PROFESSOR SAID TO BE CHARGED AFTER 3 ARE KILLED IN ALABAMA . . . Three faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville were shot to death, and three other people were seriously wounded at a biology faculty meeting on Friday afternoon . . . a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop had applied for tenure, been turned down, and appealed the decision. She learned on Friday that she had been denied once again.
—The New York Times, 2010(1)
The effects of lowering or raising the barometric pressure can be countered by increasing or decreasing the O2 fraction in the air. Extreme hyperoxia modifies cellular metabolism of all living beings: this is O2 poisoning, the Paul Bert effect.
—P. Dejours and S. Dejours, 1992(2)
FATAL BALLOONING: THE SAD STORY OF THE ZENITH
. . . At 7000 metres they lost consciousness of their acts, and were almost powerless to raise a hand even to take hold of the respirator. Sivel did so, and inhaled large doses of oxygen and appeared to have become excited unduly thereby. [He] went on cutting down bags of sand. “Yes,” he cried gaily, “and happy the one of us that returns!” When the balloon had descended to 6,000 metres Tissandier came to himself to find his companions dead and the Zenith falling like a stone.
—The New York Times, 1875(3)
IT’S NOT OFTEN THAT THE FATAL ACTS of experimental biologists have commanded banner headlines in The New York Times. The latest was Amy Bishop’s rampage on February 12, 2010, at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and the earliest was the Zenith balloon disaster of April 18, 1875, with which the respiratory physiologist Paul Bert was associated. And although the two events clearly differ in time and place, they both have roots in national policies. The aeronauts of the Zenith died in the quest for French mastery of the air; the killings in Huntsville showed that we lack adequate gun control in America. Read back-to-back, the stories have two features in common: both principals were biologists who had studied a respiratory burst, and both mortal mishaps were blamed on mental aberration.
On February 13, The New York Times reported that Dr. Amy Bishop, a 45-year-old assistant professor of biology at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, had been arraigned the day before for the shooting of six fellow faculty members: “The shootings took place after Dr. Bishop learned that she had lost her long battle to gain academic tenure at the university.”(1)
Bishop had written her 1992 PhD thesis at Harvard University on the “respiratory burst” of phagocytes and neurons; papers regarding this work appeared sporadically until 1998.(4,5) The point at issue in Huntsville was her contribution to research since her arrival at Alabama in 2003. Colleagues reported that Bishop became severely upset after tenure was denied and vented her fury in gunplay. The weapon chosen was a 9-mm semi-automatic pistol with 12 rounds in the chamber.(6)
An eyewitness account of the mayhem in Huntsville was given by Dr. Debra Moriarity, dean of graduate studies. Thirteen people had crowded into a small conference room to discuss routine departmental matters. For one hour, Amy Bishop sat quietly in a corner, and then
Moriarity heard the first crack of a pistol. She looked up to see the shooting of Dr. Maria Ragland Davis. Moriarity dove under the table, crawled toward Bishop, and grabbed onto her legs. Bishop shook free. Moriarity kept crawling, but Bishop pursued her out of the conference room. Moriarity pleaded for her life, but Bishop pulled the trigger. The gun clicked, and clicked again, Moriarity said. She crawled past Bishop and back into the conference room, where survivors quickly barricaded the door with a coffee table and a small refrigerator.(6)
Gopi Krishna Podila, the department chair, died from a single shot to the chest; Dr. Adriel Johnson and Dr. Davis, each died of a single shot to the side of the head. Three others were wounded, two critically.
Following Bishop’s arraignment on three counts of capital and three of attempted murder, her defenders sought motives for the mayhem. Her lawyer told reporters, “This is not a whodunit. This lady has committed this offense or offenses in front of the world. It gets to be a question in my mind of her mental capacity at the time, or her mental state at the time that these acts were committed.”(7) Others were a touch more parochial. A Boston criminologist explained: “Being denied tenure when you’re in your mid-40s at an out-of-the-way obscure rural campus in the deep South is a catastrophic loss, and people don’t understand that.”(8) But, the tenure-as-excuse argument seems tenuous.
Bishop had been implicated in earlier acts of gunpowder violence in Massachusetts. At age 20 in Braintree, she’d fired off three rounds from a shotgun, one of which killed her teenage brother after a “domestic argument.” She and her husband had also been suspected of mailing pipe bombs to a Harvard professor in Newton, who had been less than thrilled with Bishop’s postdoctoral work on the respiratory burst of neurons.(9)
The news stories didn’t delve much into the science she had or hadn’t been doing, so I followed up on the story on the web. To update another Harvard professor, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,(10)
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Websites on the sands of time . . .
By mid-March, Amy Bishop’s official bibliography had been scrubbed from the several websites on which it had been featured. Accessed on February 18,(4,11) it listed a total of 19 publications: Ten are original papers in refereed journals such as Environmental Health Perspectives, Free Radical Biology & Medicine and the Journal of Neurochemistry; nine are reviews and/or conference literature. PubMed, which cannot be scrubbed, lists 11, of which six are original research reports. Almost all of these describe work in Boston with her distinguished and now-deceased mentors, Paul Gallop and Manfred Karnovsky.(12) Reckoning that cells undergoing a respiratory burst must defend themselves from superoxide anion or NO, they identified a molecular protectant, pyrroloquinoline quinone (PQQ). As have others before and since,(13) they suggested that PQQ was a new vitamin.(4) Bishop’s postdoctoral work in Boston sent her from lab to lab to emerge with modest additions to related literature.(14)
Altogether, the websites suggest that Dr. Bishop’s later work in Alabama left few footprints on the sands of time. Her latest e-publication is a footnote to that judgment. Accessed early in March, the complaisant website of the International Journal of General Medicine (published by Dove Medical Press in New Zealand) listed a May 2009 article by Lily B. Anderson, Phaedra B. Anderson, Thea B. Anderson, Amy Bishop, et al., “Effects of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors on motor neuron survival.” Instead of the usual abstract, the journal noted:
Pending further investigation into alleged breaches of our manuscript submission criteria this paper has been removed from the dovepress.com website.(15)
Amy Bishop and her husband James Anderson had listed three of their teenage children as coauthors. The youngest of the teens is 14; the oldest, 18-year-old Lily Bishop Anderson, is a student at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. The children’s “institutional affiliation” was their home address.(16)
The results of this website quest suggest that after a respiratory burst of serious science in Boston, Amy Bishop’s career was like an inflated balloon: untethered, adrift and heading for trouble.
The earliest Times account of a fatal error by an experimental biologist describes a real balloon, untethered, adrift and heading for trouble. On April 18, 1875, aeronauts Joseph Croce-Spinelli and Théodore Sivel perished while experimenting with oxygen at near-record altitudes aboard the Zenith. A third balloonist, Gaston Tissandier, barely survived.(3)
The voyage of the Zenith was an episode in the late 19th-century European race for space. Mastery of flight had become important in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, in which balloons proved essential for observation, mail delivery and evacuation. Height meant mastery. In 1862, British balloonists had already ascended close to 9,000 meters, but in thin air, without oxygen, they developed cerebral symptoms and transient limb paralysis.(17) Meanwhile, German balloonists were busy developing high-flying dirigibles that became precursors of the Zeppelins.(18)
Determined to outdo these rivals, French science called on Paul Bert, who had succeeded Claude Bernard as dean of French physiologists. To prepare for the ascent of the Zenith, Bert had the aeronauts train for weeks in his new hypobaric bell-jar chamber. They gasped in the hypoxic air of simulated high altitudes and survived in the rush of pure oxygen—the respiratory burst.(19)
The Zenith took off at daybreak on the 18th of April, with Tissandier’s log recording the mission in graphic detail: “The ascension from the gasworks at La Villette was accomplished favorably,” and by one p.m., they were comfortably cruising at 4,600 meters (15,000 feet).(20) Bert had provided the crew with bags of oxygen, but his calculations fell short of the amount needed. As the Zenith reached 7,000 meters (22,960 feet), Tissandier felt “weak all over.” He saw the others become pale, and he took a small whiff of oxygen. Sivel soon dropped bag after bag of ballast, and the balloon rose rapidly. Tissandier became so weak that he was unable to hold up his head. Still lucid, he again reached for the oxygen tube but couldn’t lift his hand to grasp it. At 8,000 meters (26,240 feet), he passed out for about 20 minutes “Reviving for a moment, he was shaken by the arms, by Croce-Spinelli, who told him to throw out ballast, for the balloon was descending at a very rapid rate.”(21) Sivel had also revived; he took one long last whiff of pure oxygen. Exhilarated by the gas and mentally confused by oxygen toxicity at that low barometric pressure, Sivel dropped more and more ballast: “Yes,” he cried gaily, “and happy the one of us that returns!”(3) The craft literally shot for the moon: By 9,000 meters, all three men became unconscious. Unmanned, the balloon dropped rapidly in altitude. Tissandier came to his senses again at 6,000 meters, only to find his colleagues dead. He gained control of the craft to bring the fatal voyage of the Zenith to an end.
It remains unclear to this day why there was too little oxygen onboard; Bert’s is the only verbatim account, and it’s not a little self-serving: “I was then absent from Paris and my letter [advising them to increase oxygen gradually during ascent] arrived too late . . . and they drew from my observations only this conclusion which was so fatal, that they should wait for absolute necessity to make use of the gas bags.”(21) Those “fatal observations” may have killed two aeronauts, but Bert had learned that hyperoxia, the respiratory burst, can excite and then extinguish the mind.
Croce-Spinelli and Sivel lie under a graceful monument in the Père-Lachaise cemetery; Tissandier gained fame as editor-in-chief of La Nature (the Gallic answer to Nature of London); Paul Bert became minister of Education and Worship in Léon Gambetta’s cabinet in 1881. Experimental biologists remember him for the Paul Bert effect (Sivel’s oxygen toxicity), “caisson disease” and for an early treatise on anesthesia and tissue grafting. He also served as president of the Société de Biologie. French politicians honor him as a founder of the French Socialist Party and the country’s educational system (l’école gratuite, laïque et obligatoire, i.e., free, secular and compulsory).(19) In 1886, Bert died of cholera in Hanoi, where he had been sent as governor-general.(22) American tourists in Paris recognize his name as that of a bistro near the Hôpital Saint-Antoine and a louche corner of the Paris flea market.
What can we conclude from these two public catastrophes, separated in space and time but linked by the respiratory burst and altered mentation? Paul Bert taught us to vary inspired oxygen inversely with the barometric pressure in-flight and beneath the sea. We hail him correctly as the father of aviation and submarine medicine. Thanks to his hypobaric chamber, we fly, fully sentient, in pressurized cabins at 30,000 feet as we read about fully manned submersibles going after deep-sea life 12,400 feet beneath the sea.
As for Amy Bishop? Whatever her mental state, we assume that the state of Alabama will grant her lifetime tenure in one or another state institutions. However, the bigger story is not of tenure denied. “There are 80 gazillion disgruntled junior faculty, postdocs, and grad students who don’t go into a faculty meeting guns blazing.”(23) Disgruntled folks, tenured or not, can’t go into a meeting with guns blazing—or shoot their brother—unless they have guns. Guns are the problem, not tenure.
In keeping with the Second Amendment’s “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” Bishop knew how to bear arms. A few days before the killings, she had practiced with her 9-mm semi-automatic at an indoor shooting range. At that faculty meeting, “It was shoot, shoot, shoot, very regular, both hands on the gun,” an observer reported. “She absolutely knew how to handle that gun.”(6)
Across the pond, they are astonished: A Scots paper summed it up: “Every few weeks a mass shooting occurs which would scandalize any other developed nation. . . . On an average day, 85 Americans die from gunshot wounds—more than 30,000 each year.”(24) It’s time to stop this madness. Let’s begin by keeping guns off campus and NOT teach kids about the NRA while skipping Thomas Jefferson.(25) To update Longfellow again:
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and not wait.(10)