Missing Microbioligists, SARS

Very Mysterious Deaths
Of Five Microbiologists
By Ian Gurney
www.caspro.com
12-20-1

It is a story worthy of a major conspiracy theory, the script for a Mel Gibson "Who dunnit?" action movie, or a blueprint for a contrived and unbeleivable episode of "The X Files". Except the facts surrounding this story are just that. Facts. The Truth. Five emminent microbiologists, leaders in their particular field of scientific research, either dead or missing in the last eight weeks, and a bizzare 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.

Over the past few weeks several world-acclaimed scientific researchers specializing in infectious diseases and biological agents such as Anthrax, as well as DNA sequencing, have been found dead or have gone missing.

First, on Novemeber 12th, was Dr. Benito Que, a cell biologist working on infectious diseases like HIV, who was found dead outside his laboratory at the Miami Medical School. Police say his death was possibly the result of a mugging. The Miami Herald reported that:

"The incident, whatever it may have been, occurred on Monday afternoon as the scientist left his job at University of Miami's School of Medicine. He headed for his car, a white Ford Explorer parked on Northwest 10th Avenue. The word among his friends is that four men armed with a baseball bat attacked him at his car."

On November 16th, within of week of Dr. Que's assault, Dr. Don C Wiley, one of the United States foremost infectious disease researchers was declared missing. Bill Poovey, a journalist with Associated Press wrote:

"His rental car was found with a full tank of petrol and the keys in the ignition. His disappearance looked like a suicide, but according to colleagues and Dr. Wiley's family, the Harvard Scientist associated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute would NEVER commit suicide. Associates who attended the St. Jude's Children Research Advisory Dinner with Dr. Wiley, just hours before he disappeared, said that he was in good spirits and NOT depressed. He was last seen at the banquet at the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis the night he vanished. Those who saw him last say he showed no signs of a man contemplating his own death."

Wiley left the hotel around midnight. The bridge where his car was found is only a five-minute drive away and in the wrong direction from where he was staying, leaving authorities with a four-hour, unexplained gap until his vehicle was found.

Now Memphis police are exploring several theories involving suicide, robbery and murder.

"We began this investigation as a missing person investigation," said Walter Crews of the Memphis Police Department. "From there it went to a more criminal bent."

Dr. Wiley was an expert on how the human immune system fights off infections and had recently investigated such dangerous viruses as AIDS, Ebola, herpes and influenza.

From the United States, the story moves to England. On November 23rd, Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, a former microbiologist for Biopreparat, the Soviet biological-weapons production facility was found dead. The Times was the only newspaper to provide an obituary for Dr. Pasechnik, and said:

"The defection to Britain in 1989 of Vladimir Pasechnik revealed to the West for the first time the colossal scale of the Soviet Union's clandestine biological warfare programme. His revelations about the scale of the Soviet Union's production of such biological agents as anthrax, plague, tularaemia and smallpox provided an inside account of one of the best kept secrets of the Cold War. After his defection he worked for ten years at the U.K. Department of Health's Centre for Applied Microbiology Research before forming his own company, Regma Biotechnics, to work on therapies for cancer, neurological diseases, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases. In the last few weeks of his life he had put his research on anthrax at the disposal of the Government, in the light of the threat from bioterrorism."

Back to the United States, and on December 10th, Dr. Robert M. Schwartz was found murdered in Leesberg, Virginia. Dr. Schwartz was a well-known DNA sequencing researcher. He founded the Virginia Biotechnology Association where he worked on DNA sequencing for 15 years.

On Wednesday, December 12th the Washington Post reported:

"A well-known biophysicist, who was one of the leading researchers on DNA sequencing analysis, was found slain in his rural Loudoun County home after co-workers became concerned when he didn't arrive at work as expected. Robert M. Schwartz, 57, a founding member of the Virginia Biotechnology Association, was found dead in the secluded fieldstone farmhouse southwest of Leesburg where he lived alone. Loudoun sheriff's officials said it appeared that Schwartz had been stabbed."

And so to Victoria State, Australia, where, on December 14th, a skilled microbiologist was killed at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's animal diseases facility in Geelong, Australia. This is the same facility that, as the journal Nature announced in January this year:

"Australian scientists, Dr Ron Jackson and Dr Ian Ramshaw, accidentally created an astonishingly virulent strain of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox, among laboratory mice. They realised that if similar genetic manipulation was carried out on smallpox, an unstoppable killer could be unleashed."

The microbiologist who died had worked for 15 years at the facility. His name was Set Van Nguyen. Victoria Police said:

"Set Van Nguyen, 44, appeared to have died after entering an airlock into a storage laboratory filled with nitrogen. His body was found when his wife became worried after he failed to return from work. He was killed after entering a low temperature storage area where biological samples were kept. He did not know the room was full of deadly gas which had leaked from a liquid nitrogen cooling system. Unable to breathe, Mr. Nguyen collapsed and died."

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."

The name of this quiet 61 year old hospital worker was Kathy Nguyen.




I dont know whats going on but when I think of this deadly new SARS virus that seemed to come out of nowhere I think of these missing microbiologists, just seems to be some sort of connection there. I know it all seems like something out an X-files show but one has to admit that there is some strange things happening out there in this world today.

 

Who’s Killing the World’s Microbiologists?



A recent spate of dead microbiologists who worked for research firms with links to U.S. weapons development is raising some eyebrows.



Exclusive to American Free Press

By Christopher Bollyn



A string of microbiologists appears to have died under strange circumstances since the anthrax scare surfaced last fall. From Nov. 12 through Feb. 11, seven world-class microbiologists in different parts of the world were re ported to have died of “unnatural” causes, while the cause of the seventh’s death is questionable, according to Michael Davidson of From The Wilderness, an Internet news journal.

The seven microbiologists that Davidson reports to have died under strange circumstances are: Benito Que, Don C. Wiley, Vladimir Pasechnik, Robert Schwartz, Set Van, dean of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Faculty.

Benito Que was a cell biologist at the University of Miami Medical School, involved in oncology research in the hematology department, which relies heavily on DNA sequencing studies.

Que worked for medical research facilities that received grants from Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), which is headquartered in Chevy Chase, Md. Que was found comatose in the street near the laboratory where he worked on Nov. 12 and died on Dec. 6.

HHMI funds a tremendous number of research programs at schools, hospitals and research facilities, and allegedly conducts “black ops” biomedical research for intelligence organizations, including the CIA, according to Davidson.

Three of the five American scientists who have died, Wiley, Schwartz, and Que, worked for medical research facilities that received grants from HHMI.

Don C. Wiley worked with HHMI at Harvard University and was one of the most prominent microbiologists in the world. He had won many of the field’s most prestigious awards, including the 1995 Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award for work on anti-viral vaccines. Wiley was also heavily involved in research on DNA sequencing.

Wiley, 57, vanished, and his abandoned rental car was found on the Hernando de Soto Bridge outside Memphis, Tenn. Wiley’s body was found on Dec. 20, snagged on a tree along the Mississippi River in Vidalia, La., 300 miles south of Memphis. Until his body was found, Wiley’s death was handled as a missing person case, and police did no forensic examinations.

Vladimir Pasechnik, the top scientist from the Soviet Union’s bio-weapons program who had defected to Britain in 1989 was found dead in Wiltshire, England, not far from his home, on Nov. 23. No reports of Pasechnik’s death appeared in Britain for more than a month, until Dec. 29, when his obituary, which did not include a date of death, appeared in The London Telegraph.

Pasechnik’s death was announced in the United States by Dr. Christopher Davis of Virginia, who stated that the cause of death was a stroke. Davis was the member of British intelligence who de-briefed Dr. Pasechnik at the time of his defection. Davis reportedly declined to say which branch of British intelligence he served in.

Robert M. Schwartz was a founding member of the Virginia Biotechnology Association, and the executive director of Research and Development at Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology. He was an expert in biophysics and DNA sequencing.

Schwartz, 57, was found murdered in his rural home in Loudoun County, Va. on Dec. 10. Loudoun County sheriff’s officials said Schwartz was stabbed on Dec. 8 with a sword, and had an “X” cut into the back of his neck. His daughter and her friends, who were accused of devil worship, have been charged with the murder.

Set Van Nguyen, 44, was found dead in the airlock entrance to a walk-in refrigerator in the laboratory where he worked at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization’s animal diseases facility in Geelong, Australia.

Two scientists at this Australian facility, using genetic manipulation and DNA sequencing, had created an incredibly virulent form of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox, according to an article in the Jan. 2001 issue of Nature magazine. The researchers were reportedly extremely concerned that if similar manipulation were done to smallpox, a terrifying bio-weapon could be un leashed.

On Feb. 8, Vladimir Korshunov, 56, was found dead on a Moscow street. Korshunov was head of the microbiology sub-facility at the Russian State Medical University. He was found dead in the entrance to his home with a head injury. On Feb. 9 the Russian newspaper Pravda reported that Korshunov had probably in vented either a vaccine to protect against biological weapons, or a weapon itself.

Ian Langford, 40, a senior researcher at the University of East Anglia was found dead in his home in Norwich, England on Feb. 11.

The London Times reported that Langford was found wedged under a chair “at his blood-spattered and apparently ransacked home.” A local newspaper in Norwich reported that police “were not treating the death as suspicious.”

On Oct. 4, a commercial jetliner traveling from Israel to Novosibirsk, Siberia, was shot down over the Black Sea by an “errant” Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, killing all on board. The missile was over 100 miles off-course. The plane is reported to have had as many as five passengers who were microbiologists. Israeli journalists had reported that two Israeli microbiologists had been murdered prior to the plane being shot down, according to Davidson.

On Nov. 24 a Crossair (Swiss) airplane coming from Berlin crashed on its approach to Zurich. Of the 33 persons on board, 24 were killed, including Dr. Amiram Eldor, the head of the hematology department at Israel’s Ichilov Hospital, as well as the director of the Tel Aviv Public Health Department and hematologist Dr. Ya’acov Matzner, dean of the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical Faculty.