Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
by IanEye » Wed Feb 17, 2010 11:02 am
by psynapz » Wed Feb 17, 2010 11:28 am
by JackRiddler » Wed Feb 17, 2010 1:01 pm
psynapz wrote:Boy it would be nice if people would edit their thread titles after assertions within them are proven false... no offense to OP.
by JackRiddler » Wed Feb 17, 2010 2:14 pm
dbcooper41 wrote:and please check out the story sidebar about her high school yearbook comments.
something in there seems very disturbing to me. does anyone else see anything strange?
From Amy Bishop's 1983 yearbook
1983 class will
Amy Bishop,
I hereby bequeath my violin and music to my brother Seth.
Amy Bishop
National Honor Society 4, Orchestra 1,2,3,4, BHSSA 2,3, New England Conservatory of Music, Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra, BHS Chamber Orchestra, BHS Orchestra 1,2,3,4
“The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To talk of many things: Of shoes-and-ships-and sealing wax-Of cabbages-and kings-And why the sea is boiling hot – And whether pigs have wings.” Lewis Carroll
---
Who is Amy Bishop?
She is a 1983 graduate of Braintree High School, where she was a talented musician.
Her family lived in a large blue Victorian home at 46 Hollis Ave. at the time of her brother Seth’s death in 1986. They had previously lived on Pond Street.
She had been teaching biology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Ala., since 2003.
She is a graduate of Northeastern University and Harvard Medical School.
She is married to James Anderson and the couple has four children.
by dbcooper41 » Wed Feb 17, 2010 2:37 pm
"1983 class will
Amy Bishop,
I hereby bequeath my violin and music to my brother Seth."
by Nordic » Wed Feb 17, 2010 3:30 pm
by justdrew » Wed Feb 17, 2010 5:26 pm
The district attorney who decided not to pursue charges against Bishop in 1986 was William Delahunt, now a member of Congress from Massachusetts.
William D. Delahunt has been a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives since 1997, representing the 10th District of Massachusetts.
Bret Christopher of Orleans, who recently lost his business and is working as a dishwasher at a local restaurant, is benefiting from a home heating oil program supported by Congressman William Delahunt that accepts discounted oil from controversial Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.
February 13, 2010
US Representative William Delahunt said yesterday (the VERY DAY OF THE SHOOTING) that he is considering retiring from his congressional seat representing the South Shore and Cape Cod, although he portrayed his deliberations as routine and said they are not related to challenges from Republicans who are energized by Scott Brown’s upset victory in last month’s special Senate election.
by dbcooper41 » Wed Feb 17, 2010 6:20 pm
The HOFFMAN WIRE
*
* Dec. 31, 2000: Eve of the Third Millennium
*
* Center for Revisionist Studies
* Idaho
*
* http://www.hoffman-info.com/news.html
**************************************************
This is an e-mail letter for those who have requested it.
Subscribe/Unsubscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
--------------------------------------------------
RUN AMUCK(o)
Under the Edgewater Killings: Some points about the case of Michael Martinez
McDermott, a.k.a. Michael Morgan McDermott, a.k.a Michael McDermod Martinez,
a.k.a. Mucko, a.k.a. Elwood P. Dowd
1. The gun-grabbers have failed to note well that Massachusetts has some of
the toughest gun laws in the US, yet these did not deter alleged the alleged
42 year old killer, McDermott. Guns are like drugs. They can never be
eliminated. They will always be in the hands of criminals, the wealthy and
the government. If average citizens were heavily armed, the suspect
McDermott could have been shot down by his armed co-workers, especially
those who were barricaded inside the acounting dept. and had time to react
defensively.
2. Of the duo who committed the Columbine High school massacre in Colorado,
the leader was Eric Harris. It was reported concerning Harris: "[T]he
coroner has released further toxicology reports ... specialized testing
shows levels of Luvox in Harris' blood in a therapeutic range." --KCNC
NEWS4, 5/4/99. Oregon's 1998 school shooter Kip Kinkel, who also killed his
parents; Kenneth Seguin of Mass. who killed his wife and children, and many
other 'cereal' and 'random' mass murderers, including the accused McDermott,
were taking an "anti-depressant" drug. This drug, defined chemically as a
"selective seratonin reuptake inhibitor" (SSRI), and better known under the
brand names Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and Luvox, deadens the conscience and
desensitizes the feelings--thus making killing easier.
This substance is immensely profitable for drug maker Eli Lilly, which
earned $2.5 billion in profits in 1999 from Prozac alone. When is this drug
going to come under establishment media scrutiny and Congressional
investigation as a powerful contributing factor in these mass murders? This
drug has "significant 'side effects," including akathisia, a severe form of
agitation. Dr. Jodi Worrel of the Western Missouri Mental Health Center
states: "Child and adolescent data suggest worsening of aggression with SSRI
treatment.
3. For students of my cryptocracy research, the Twilight language that
surfaces in the case of this sub-mariner includes Duracell, (durable cell --
anal e-coli, the secret basis of the next generation of living computers)
Edgewater -- the "Maritime law come inland" of the "Bar association,"
Francis Dashwood's Man-o'-war and the watery borderlands of Oannes, Sirius
and Naval Intelligence; #42, the Guide to the Galaxy (car repossessed before
the shootings-- a Hitchhiker at the time, also cf. the message he left on
his answering machine), dungeons & dragons king's jail & cereal spirit);
and Mucko the nursery school behemoth, the raging 6' 3", 280 lb. elephant
whose "must" produces alchemical Must Be -- Revelation of the Method -- on
the eve of the Third Millennium.
For example, media one has put its bigfoot on the occult pedal in this case.
(This can be turned on and off at will like a spigot). In the early stages
of this scenario the media are powering the archetype with haunting
suggestions, as for example, in a Dec. 30 Associated Press report titled,
"Mysterious details of shooting suspect's life surface," in which attention
is paid to sub-rosa hints and allusions which are usually discounted or
mocked in similar cases:
His answering machine contained a reference to the
novel 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' by Douglas Adams. In the book,
some characters are computers with GPP Genuine People Personalities...The
novel is part of a series that includes a search for the meaning of 'life,
the universe, and everything.' The answer, in something of an anticlimax,
turns out to be the number 42. That is also McDermott's age." (End quote
from AP, Dec. 30, 2000).
The Boston Herald (Dec. 30) quotes an unnamed "nationwide computer system
that tracks public records" as stating that the alleged Edgewater killer is
"known to have changed his birth name of Michael McDermod Martinez to
Michael Morgan McDermott in 1980, and to have used several different
combinations of middle names." The Herald says that the real Michael
McDermott died in 1984: "Michael McDermott...listed as having died in 1984 -
is listed at the same series of addresses as the suspect throughout the late
1980s and 1990s."
Another seeming puzzle: "Both prosecution and defense sources say they have
little knowledge of where McDermott's income has gone or why he had tax
problems. But both sides want to know why a single man with no apparent
extravagances and a biweekly paycheck of $2,000 to $3,000 wasn't paying his
rent, wasn't making his car payment, and had run afoul of the IRS." (End
quote from the Boston Herald, Dec. 30, 2000).
The chief physical image-symbol-yantra in the case thus far emerged with the
raised platform that McDermott occupied at his preliminary hearing. He was
filmed and photographed at this elevated vantage, making him seem as though
he were the judge of the criminal proceedings, looking every inch a harsh,
Old Testament magistrate from the Puritan theocracy, gazing sternly at
modern miscreants; a fitting personification for a man born in America's
pilgrim capital, Plymouth, Massachusetts.
There are many other anomalies to observe herein: M.M.M. the mirror double,
Dowd's 6' 3" invisible Pooka familiar (McDermott/Martinez once portrayed the
highly symbolic and invulnerable "Harvey" character, Elwood P. Dowd), and
links to other high profile "cereal" killer cases, in particular, the "Son
of Sam."
One aspect of the profile rests in evidence tampering-- like the
Murrah building in Oklahma City that was demolished before the trial of
Timothy McVeigh, and the shack of Ted Kaczynski which was removed from its
site to an air force base before his "Unabom" case came before the court,
the Edgewater Technology Inc. offices in Wakefield, Mass. have been
remodeled and will no longer accurately reflect the physical circumstances
of the crime scene, less than one week after the killings occurred.
Copyright (c) Michael A. Hoffman II
by ninakat » Thu Feb 18, 2010 2:47 am
Nordic wrote:Cryptogon has one hell of a thread going on Bishop, as well as a really creepy picture of her and her husband at the top of his page now! (I'm assuming it's her husband. Very creepy)
http://cryptogon.com/?p=13672
by JackRiddler » Thu Feb 18, 2010 12:13 pm
The Walrus and The Carpenter
Lewis Carroll
(from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872)
The sun was shining on the sea,
Shining with all his might:
He did his very best to make
The billows smooth and bright--
And this was odd, because it was
The middle of the night.
The moon was shining sulkily,
Because she thought the sun
Had got no business to be there
After the day was done--
"It's very rude of him," she said,
"To come and spoil the fun!"
The sea was wet as wet could be,
The sands were dry as dry.
You could not see a cloud, because
No cloud was in the sky:
No birds were flying overhead--
There were no birds to fly.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Were walking close at hand;
They wept like anything to see
Such quantities of sand:
"If this were only cleared away,"
They said, "it would be grand!"
"If seven maids with seven mops
Swept it for half a year.
Do you suppose," the Walrus said,
"That they could get it clear?"
"I doubt it," said the Carpenter,
And shed a bitter tear.
"O Oysters, come and walk with us!"
The Walrus did beseech.
"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each."
The eldest Oyster looked at him,
But never a word he said:
The eldest Oyster winked his eye,
And shook his heavy head--
Meaning to say he did not choose
To leave the oyster-bed.
But four young Oysters hurried up,
All eager for the treat:
Their coats were brushed, their faces washed,
Their shoes were clean and neat--
And this was odd, because, you know,
They hadn't any feet.
Four other Oysters followed them,
And yet another four;
And thick and fast they came at last,
And more, and more, and more--
All hopping through the frothy waves,
And scrambling to the shore.
The Walrus and the Carpenter
Walked on a mile or so,
And then they rested on a rock
Conveniently low:
And all the little Oysters stood
And waited in a row.
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
"But wait a bit," the Oysters cried,
"Before we have our chat;
For some of us are out of breath,
And all of us are fat!"
"No hurry!" said the Carpenter.
They thanked him much for that.
"A loaf of bread," the Walrus said,
"Is what we chiefly need:
Pepper and vinegar besides
Are very good indeed--
Now if you're ready, Oysters dear,
We can begin to feed."
"But not on us!" the Oysters cried,
Turning a little blue.
"After such kindness, that would be
A dismal thing to do!"
"The night is fine," the Walrus said.
"Do you admire the view?
"It was so kind of you to come!
And you are very nice!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"Cut us another slice:
I wish you were not quite so deaf--
I've had to ask you twice!"
"It seems a shame," the Walrus said,
"To play them such a trick,
After we've brought them out so far,
And made them trot so quick!"
The Carpenter said nothing but
"The butter's spread too thick!"
"I weep for you," the Walrus said:
"I deeply sympathize."
With sobs and tears he sorted out
Those of the largest size,
Holding his pocket-handkerchief
Before his streaming eyes.
"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?'
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.
dshaw@jabberwocky.com
by Nordic » Thu Feb 18, 2010 2:13 pm
ninakat wrote:That picture on the current masthead really is beyond creepy -- I'm actually avoiding the site (or scrolling down quickly) because of how scary I find that picture. But yeah, Kevin's got a hell of a thread going....
by JackRiddler » Sat Feb 20, 2010 6:20 pm
NYT used here strictly for non-commercial, educational purposes of archiving and discussion wrote:February 21, 2010
Fury Just Beneath the Surface
This article is by Shaila Dewan, Stephanie Saul and Katie Zezima.
Not long after Amy Bishop was identified as the professor who had been arrested in the shooting of six faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on Feb. 12, the campus police received a series of reports even stranger than the shooting itself.
Several people with connections to the university’s biology department warned that Dr. Bishop, a neuroscientist with a Harvard Ph.D., might have booby-trapped the science building with some sort of “herpes bomb,” police officials said, designed to spread the dangerous virus.
Only people who had worked with Dr. Bishop would know that she had done work with the herpes virus as a post-doctoral student and had talked about how it could cause encephalitis. She had also written an unpublished novel in which a herpes-like virus spreads throughout the world, causing pregnant women to miscarry.
By the time of the reports, the police had already swept every room of the science building, finding nothing but a 9-millimeter handgun in the second-floor restroom.
But the anxious warnings reflected the fears of those who know Dr. Bishop that she could go to great lengths to retaliate against those she felt had wronged her.
Over the years, Dr. Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her. Her life seemed to veer wildly between moments of cold fury and scientific brilliance, between rage at perceived slights and empathy for her students.
Her academic career slammed to a halt with the shooting rampage nine days ago against her colleagues. Dr. Bishop, 45, is accused of killing three fellow biology professors, including the department’s chairman, at a faculty meeting. Three others were wounded.
Her lawyer says she remembers nothing of the shootings and that he plans to have her evaluated by psychiatrists.[I believe it when Sirhan says it, kind of tough in this case.]
The shootings took place after Dr. Bishop learned that she had lost her long battle to gain academic tenure at the university. But they were hardly the first time that she had come to the attention of law enforcement because of an outburst or violent act.
In 2002, she was charged with assault after punching a woman in the head at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The woman had taken the last booster seat, and, according to the police report, Dr. Bishop demanded it for one of her children, shouting, “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!”
In 1986, not long after a family argument, Amy Bishop shot and killed her brother, Seth, 18, with her father’s 12-gauge shotgun, putting a gaping hole in his left chest and tearing open his aorta, according to the police report. She was 21 years old and, like her brother, a student at Northeastern University.
But Amy Bishop was not charged with a crime, and the shooting was never fully investigated by the police. She and her family said it was an accident, and the authorities accepted their version.
And in 1994, she and her husband were questioned in a mail bomb plot against a doctor at Harvard, where she obtained her Ph.D. and remained on and off for nearly a decade to conduct postdoctoral research.
In each brush with the law until this month, Dr. Bishop emerged unscathed, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville never knew of them. But she left behind a trail of neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances who were mystified by her mood swings and volatility.
She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities.
She was known to have cyclical “flip-outs,” as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory. On the day she shot and killed her brother, she ran out into the street with the shotgun and demanded a car at a local dealership.
Dr. Hugo Gonzalez-Serratos, now a professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, collaborated with Dr. Bishop on a 1996 paper while both were working in the cardiology department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, affiliated with Harvard. When the paper was completed, Dr. Gonzalez-Serratos said, Dr. Bishop flew into a rage.
“She was very angry because she was not the first author,” he recalled, referring to the more prominent position. “She broke down. She was extremely angry with all of us. She exploded into something emotional that we never saw before in our careers.”
Her contract in the department was not renewed.
Even those who worked with her on fiction writing in Massachusetts described the experience as painful and said they always had a feeling she was about to explode.
“When I worked with her, I found she was always within striking distance of the edge,” said Lenny Cavallaro, a writer who said he collaborated with Dr. Bishop on “Amazon Fever,” the unpublished novel about the virus.
A Shell in Her Pocket
On the morning of Dec. 6, 1986, there was an argument at the home of Judith and Samuel Bishop, a Victorian house among the grandest in Braintree, Mass., a middle-class suburb of Boston.
Judy, active in local politics and well known around town, was out horseback riding. Seth was outside washing his car. Sam Bishop, a film professor at Northeastern, was heading to the mall before lunch to do some Christmas shopping. But before he left, he and his daughter, Amy, had some kind of dispute, according to police records. It was over something Amy had said.
Amy went upstairs to her room and would later tell the police that she had decided to load her father’s shotgun. She wanted to learn how it worked, she said, because there had been a break-in at the house not long before.
Sam Bishop had bought the gun a year earlier in Canton, Mass., and he and his son joined the local Braintree rifle club. He had left the gun, unloaded, on the top of a trunk in his bedroom, enclosed in a case. The shells were in a nearby bureau.
Amy had never used the shotgun before.
She loaded it and a blast went off in her room. Police later found evidence that she had tried to conceal the results of that blast, using a Band-Aid tin and a book cover to hide holes in the wall.
Carrying the shotgun, she descended the stairs to the kitchen, where her brother and mother were standing.
“I was at the kitchen sink and Seth was standing by the stove,” Mrs. Bishop told the police. “Amy said, ‘I have a shell in the gun, and I don’t know how to unload it.’ I told Amy not to point the gun at anybody. Amy turned toward her brother and the gun fired, hitting him. Amy then ran out of the house with the shotgun.”
Mrs. Bishop said the shooting had been an accident.
As police officers and emergency medical technicians tended to Seth, who was bleeding to death on the floor, another group of officers went in search of Amy, who had headed toward Braintree’s commercial district.
Tom Pettigrew, who was working in the body shop of a Ford dealership, said he and his friends saw a young woman walking around, looking into cars, carrying a shotgun.
“I kind of stepped back and said, ‘What’s going on, what are you doing here?’ ” Mr. Pettigrew said in an interview. “She said, ‘Put your hands up.’ I put my hands up and repeated the question.”
He continued: “She was distraught. She was hyperaware of everything that was going on. She said: ‘I need a car. I just got into a fight with my husband. He’s looking for me, and he’s going to kill me.’ ”
Minutes later, the police found Amy Bishop, still holding the gun, near a village newspaper distribution agency, where workers were busy unloading Sunday papers. According to Officer Ronald Solimini’s report, she appeared frightened, disoriented and confused, but she refused his orders to drop the gun until another officer approached her from the other side.
When the police took her into custody they found one shell in the shotgun and another in her pocket.
As Officer Solimini and a partner drove Amy Bishop to the police station, she made a remark that surprised him, according to the report. “She stated that she had an argument with her father earlier,” Officer Solimini wrote. “(Prior to the shooting, she stated!)”
Police officers began to question Amy, but her mother arrived and told her not to answer any more questions. Paul Frazier, the current police chief of Braintree, said that Amy Bishop’s release “did not sit well with these officers,” and that the lieutenant in charge of booking that night told him a higher-up had given instructions to stop the booking process.
In an interview Wednesday, the area’s current prosecutor, William R. Keating, district attorney of Norfolk County, was highly critical of the handling of the shooting 24 years ago, particularly because it appears that Amy Bishop’s actions after her brother’s shooting — demanding a car at gunpoint and refusing an officer’s orders to drop the gun — were not conveyed to state authorities who investigated the case.
“It’s not a minor thing that would be omitted,” Mr. Keating said.
Mr. Keating said Amy Bishop could have been charged with weapons and assault felonies, which would probably have prompted a psychiatric evaluation. Had such a charge, or any of the others that followed, been on her record, it could have changed the course of Dr. Bishop’s career, and the fate of those who died in Huntsville.
Instead, the investigation was stopped.
Did someone intervene to save Amy Bishop from prosecution? Her mother served on the town committee, an elected legislative panel of 240 members that set the town’s spending. Or was Amy’s release merely a town’s way of caring for its own, the way small towns do?
That night, after the gory mess in the kitchen had been cleaned up by helpful neighbors, one of the investigating officers, Billy Finn, stopped by to see if the family needed food.
“You cannot imagine how kind the Braintree police were to us,” Judy Bishop told The Braintree Forum and Observer a week later.
Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts has ordered the State Police to review its role in the case, and the district attorney is also conducting an inquiry.
Grievances and Appeals
The job application for the University of Alabama in Huntsville asked, “Have you ever been convicted of an offense other than a minor traffic violation?” Amy Bishop, who took a tenure-track job there in 2003, answered the question with a simple “no.”
Technically, she was correct. She was never charged with her brother’s death, and though she was sentenced to probation in the IHOP incident, she was never officially found guilty. She and her husband, James E. Anderson, were questioned in connection with the mail bomb sent in 1993 to one of her mentors at Harvard, Dr. Paul A. Rosenberg, a professor of neurology, but nothing came of it. A law enforcement official has said federal agents are now going back over the case.
Mr. Anderson initially insisted to The New York Times that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had sent him and his wife a letter clearing them in the pipe bomb case, but the law enforcement official said it was extremely unlikely the bureau had sent such a letter. Mr. Anderson later produced a letter from his lawyer, Robert Harrison, dated June 2000, saying that the United States Postal Service was “closing the file” on its separate investigation.
Dr. Bishop also arrived in Huntsville with a padded résumé, giving the impression that she had worked at Harvard two years longer than the university’s records indicate.
Still, as a new professor with recommendations from Harvard and two other universities, Dr. Bishop did not attract scrutiny. She, her husband, a computer engineer who now works at a start-up company, and their four children settled into a house in a quiet subdivision, and she began her new job in the biology department.
At first, colleagues and students said, she came across as funny and extroverted, enthusiastic and knowledgeable about campus issues. She became the biology department’s representative to the Faculty Senate — not necessarily a coveted job, but one she seemed to enjoy.
She was, however, not universally liked. Some students say they found her so unresponsive that they signed a petition complaining that, among other things, her test questions went beyond what was covered in class. Dr. Bishop would say, “Well, my daughter took it and she got an A, so you should be able to do it,” said Caitlin Phillips, a junior studying nursing.
Graduate students did not last long in her laboratory, and those familiar with the department said that most transferred to a different one before completing their degree. In May 2006, she dismissed a graduate student from her lab. The student promised to return some notebooks and a set of keys the next day, a person familiar with the incident said, but Dr. Bishop called the campus police that night, according to a campus police report. The student filed a grievance against her.
But in 2008, Dr. Bishop seemed to be riding high. She and her husband had developed an automated cell incubator that was supposed to keep finicky cells, like nerve cells, alive longer and make experiments easier. The university, which would share in any proceeds, was trying to market the device, and the university president, David B. Williams, predicted that it would “change the way biological and medical research is conducted,” according to The Huntsville Times. In the winter of 2009, a smiling Dr. Bishop was shown on the cover of The Huntsville R & D Report.
Prodigy Biosystems, where Mr. Anderson now works, ultimately raised $1.25 million to develop the product.
In March 2009, however, Dr. Bishop received word that her bid for tenure had been denied because her research and publication record were not strong, colleagues said. Such denials are rare, faculty members said, because the university reviews tenure-track professors annually, alerting them to areas that need improvement.
Even though faculty members, including her department chairman, counseled her to look for another job, Dr. Bishop appealed the decision.
“Her attitude was not, ‘I’m going to have to go find another job,’ ” said Eric Seemann, an assistant professor of psychology. “It was more like, ‘When are these idiots going to clear this up?’ ”
She lobbied for a revote in the department, badgering people for support, her colleagues said. They disputed an assertion by her husband after the shooting that Dr. Bishop had won the appeals process and the provost had overruled the decision. The appeals process identified only a minor procedural problem, which was remedied, they said. Last November, a university spokesman said, her appeal was finally denied.
Increasingly expressing concern about her family’s finances, Dr. Bishop hired a lawyer, her husband said, and filed a discrimination complaint against the university. He said she also began going to a firing range. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, he told reporters, he had gone with her to the range once. He said she claimed to have borrowed the gun she used.
Her lawyer said Friday that she did not remember what happened next. But the police and witnesses say that on Feb. 12, Dr. Bishop went to a routine faculty meeting with a plan. And a loaded handgun.
Shaila Dewan reported from Huntsville, Ala, and Stephanie Saul and Katie Zezima from Boston. William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York.
Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company
by JackRiddler » Sun Feb 21, 2010 1:19 am
Amy Bishop and her children wrote:Effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors on motor neuron survival
(6266) Article views
Authors: Lily B Anderson, Phaedra B Anderson, Thea B Anderson, Amy Bishop, et al.
Published Date May 2009 , Volume 2009:2
Lily B Anderson1, Phaedra B Anderson1, Thea B Anderson1, Amy Bishop2, James Anderson2
1Cherokee Labsystems, Huntsville, AL USA; 2Department of Biology, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, USA
Abstract: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as fluoxetine and paroxetine are prescribed to relieve clinical depression and a variety of other disorders. Recently tardive dyskinesia, as well as other movement disorders, have been found to be a clinical side effect of SSRIs. In light of these emerging side effects, we asked if motor neurons were affected by SSRI. Motor neurons were challenged with fluoxetine and paroxetine at clinically relevant doses as well as at lesser and greater doses. Ethanol was used as a negative control and another group of cells was left untreated. As expected, in alcohol-treated cells, there was significant decrease in cell survival and neurite outgrowth. In untreated cells there was no effect in either cell survival or neurite outgrowth. In fluoxetine-treated motor neurons there was ∼52% cell death while in paroxetine-treated cells there was 14% cell survival and both SSRIs caused significant loss of the percentage of neurite-bearing cells. Both SSRIs decreased cell survival in a dose-dependent manner. This study is provocative enough to call for further in vivo studies.
Keywords: fluoxetine, paroxetine, motor neurons, NSC34, neurotoxicity, SSRI
A Case for Tenure That Some See as Falling Short
By GINA KOLATA
Published: February 20, 2010
Neurobiologists say Amy Bishop did not actually have an exciting new idea for treating degenerative nervous system diseases like multiple sclerosis or Alzheimer’s. And her invention of a better petri dish did not seem like something that is needed or wanted in research laboratories. [EXCEPT FOR THE 1.25 MILLION SHE RAISED FOR MARKETING IT.]
To get tenure, scientists ordinarily have to demonstrate that they have an impressive record of published research. Dr. Bishop failed that test, scientists said.
Her publication record, a few papers in specialty journals, is “very skimpy,” said Feng C. Zhou, a professor of neurobiology, anatomy and cell biology at the Indiana University School of Medicine.
And, Dr. Zhou and others said, Dr. Bishop had no papers in high-impact journals, which ordinarily would be required for tenure at major universities.
Dr. Serge Przedborski, a neurology professor at Columbia University, said Dr. Bishop’s publication list is so unimpressive that if she were at Columbia, “I do not believe that she would even have been recommended for tenure by the department.”
The publications include a recent paper in The International Journal of General Medicine, published electronically by Dovepress, essentially a scientific vanity press. Dr. Bishop’s paper in that journal, on nerve cells grown in the laboratory and exposed to drugs used to treat depression, lists her school-age children as the first three authors. The fourth author is herself, and the fifth is her husband, who is identified as being at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, although he does not have a position there.
As for Dr. Bishop’s invention of an automated way to grow nerve cells in the laboratory, Dr. R. Douglas Fields of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, said, “There is not a great need for it that I’m aware of.”
Although it was characterized as a way to keep nerve cells alive for long periods of time, researchers say they do that anyway using cheap and easily available petri dishes.
by Nordic » Sun Feb 21, 2010 2:23 am
by lupercal » Sun Feb 21, 2010 3:28 am
Nordic wrote:I'm sure her father is very pleased how that shotgun he purchased and kept in the house protected his family so well.
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