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United States News Title: At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly, Officials Say At an Academic Pressure Cooker, a Setback Turns Deadly, Officials Say HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — This city of rocket scientists and biotechnology entrepreneurs prides itself on having one of the highest per capita numbers of Ph.D.s in the country. On Saturday, it was still reeling from the news that one of them, a neurobiologist with a Harvard doctorate named Amy Bishop, was accused of opening fire in a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, killing three fellow professors and wounding three more people. As of Saturday morning, the authorities said, Ms. Bishop, 42, had been charged with one count of capital murder and more charges were expected. The shootings opened a window into the pressure-cooker world of biotechnology start-ups, where scientists often depend on their association with academia for a leg up. Ms. Bishop was part of a start-up that had won an early round of financing in a highly competitive environment, but people who knew her said she had learned shortly before the shooting that she had been denied tenure at the university. On Friday, Ms. Bishop presided over her regular neuroscience class before going to a biology faculty meeting on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. There she sat quietly for about 30 or 40 minutes, said one University of Alabama in Huntsville faculty member who had spoken to people who were in the room. Then Ms. Bishop pulled out a 9-millimeter handgun and began shooting, firing several rounds before her gun either jammed or ran out of bullets, the faculty member said. The police on Saturday said that at least one person in the room tried to stop Ms. Bishop to prevent further bloodshed, according to Sgt. Mark Roberts, of the Huntsville Police Department. She left the room and then dumped the gun — for which she did not have a permit— in a second-floor bathroom.After Ms. Bishop left the room, the faculty member said the remaining people barred the door, fearing she would return. She was arrested outside the building minutes later, Sergeant Roberts said at a late morning news conference on Saturday. The Boston Globe reported Saturday that Ms. Bishop accidentally shot her 18-year-old brother to death in 1986, when she was living in Braintree, Mass. The newspaper quoted John Polio, then the city’s chief of police, as saying that Ms. Bishop, who was 20 at the time, had asked her mother, Judith, in the presence of her brother how to unload a round from the chamber of a 12-gauge shotgun. While Ms. Bishop was handling the weapon, it fired, wounding Seth Bishop in the abdomen. He died later at a hospital.The Huntsville campus shooting occurred around 4 p.m., officials said. A 911 call came at 4:10, authorities said. Few students were in the building, and none were involved in the shooting, said Ray Garner, a university spokesman. 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, were at Huntsville Hospital. Mr. Cruz-Vera was in fair condition; the ohters were in critical condition. Mr. Garner said Ms. Bishop was first told last spring that she had been denied tenure. Generally, the university does not allow professors to stay on after six years if they have not been granted tenure, and this would have been the final semester of Ms. Bishop’s sixth year. The university does have an appeals process, and people who knew Ms. Bishop said she had appealed the decision. Ms. Bishop was quick to talk about her tenure worries, even to people she had just met. A businessman who met her at a technology open house in January, and who asked not to be named because of the close-knit nature of the science community in Huntsville, said, “She began to talk about her problems getting tenure in a very forceful and animated way, saying it was unfair.” “She seemed to be one of these persons who was just very open with her feelings,” he said. “A very smart, intense person who had a variety of opinions on issues.” Ms. Bishop may have had academic problems, but her business prospects seemed good. She and her husband, James Anderson, had invented an automated system for incubating cells that was designed as an improvement over the petri dish. The system was to be marketed by Prodigy Biosystems, which raised $1.2 million in capital financing.“From the way it looked to us, looking from the outside, she’s had success,” said Krishnan Chittur, a chemical engineering professor. “I’ve been here longer than she has, and she’s had more success raising money than I’ve had.” He said Ms. Bishop was a respected scientist who nevertheless had trouble getting along with colleagues. As members of the biotechnology program, students have to pass core classes in biology, chemistry and chemical engineering. But Ms. Bishop became convinced, he said, that the chemical engineering professors were trying to keep biology students from succeeding by making the classes too difficult. “It was one of those things that ultimately became irrational with her, in my opinion,” he said. She and her husband, who was also questioned by the police on Friday but not charged, have four children. Ms. Bishop was also a vocal critic of a new policy to require freshmen and sophomores to live on campus, and helped lead an effort to censure the university president, David B. Williams, for that and other policies, The Huntsville Times reported. Last month, the censure vote failed, 20-18. Andrew Ols, a senior, said he had been in a biology laboratory in the Shelby Center less than five minutes before the shooting began. “Now that we realize that it was a faculty person that committed the crime, no students were injured and no students were targeted or anything like that, there’s more shock than there is fear,” he said. Kourtney Lattimore, a sophomore nursing student, had classes with both Mr. Leahy and Mr. Bishop this semester. Mr. Leahy, she said, was very passionate about teaching. On Wednesday, he used students as stand-ins for a live demonstration of how macrophages and T-cells interact. She said Ms. Bishop’s class, Anatomy and Physiology II, caused grumbling and complaints, in part because there was so much material to cover. “She might have been aware that people were frustrated with the class, but I don’t think she knew how to do it differently,” she said. Ms. Lattimore said she tuned out during Ms. Bishop’s lectures and stories, but added, “She was really passionate about her research – that’s something we all knew, that she really loved to do her research.” On Ms. Bishop’s faculty Web page, she said she was developing a neural computer that used living neurons taken from adult stem cells and the cells of bony fish and enriched with nitric oxide. David Karabinos, the chairman of BizTech, a Huntsville mentoring company that helped Ms. Bishop and her husband develop the incubation technology, described her“as a passionate person in general — about the research and her activities as a professor.” He said the members of the business technology group were all shocked by the events of Friday afternoon. “There was no hint of what happened,” Mr. Karabinos said in a telephone interview. He acknowledged that Ms. Bishop had mentioned her tenure situation, adding she had been “very nervous about it over the last several months.”
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Does anybody remember who the last mass murdering female shooter was? I don't.
Apparently this bitch shot and killed someone else earlier in her pathetic, liberal life.
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