Maria Ragland Davis, 52. Died February 13, 2010 at the hand of Neurobiologist Amy Bishop. Her background was in chemical engineering and biochemistry, and she specialized in plant pathology and biotechnology applications. She had a doctorate in biochemistry and had worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Monsanto Company in St. Louis. She was hired at the University of Alabama after a seven-year stint as a senior scientist in the plant-science department at Research Genetics Inc. (later Invitrogen), also in Huntsville.
Malcolm Casadaban, 60, died Sept. 13, 2009 of plague. Casadaban, a renowned molecular geneticist with a passion for new research, had been working to develop an even stronger vaccine for the plague. The medical center says the plague bacteria he worked with was a weakened strain that isn’t known to cause illness in healthy adults. The strain was approved by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for laboratory studies.
‘Dr. Roger’ died in the Summer of 2003. ‘Roger’ was a pseudonym for this genetics scientist. He was 17 and lived in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 when the unexplained object crashed. He told a woman he worked with in 1977 named ‘Kate’ while employed by the Navy, who he helped to clean up the crash site of the 1947 UFO. He subsequently went to work for the government at this young age and ended up a geneticist working in China Lake for the Navy. Although he lived in fear and hiding soon after he told his story to Kate, he retired in late 1990s or early 2000’s and she saw him again once in early 2002 in San Diego. He told her she was in danger to talk to him and he left the store.
In 2003 she received a phone call from his ‘friend’ who said he had been executed in his retirement home in Connecticut. The body had been removed by a black government looking vehicle. The home had been cleaned up and the body removed without any public notices of his death or existence. Many disfigured and abnormal animals were found in the desert near Groom Lake during his time there and after. Kate thought he might have been doing this gruesome experimental work.
Dr. Set Van Nguyen, age 44, died on December 14, 2001. He was found dead in the airlock entrance to the walk-in refrigerator in the laboratory he worked at in Victoria State, Australia. The room was full of deadly gas which had leaked from a liquid nitrogen cooling system and the room was vented. He was working on a vaccine to protect against biological weapons, or a weapon itself. In January, 2001, the magazine Nature published information that two scientists, Dr. Ron Jackson and Dr. Ian Ramshaw, using genetic manipulation and DNA sequencing, had created an incredibly virulent form of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox and Dr. Nguyen had worked for 15 years at the same Australian facility. Now for the intriguing part of this story.
On Friday, November 2nd, the Washington Post reported: “Officials are now scrambling to determine how a quiet, 61-year-old Vietnamese immigrant, riding the subway each day to and from her job in a hospital stockroom, was exposed to the deadly anthrax spores that killed her this week. They worry because there is no obvious connection to the factors common to earlier anthrax exposures and deaths: no clear link to the mail or to the media.
