A jury in the US state of Texas convicted plague expert Dr Thomas Campbell Butler, professor of medicine and head of the infectious diseases division at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock, Texas, on 47 of 69 charges this week, including theft, fraud, embezzlement, and unauthorised export of plague bacteria.
He was cleared of the most serious charge, however, that he lied to FBI agents when he said that 30 phials of plague bacteria were missing from his laboratory (27 September, p 699).
Dr Butler will be sentenced later. He faces years in jail and millions of dollars in fines. His university is trying to fire him.
But Dr Butler is supported by Nobel prize winners, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the New York Academy of Sciences, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the Federation of American Scientists. The federation said, "The government is prosecuting this case in a manner that is grossly disproportionate to the offences that have been alleged. Dr Butler is not a terrorist."
His trial was closely followed by Science magazine (published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science), the Federation of American Scientists, and the Associated Press (www.sciencemag.org and www.fas.org/butler).
Dr Butler's troubles began on 14 January 2003, when he told his laboratory safety officer that 30 phials of plague bacteria were missing. FBI agents swarmed in, the White House was alerted, and he was arrested. After long questioning, he signed a statement&8212;which he later recanted&8212;saying he had accidentally destroyed the bacteria.
What happened to the bacteria never became clear. Dr Butler said he did not remember, but they might have been destroyed in a clean-up after an earlier laboratory accident.
The Morris News Service, a news agency, reported that during the trial Dr Butler said that he had not declared plague samples when he visited Britain, and&8212;between flights&8212;got dry ice from a colleague to protect the serum samples.
Dr Butler was found guilty on charges that he cheated his university of funds from clinical study contracts with pharmaceutical companies. The companies paid part of the study revenue to the university and part to him personally.