The Dangers of Being A Microbiologist

Anonymous Coward writes "Globe and Mail is running a story for all the paranoid conspiracy theorists among us: "Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months.... Throw in a few Russian defectors, a few nervy U.S. biotech companies, a deranged assassin or two, a bit of Elvis, a couple of Satanists, a subtle hint of espionage, a big whack of imagination, and the plot is complete, if a bit reminiscent of James Bond.""

Pagan != Satanist!!!

[cardshark2001]

A "Pagan" is not a "Satanist". It makes me very angry when I hear those two terms interchanged.

Perhaps some of those deaths seem suspicious, but please: a murder-suicide by an associate of the deceased? I really do not see how the "spooks" could cause something like that.

Re:"Exposure to Nitrogen"?

[marimbaman]

Yes, nitrogen is very inert. You get asphyxiated when you breathe 100% nitrogen.

Re:Ah ha!

[Anonymous Coward]

This has happened before - and it is still not cool. Here's a link [devvy.com] to some information on the death of five microbiologists from not-too-long-back. Here's a quote from the page:

"Five eminent microbiologists, leaders in their particular field of scientific research, either dead or missing, and a bizarre connection between one of the dead scientists and the mystery surrounding the death by Anthrax inhalation of a sixty one year old female hospital worker in New York. Sounds far fetched? Read on."

It's all very nuts!
_
[Free Awesome Cursors for Windows Users!] [paware.com]

Re:Didn't this happen to Programmers in the UK too

[KieranElby]

> I remember almost a decade ago, there was a rash of mysterious deaths in the UK of top programmers working on top secret military projects.

To be precise, a total of 20 programers linked to Marconi Defense Systems or the Ministry of Defense died suspiciously between 1985-1987.

The first mainstream magazine to break this story was the April 30th 1987 edition of Computer News (UK), but unfortunately the article does not seem to be available online.

However, it gets a mention in the Risks Digest [ncl.ac.uk], as well as plenty of conspiracy sites such as this one [futuretalk.org].

Here's another list of murdered scientists

[millette]

For some reason, the original isn't accessible anymore... perhaps it has something to do with the content. If anyone knows people at google, maybe now would be a good time to change jobs - who knows whom does lunatic murderers will go after now!
dead scientists [google.com]

Re:they missed a few.

[RKloti]

Excuse me? It was a Crossair flight, not a Swissair flight. Swissair no longer exists per se. Crossair was a regional airline, now it has taken up some (most) of Swissair's medium and long haul flights. That is, those that actually made money.

The plane flew too low and ended up flying into a forest in Birchwil, which is a few kilometres from the end of runway 28, the shortest of ZRH's 3 runways (it is 2.5 km long, the others are 3.3 and 3.5 kilometres long). According to the CVR, it appears to have been an accident. At least partially responsible were noise regulations forcing airliners to land on a runway that was not IFR equipped during poor visibility, though the pilot should have been capable of performing this procedure safely.

No, I do not work for an airline. Or for an airport. I happen to know this because Birchwil is about 2-3 km from where I live.

Sounds like Silk from Greg Bear's Vitals

[Nova Express]

This sounds like the work of Silk, the sinister organization in Greg Bear's new novel Vitals which programs people's minds through bacteria. Naturally, they have to kill off a number of microbiologists who get too close to their secret, like the ones in the article. Especially the murder/suicide, which sounds like something Silk would do.

Of course, just keep telling yourself it's only a novel... ;-)

Re:The only two subjects I got 100% in...

[swillden]

If the result only occurs 0.02% of the time, then it will almost always occur so long as I select 50,000 events (0.02% = 1/50,000).

You may have done well in you probability course, but you should probably go back and take some more statistics. Particularly study the Poisson distribution and how it can be used to calculate the odds of an event with a given rate of incidence occurring a certain number of times within a given time period.

The event with probability 0.2% was the occurence of 11 deaths in a period of time in which the expected average number was 4.2 (based on all those reasonable-sounding numbers the poster pulled out out of his hat). While it's true that in 50,000 trials the probability of an event with probability .002 occurring at least once is very, very close to 1, 50K trials would require watching a population of 20,000 microbiologists for 20,833 years, since each trial takes five months.