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March Wired: The Fury

Thursday, March 3rd, 2011

The Fury

Last year, a University of Alabama scientist gunned down six of her colleagues. Here’s what made Amy Bishop snap.

By Amy Wallace

Originally appeared in Wired March 2011

4 pm, February 12, 2010—University of Alabama in Huntsville

Shelby Center for Science and Technology, Loading Dock.

Amy Bishop stepped out of the science building and into the afternoon light. She was a solid woman—5′8″ and 150 pounds—and from a distance, at least, her red V-neck sweater and jeans made her look more like a soccer mom on an errand than a remorseless killer leaving the scene of her crimes. Upstairs, in Room 369R, there was only suffering. Three professors lay on the floor, dying. Three more were wounded.

Now Bishop stood near the loading dock, unarmed. On her way down from the third floor, she had ducked into a restroom to stuff her Ruger 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol and blood-spattered black and red plaid jacket into a trash can. The 45-year-old assistant professor had also phoned her husband, James Anderson, and instructed him—as she often did—to come pick her up. “I’m done,” she’d said.

Bishop focused her blue eyes, so fierce under the horizon of her dark bangs. She paid attention to people’s eyes. There was so much you could see in them. Pain. Hardness. Sometimes she envisioned that people’s eyes made sounds. Tick. Tick. Tick. Other times she imagined she could feel eyes boring into the top of her head. Now her own eyes scanned the street. Where was James?

More than two decades earlier, the first time she’d fired a gun with fatal results, James had stood by her. Other boyfriends would have turned their backs. But not James. In the dark days after that 1986 shooting, Amy—then a 21-year-old senior at Northeastern University in Boston—had actually broken up with him. James waited patiently for her to return to herself, then to their relationship. The shooting was ruled an accident, and soon they were getting married, honeymooning in the Bahamas, starting a family. James would stand by her again, when she had problems on the job after earning her PhD from Harvard University. She had no reason to think he wouldn’t stand by her now.

At 4:10 pm, as ambulances rushed to the scene, a Madison County sheriff’s deputy approached Bishop and took hold of her. Click to continue »

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Physicist Taps Pop Culture to Explain New Theory of Time – Wired

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Originally appeared in Wired Magazine January, 2010

BY: Amy Wallace

Sean Carroll’s office at Caltech is a jumble of brainy flotsam. There are books with titles like Differential Forms in Algebraic Topology; five empty champagne bottles, one for each of his students who’s earned a PhD; and a NASA-approved blow-up beach ball of the universe. And on the physicist’s computer screen is a graph of the narrative progression of the time-bending movie Memento. “Memento does this combination of flashbacks and reverse chronology,” he says excitedly. “The later scenes are played in reverse chronology, the earlier scenes are played in ordinary chronology, and they meet up.”

In January, Carroll will release his own pop take on the complexities of time with his much-anticipated debut book, From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time. Armchair Einsteins will geek out on his audacious thesis. He argues that our perception of time is informed by entropy — the level of disorder in a system — and that the movement from low to high entropy as the universe expands establishes the direction in which time flows. Furthermore, he posits that our cosmos may be a relatively young member of a large family and that in some of our sibling universes time runs in the opposite direction. Some others, he argues, don’t experience time at all; once a universe cools off and reaches maximum entropy, there is no past or present.

Abstract enough for you? That’s where Carroll’s common touch comes in. His writing is accessible and peppered with cultural references — quotes from Dumb and Dumber and Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance. But don’t be fooled by his mass-market approach: Carroll isn’t afraid to wade into topics that have befuddled even name-brand physicists. Though we may deal daily with time’s quotidian realities — deadlines and bus schedules and aging — most of us have trouble thinking about how it might exist outside our own experience of it. “We’re so used to the arrow of time that it’s hard to conceptualize time without the arrow,” he writes. “We are led, unprotesting, to temporal chauvinism.”

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Tags: genius

An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All – Wired Magazine

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Originally appeared in Wired Magazine November, 2009

By Amy Wallace

To hear his enemies talk, you might think Paul Offit is the most hated man in America. A pediatrician in Philadelphia, he is the coinventor of a rotavirus vaccine that could save tens of thousands of lives every year. Yet environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams Offit as a “biostitute” who whores for the pharmaceutical industry. Actor Jim Carrey calls him a profiteer and distills the doctor’s attitude toward childhood vaccination down to this chilling mantra: “Grab ‘em and stab ‘em.” Recently, Carrey and his girlfriend, Jenny McCarthy, went on CNN’s Larry King Live and singled out Offit’s vaccine, RotaTeq, as one of many unnecessary vaccines, all administered, they said, for just one reason: “Greed.”

Thousands of people revile Offit publicly at rallies, on Web sites, and in books. Type pauloffit.com into your browser and you’ll find not Offit’s official site but an anti-Offit screed “dedicated to exposing the truth about the vaccine industry’s most well-paid spokesperson.” Go to Wikipedia to read his bio and, as often as not, someone will have tampered with the page. The section on Offit’s education was once altered to say that he’d studied on a pig farm in Toad Suck, Arkansas. (He’s a graduate of Tufts University and the University of Maryland School of Medicine).

Then there are the threats. Offit once got an email from a Seattle man that read, “I will hang you by your neck until you are dead!” Other bracing messages include “You have blood on your hands” and “Your day of reckoning will come.” A few years ago, a man on the phone ominously told Offit he knew where the doctor’s two children went to school. At a meeting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an anti-vaccine protester emerged from a crowd of people holding signs that featured Offit’s face emblazoned with the word terrorist and grabbed the unsuspecting, 6-foot-tall physician by the jacket.

“I don’t think he wanted to hurt me,” Offit recalls. “He was just excited to be close to the personification of such evil.” Still, whenever Offit gets a letter with an unfamiliar return address, he holds the envelope at arm’s length before gingerly tearing it open. “I think about it,” he admits. “Anthrax.” Click to continue »

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Tags: pseudoscience, vaccines