and less than 10 on the CRYSTAL STRUCTURE of specific HIV proteins. He was widely regarded as the nation's foremost expert in using special X-ray cameras and mathematical formulas to make high-resolution images of viruses Well at least they got the first part right this time - he did X-ray crystallography on specific viral PROTEINS (not entire viruses), focusing mainly on influenza virus proteins and their interactions with human cells.

Regarding Schwartz: I'm not sure what this Virginia's Center for Innovative Technology is, it seems like some strange funding intermediary between the State of Virginia and private technology companies. Upon further reading, it seems like a vehicle to fund research at Virginia Universities and then promote its commercial development by private VA companies. Whatever... I doubt there is any biological research actually carried out there. I suspect whatever biological research he did in DNA sequencing was earlier in his career.


2) Not all those people were "experts" in their fields, although Wiley certainly was.

Nguyen Van Set, 44, dies in an airlock filled with nitrogen in his lab in Geelong, Australia. The lab had just been written up in the journal Nature for its work in genetic manipulation and DNA sequencing. If memory serves this guy was simply a lab techician, and the lab in which he worked was not the same one as the one that made the mousepox virus dicovery.

The first dead microbiologist is Dr. Benito Que, 52, was "an expert in infectious diseases and cellular biology at the Miami Medical School. Per searching PubMed I don't see any evidence that Que was an expert in "infectious diseases". Or a microbiologist, for that matter.



Here's a tip: Not everyone who does biological research, or whose career deals with genetics, DNA sequencing, bioterrorism or ecology is a microbiologist. The people in the above list all had careers relating to some aspect of biology. The same way that Michael Jordan, John Madden, Pele, Nancy Kerrigan, Bobby Fisher, Picabo Street, Don Zimmer, and Ben Crenshaw all made their living through sports.


-SM