University shooting at Alabama-Huntsville: Dr. Amy Bishop is suspect

[TomClash]

Source: SF Gate

Dr. Bishop was also working on a cybernetics project called The Neuristor, using neurons as we use integrated circuits in a living computer. Bishop wrote:

Neuroengineering

My laboratory's goal will be to continue in our effort to develop a neural computer, the Neuristorâ„¢, using living neurons. This computer will exploit all of the advantages of neurons. Specifically, neurons rich with the nitric oxide NO dependent learning receptor, N Methyl D Aspartate receptor NMDAR, will be utilized. These have previously been studied in the context of induced adaptive resistance to NO IAR. For the Neuristorâ„¢ we will take advantage of the IAR phenomena since it has been demonstrated that IAR neurons express more learning and memory receptors NMDAR as well as increased neurite outgrowth. The neurons that we are currently using are mammalian motor neurons. We are exploring the possibility of using neurons derived from adult stem cells, and from bony fishes provided by Bruce Stallsmith Ph.D. This laboratory has created a portable cell culture incubator, the Cell Driveâ„¢ that is an ideal support structure for the Neuristor".

Amy Bishop was reportedly denied tenure. What happened after that, a hypothesis, may be that Bishop went off when she perceived the University as trying to take and profit off of an idea she developed, just as they were getting rid of her. At that point, Bishop may have went berserk.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail??blogid=95&entry_id=57181#ixzz0fNgT77Do


Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/abraham/detail??blogid=95&entry_id=57181

---

She is only a suspect but this is very interesting. Very.

[sharesunited]

1. She was a law abiding gun owner. Until she wasn't.

[Psephos]

11. The university was a gun-free zone. Until it wasn't. n/t

[sharesunited]

13. Alabama is like Virginia. They just loves them some guns too much.

[proteus_lives]

56. They love their rights.

There I fixed it for you and your bigoted language.

[marshall]

59. I don't think she had a permit to carry the gun

That's the report.

[Quantess]

2. She is only a suspect, but in the case of a shooting rampage, they usually

finger the suspect accurately.

A female college professor on a shooting rampage. That doesn't happen every day. Has it ever happened before?

[elleng]

5. I fear we will hear from more and more aggrieved women professionals.

[Randall Flagg]

6. I located reports on her and posted her as suspect#1 an hour b4 reported by MSM

And it's a crying shame when considering her victims and the waste of her own intellect.

[Hoopla Phil]

3. But, but, there were "No Guns" signs. This was a "gun free" zone.

[MichaelHarris]

31. actually

A law-abiding gun owner started killing people. Did you have some sort of point?

[sendero]

45. If she were.

... "law abiding" she wouldn't have killed anyone.

[Hoopla Phil]

49. Yep, but I guess the point was lost. Try reading it again.

[woo me with science]

55. She didn't have a permit for the gun.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=4268130&mesg_id=4268152

[truthisfreedom]

4. "At that point, Bishop may have went berserk." FIre the writer. Seriously.

May have gone berserk. And who calls someone berserk in a serious article anyway? Sheesh.

[Name removed]

17. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Syrinx]

25. this was a blog post on a San Francisco website

Did you understand that?

[UpInArms]

19. goobspeak is prevalent where I live also

gone only happens after "done"

[nealmhughes]

7. It is illegal to bring any firearm except for uniformed officers onto any campus in Alabama.

It seems that Dr. Bishop was involved with a business deal with UAH and her husband on a cell incubator that the university may have wanted a cut of the goods more so than the tenure thing. With her level of research, I would daresay that she could have easily have dashed off a few short papers to meet any publication deadlines that the dept. felt were incumbent for tenure.

I am not sure how much she and colleagues were will just yet to reveal about fish neurons and possibly mammalian ones in a computer circuit.

This sounds vastly more complicated than just a "deranged denied tenure wacko academic" story. In fact, were I not about 40 miles from there in the NW suburbs and in academia, I would be very, very interested, now I am just frankly shocked.

I had a neighbor try to burn down the building with me and a few dozen other people in it over his failure of midterms and being asked to leave graduate school, another guy at the end of the block holding 2 blocks hostage with a rifle through a window and the SWAT assembled in my front yard a year later, and one of my close colleagues assaulted by a student and hospitalized with a broken jaw a year later. Not funny. Not interesting, sad. To date, I have only had one student attempt to leap from her seat and slap me when I returned a plagiarized paper to her with an F and a note "See me Monday morning at 8:15 a.m. for possible dean's meeting" on it.

[liberation]

15. Frankly, having gone through the whole PhD/postdoc thing... at least in the sciences

I am not surprised when I hear cases of people in these labs cracking under the pressure. Few people are aware of the insane amounts of work and pressure involved, for basically sh*t pay, and every cent of every grant has to be sweat and earned 10 times over... and then is the whole issue of publishing and all the fun and games that it brings to the mix.

In a sense it is also one of the most rewarding life choices anyone can make, the feeling one gets with scientific discover is as close to a religious experience I think I have ever experience. Being in a rarefied atmosphere where one is among one of the first to discover/understand/model something, and being able to pass along that information/knowledge/byproducts gives one a real sense of self awareness. It is as if the training wheels come off at some point, and you are on your own... and then you have to bring something new to the table. It is scary and yet exhilarating thing/feeling. Which is why people are really committed to this, due to the amazing economic and personal sacrifices involved... and the ever present pressure.

It is really sad that even in our best universities, American kids are less and less interested in participating in the process of discovery. I think I was the only one holding an American passport in my group when I graduated. The issue that I am having with that perennial lack of interest in research, is that the same American kids who did not want to put the time and effort... still want us to produce new technologies/products at an exponential rate. But since the American kids are getting business degrees nowadays, they assume the quickest path to profit is to maintain increasing expectations with either frozen or even decreasing funding options.

[jberryhill]

18. Remember that math grad student a few years ago...

He'd reached his limit.

[onpatrol98]

23. Man...This is Tough

I had a student standing over my desk demanding why he made an F as a final grade a few years ago. I could not impress upon him that an average of 33 didn't really leave any wiggle room for anything higher. I'm 5'3...he was 6'7. It wasn't a good feeling. I teach some tougher classes, but this wasn't one of them. But, at that moment, you're wondering...just how mad is he?

With the economy tanking and universities looking for reasons to unload even tenured faculty, it's just a dangerous season to be anywhere even a college campus.

[Blue_Tires]

26. excellent insights...

[fujiyama]

29. Weren't there a bunch of Chem PhD suicides a while back at Harvard?

Academia is tough as hell. It's so insanely competitive and as it is, it takes so long to finish the PhD. And then there's a post-doc...Neither of which pay particularly well.

[marshall]

48. There is also the dichotomy between the lab and the classroom

Many folks who are wonderful in the lab find the human interaction side of academia more difficult. That includes relationships with both students AND colleagues.

[aquart]

21. Ye gods.

[XemaSab]

8. And every "school shooting" profiler in the world

goes nuts.

Interesting demographic.

[dmallind]

9. Oh I am sure that another gun law would have stopped this

I mean if you are willing to shoot people it's OBVIOUS that you are not willing to take a gun onto a campus and that if only we banned guns in universities this wouldn't have happened. Oh.....wait a minute.....

[aquart]

22. No, no. You keep your precious little bullet toy.

Because you clearly don't sound too paranoid to have one.

[tonysam]

10. If that is an accurate representation of Bishop's writing ability,

it's no wonder she didn't get tenure. She's a shitty writer.

[bertman]

20. Yeah, if the chief criterion for tenure for a scientist is her writing ability. Ummmm?

[Sen. Walter Sobchak]

44. most of my sciences professors were functionally illiterate

nothing new there,

[FarCenter]

47. What is wrong with her writing?

It seems fairly standard for an abstract of work in the field. The language is typical of what you'd see in a Science or Nature paper.

[Ed76638]

12. Wow, first mass shooting with a "logical" motive.

Haven't seen those in a while.

[pitohui]

16. well this is a woman shooter

this is not fitting the usual profile at all

although i'm sure eventually someone will drag into her past and claim she was molested by devil worshippers in 1986 or something because otherwise women are supposed to be sweet and just forever take any kind of shit and STFU and do the work and let somebody else take the money and credit...

mass murder ain't the answer but being a doormat hasn't been working out particularly well for women either

[Gator_Matt]

27. Please don't give any tacit support to this monster

Years ago I met one of the victims, Dr. Maria Davis. She was a very nice woman who trained my wife early in her career. She was the perfect example of achievement for women. It is surreal to think that she has been murdered in this despicable, premeditated crime. Please consider the lives that have been destroyed, rather than empathizing with the cowardly shooter. Academic research is a tough business in which men and women alike are denied tenure constantly. Her reaction is completely inexcusable.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

14. "May have GONE berserk"

Are past participles some kind of esoteric lost knowledge?

[Manifestor_of_Light]

24. Yes they are esoteric.

I keep hearing and reading verbs with -ed on the end.

Verbs that don't exist, such as "grinded".

People don't know about past perfect tenses, and using "have" with them.

And there is also a serious adverb shortage. Not enough words with "ly" on the end.


ARGGGHHH!!!

[Dulcinea]

51. Whatever happened to subject-verb agreement?!

Every week, I get notes from my kid's preschool that say things like:

"We TAKE the kids on a field trip next week"

"The kids PLAY outside yesterday"

ARRGGHH!!!

[Blue_Tires]

28. i still don't understand why people

are so quick to resort to bullets to resolve a nonviolent conflict...as long as people continue to see it as an acceptible method, these incidents will continue...

[fujiyama]

32. I think it's especially shocking

when it's a seemingly educated person in a field like medical research which you would normally figure is a noble field.

[Blue_Tires]

36. who knows?? by all accounts the Unabomber was a genius, too...

and a host of others...

I am interested in the psychological common threads behind these incidents...Every time a mass shooting happens, the LBN post is predictably filled with the "guns bad/guns good" partisans, and my question always is "what was going through this person's mind when he/she made thought that gunning someone down was going to improve the situation??"

[Jefferson23]

30. Professor Is Charged After Three Are Killed in Alabama

snip* The Associated Press reported that a biology professor, identified as Amy Bishop, was charged with murder.


Officials said the dead were all biology professors, G. K. Podila, the department’s chairman; Maria Ragland Davis; and Adriel D. Johnson Sr. Two other biology professors, Luis Rogelio Cruz-Vera and Joseph G. Leahy, as well as a professor’s assistant, Stephanie Monticciolo, are at Huntsville Hospital in conditions ranging from stable to critical.

Officials said the suspect was detained outside of the building “without incident.” The police said a weapon had not been recovered.

snip* Erin Johnson, a sophomore, told The Huntsville Times that a biology faculty meeting was under way when she heard screams coming from the room.

According to the 2006 profile, Dr. Bishop and her husband tired of using old-fashioned petri dishes for cell incubation and designed a sealed, self-contained mobile cell incubation system. The system was described as reducing many of the problems with cultivating tissues in the fragile environment of the petri dish. The system was later marketed by Prodigy Biosystems, which raised $1.2 million in capital financing after winning third place in an Alabama technology competition.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/us/13alabama.html?hp

[readmoreoften]

33. Is this the same UA female bio prof who was fighting a dept that had NEVER given tenure to a woman?

It could be another University of Alabama satellite (unsure). If anyone knows, I'm curious.

[Gator_Matt]

34. One her victims was a female professor - nt

...

[QC]

35. No. One of the victims was a woman with tenure.

Sammie Lee Davis said his wife, Maria Ragland Davis, was a researcher who had tenure at the university.

In a brief phone interview, he said he was told his wife was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of another faculty member who got angry and started shooting.

He said his wife had mentioned the shooter before, describing the woman as "not being able to deal with reality" and "not as good as she thought she was."

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/top/all/6865562.html

[nsd]

37. The description of the "neural computer" is ridiculous.

The idea that neurons "rich in NMDA receptors" provide some special route to neural computing is just so stupid that it's hard to know where to start in debunking it. I'll restrict myself to pointing out that the vast majority of mammalian neurons have NMDA receptors. In other words, all she's claiming is that using neurons will -- somehow, through some mysterious process -- result in better computers. That's not an idea. It's hardly an idea for an idea.

That blog post is crap. Speculating that the university was trying to steal her (nonsensical) idea and that this caused her actions is really inappropriate, given the deaths today.

[Duer 157099]

38. If anything, it was the incubator idea that was probably at issue

I mean, if it was anything other than the tenure thing.

I'd like to see what this incubator idea is actually. Portable? So people can take them home instead of having to run to the lab every few hours?

[NoodleyAppendage]

52. Actually, if you look at her faculty bio page at the Univ., she appears to know her sh*t.

She was looking into some interesting NO signaling mechanisms. Being a (suspected) crazy killer doesn't exclude the possibility that she had good ideas, but was just unable to make them happen or get along with her peers.

J

[nsd]

57. I have looked at her bio page.

More to the point, I work in a related part of neuroscience. I'm expressing the opinion that the general approach is simplistic and unworkable. Using neural tissue for computation is an idea that has occurred to and been pursued by others. The problems and limitations are numerous and grave. There's nothing in Bishop's background or on her webpage to suggest that she could counter them. In fact, the way she writes about nitric oxide and NMDA suggests she doesn't even understand them.

ETA: I should that add that mostly I'm reacting strongly against the blogger's notion that there's some hidden force at work -- namely, that Bishop was being cheated out of the rewards of her work. The idea that there's big money to be made in computers made of neurons is just so nuts that it that the mere mention annoys me.

[sohndrsmith]

39. WHY.... does this have anything to do with "academia"? Whatsoever...?

Yes... academia is hard. Getting a doctorate is hard. Keeping a job is... hard.

My partner has a doctorate in experimental physics. He cannot bring himself to kill the darn fire ants that are more than annoying. The rigors of his education have nothing to do with his character, conscience or capacity for violence. In fact, he is the most stable, kind person I've ever met, often to a fault.

Academia is tough, truly. So is being homeless and jobless. Being denied tenure (or a job) when one believes (whether justified or not) is unfair - is - horrible. Undeniably horrible. So what?

Coming from Harvard or coming from an underpass in the bad part of town... killing anyone because you're mad is... um... worse than wrong, Period.

Stressors of a high level job - even denied innovative rewards - are not a reason to kill. Anyone not clear on that?

[stray cat]

46. Yet I see people on this board defend kids who kill and terrorists and those who soldiers

who are at military bases or recruiter stations. DUers at least some seem selective of the murderers they give passes too.

Even a few were wanting to label her a creationist - turns out some students had complained she was a liberal from Harvard who pushed her beliefs on the students - a few in their reviews called her a communist. Not common topics for a Biology instructor who normally teaches Biology and not political ethics.

People from any political persuasion can become murderers.

[tonysam]

50. Being denied tenure at the university level isn't a career killer

the way that it is in public schools. That's because higher education isn't as incestuous as public education. It's also because school districts have promoted the propaganda that it is almost impossible to fire public school teachers, when this is a lie, and of course since it is believed that it is nearly impossible to fire public school teachers, those fired teachers must have done something truly horrible to kids to get the sack. The reality, though, is far different. Teachers are fired for all kinds of stupid reasons thanks to districts rigging "due process" hearings as kangaroo courts on behalf of unethical, vindictive, incompetent, or negligent principals. It doesn't matter, however. As long as there are far more people than jobs and far too many ignorant people graduating from college and universities in education who think education is about "making a difference in children's lives" while not realizing the filthy, corrupt politics of school districts, the lousy treatment of teachers will continue.

Higher education is a completely different animal from public education.

[vegiegals]

54. see this.....

.......................

http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/02/police_find_gun_used_in_uah_sh.html

UAH officials said Bishop, who has been an assistant professor at UAH since fall 2003, was up for tenure but said the faculty meeting had nothing to do with the tenure discussion. Huntsville police and the district attorney's office refused to discuss a possible motive................

[Lena inRI]

40. The "Suspect". . .

Dr. Amy Bishop

[No Elephants]

41. The facial expression reminds me of some photos of that woman who drowned her kids in the bathtub.

Not that they look alike. it's just that neither face had much life to it.

[Lena inRI]

43. Faces say nothing. . .

.. . and comparing this Amy's face to that of Andrea Yates. . .



would be specious thinking at best. . .

BUT, then again, I see what you're driving at. . .their faces have NO AFFECT. . .

I'll tell ya one thing, these two cases make you really perceive family and co-workers with more suspicion. . .more philosophically. . .here's what I googled-harvested on that realization. . .

Evil is unspectacular and always human

And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

W.H. AUDEN

:smoke: :smoke: :smoke: :smoke: :smoke:

[Lena inRI]

42. The "Suspect" . . .Part 2. . .

Bob Gathany / The Huntsville Times
Shooting suspect Amy Bishop is taken into custody. She has not been charged with a crime.

http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/02/biology_professor_accused_in_u.html

[vegiegals]

53. UAH officials said Bishop,.....the faculty meeting had nothing to do with the tenure discussion.

umm..

.......................

http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/02/police_find_gun_used_in_uah_sh.html

UAH officials said Bishop, who has been an assistant professor at UAH since fall 2003, was up for tenure but said the faculty meeting had nothing to do with the tenure discussion. Huntsville police and the district attorney's office refused to discuss a possible motive................

[joshcryer]

58. She killed her brother when she was younger, wasn't charged.

Pretty crazy.