Latest news with #scientist
ABC News
3 days ago
- General
- ABC News
Mourners walked down the shopping aisles inside Coles, wailing in grief.
Photo shows New COVID Variant: A bespectacled female scientist holds up pathology testing equipment as if to examine a sample. Has Video Duration: 2 minutes 7 seconds . 2 m 7 s
Reuters
4 days ago
- General
- Reuters
US judge grants Russian-born Harvard scientist bail in immigration case
May 28 (Reuters) - A federal judge in Vermont on Wednesday ruled that the continued detention by immigration authorities of a Russian-born scientist at Harvard University was unjustified, removing a key hurdle to the researcher being released from U.S. custody more than three months after she was detained at an airport in Boston. U.S. District Judge Christina Reiss said during a hearing in Burlington, Vermont that it appeared immigration authorities had detained Kseniia Petrova in February and canceled her visa without any factual or legal basis for doing so after discovering frog embryo samples in her luggage. "What happened in this case was extraordinary and novel," Reiss said. Reiss was not able to order Petrova's full release from government custody, as federal prosecutors in Boston earlier this month criminally charged her with illegally attempting to smuggle the frog embryo samples into the country. She is now being held by the U.S. Marshals Service, and a judge in her criminal case would need to decide whether to grant her bail as well when she goes before the court as soon as next week. But Reiss said bail in her related immigration case was appropriate as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has indicated that it intends to re-detain Petrova if a judge in her criminal case grants her bail. "At today's hearing, we demonstrated that Kseniia is neither a danger to the community nor a flight risk, and does not belong in immigration detention," her lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, said in a statement. The Justice Department declined to comment. Petrova, 31, was detained at Logan International Airport in Boston on February 16 on her return from a trip to France. Petrova, who works at Harvard Medical School, has said her boss asked her to bring back frog embryo samples for ongoing experiments. Petrova's detention comes amid efforts by Republican President Donald Trump's administration to ramp up deportations and revoke student visas as part of its wide-ranging efforts to fulfill his hardline immigration agenda. Federal judges in Vermont have similarly ordered immigration authorities to release from custody students at Tufts University and Columbia University who were arrested after engaging in pro-Palestinian advocacy on campus. Reiss, who is presiding over a lawsuit Petrova filed challenging her immigration detention, said Petrova raised a substantial claim that "her current detention is the product of a process that has nothing to do with the merits of this case." Reiss said the embryos were "non-hazardous, non-toxic, non-living, and posed a threat to no one," and that Petrova had established a likelihood of proving they did not qualify as the type of biological material she needed to declare to customs. Reiss said that while Petrova asked at the airport to be allowed to return to France, the government instead detained her with the intent to deport her to Russia, a prospect Petrova has said she fears after protesting Russia's war in Ukraine.
Wall Street Journal
4 days ago
- General
- Wall Street Journal
U.S. Shouldn't Have Revoked Harvard Frog Embryo Researcher's Visa, Judge Says
Federal immigration authorities shouldn't have revoked the visa of a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School after she failed to declare frog embryos she was bringing home to her lab, a federal judge in Vermont ruled on Wednesday. Kseniia Petrova, a biologist studying cell rejuvenation and longevity, was detained in February at Boston Logan International Airport after returning from a vacation to Paris, where she picked up specimens from a French lab to study at Harvard.
New York Times
13-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The Science I Would Be Doing if I Weren't in ICE Detention
When I moved to America from Russia to join a biology lab at Harvard Medical School in 2023, it felt as if I found my dream job. America was a paradise for science. Everything was flourishing. There was freedom of discourse; conferences, seminars. It was nothing like the environment I had left behind in Russia, where international sanctions meant there weren't enough supplies to do experiments and I once declined a job offer that was contingent on me no longer protesting the war in Ukraine. After I was arrested for taking part in a protest, I fled the country, knowing that I could not continue to live or work as a scientist there. My background is in bioinformatics, a field that uses computational tools to understand biology. In my lab at Harvard, I worked with a microscope that we called NoRI (short for Normalized Raman Imaging). This microscope, which was created in our lab, is the only one like it in the world. What makes it unique is its ability to measure the chemical makeup of cells to an astonishing and novel degree of precision, offering new insights into disease and aging that could one day pave the way for healthier life spans and treatments for diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer. There is so much beauty in what we can learn through science, in how complicated life is, and in trying to understand how it works. It's what motivates me to wake up every morning. I haven't been in my lab or worked with my microscope since February, when I was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as I was returning to Boston from a vacation in France. At Logan International Airport, I did not complete a customs declaration for frog embryos (for use in our lab's research) in my luggage. I'm told this would normally result in a warning or a fine. Instead, my visa was revoked and I was sent to a detention center in Louisiana, where I have spent the past three months with roughly 100 other women. We share one room with dormitory-style beds. I'm used to spending up to 12 hours a day in the lab, talking with colleagues about tricky scientific questions and fine-tuning the algorithms used for NoRI. At the detention center, there is no access to computers and six phones are shared among all of us. The calls cost $5 for 15 minutes, at which point they cut off. It's constantly noisy and cold. Fortunately, my beautiful colleagues have mailed me academic articles and books (I'm reading a wonderful one now about biochemistry called 'Transformer' that I recommend to everyone). I've asked a colleague to share some of the images from NoRI with The Times. Maybe if people see them, they will understand why I want to get back to work. Until now, no one outside our lab has seen these images, which are of tissue samples taken from mice and rats that we hope will provide greater understanding of how organs age and diseases develop in the body. A traditional light microscope, like one you might find in a high school biology class, works by shining light through lenses to magnify a sample. Our microscope is different. It takes advantage of the fact that each type of molecule has its own unique frequency of vibration. If we pass a specialized laser through a sample, we can measure how it interacts with these vibrations and generate a detailed image that shows the kinds of molecules inside. Because of the way our microscope works, we don't have to use dyes that can make samples more visible but commonly damage them. That may seem like a minor point, but it's utterly revolutionary. Take lipids, types of fat in the body. It's almost impossible to study lipids through traditional microscopes because they are so easily destroyed while preparing the sample. The accumulation of fat in tissues plays a crucial role in diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease and cancers. The fact that scientists haven't been able to measure lipids accurately before now has made it harder to understand these diseases. With NoRI, our lab is uncovering new hallmarks of diseases, learning about the role of lipids and cholesterol in cancer development and gaining new knowledge about cells in the brain and the development of Alzheimer's disease. Our next project with NoRI — which we started just before I was detained — is to use the microscope to produce what we are calling an 'atlas of aging.' Everyone takes aging for granted and knows the signs of it, but no one really understands why it happens. At our Harvard lab, we plan to analyze many different samples of organs at different ages to understand how each organ changes over time. Images of kidneys from young and old rats have revealed new features of how kidneys age. The goal is to use these discoveries to improve the quality of life of older people. My colleagues tell me that since my detention, the work with NoRI has ground to a halt. Without me there to help, the lab has been unable to analyze the image data that the microscope generates. The political environment in Russia made it hard to do science because everything was unpredictable. The war in Ukraine affected scientists' ability to get funding and materials; we worried that our male colleagues might be conscripted. That type of uncertainty is incompatible with science, which requires the ability to plan what type of experiments and research you will do a year into the future. I fear that if I return to Russia I will be arrested. I am hesitant to comment broadly on what it's like for scientists now in America because I have only limited information about what is going on outside of this detention center. What I do know is that my colleagues, many of whom are, like me, foreign scientists, are terrified of being detained or having their visa status revoked. On Wednesday a federal judge in Vermont will hear a petition challenging my detention. I am not able to attend the hearing, but my lawyer, as well as colleagues and friends, will be there. During my time in detention I have been learning about immigration in America. I'm meeting all sorts of people with unique stories. One young woman here in ICE detention has been in the United States for more than a dozen years; her fiancée is an American citizen, but her next court date, in which she could finally be released on parole, is not until October. Another woman, who was seeking political asylum, was just deported; her daughter has legal status in America, and they don't know when or if they'll meet again. The people I've spent time with are not dangerous criminals. They are friendly, kind people. I hope that the judge rules Wednesday that I can be released, so I can return to my lab. There is a data set that I'm halfway finished analyzing. I want to go home and finish it.
Daily Mail
10-05-2025
- Business
- Daily Mail
The simple mistake that saw me miss out on making MILLIONS: City Editor ALEX BRUMMER reveals blunder that cost him a 192,000% return on his money with Warren Buffett
The first time the name Warren Buffett was brought to my attention was on a Thanksgiving Day hike in Virginia's bucolic Blue Mountains in the early 1980s. A scientist friend, who had left the US Navy space labs to create a biotech start-up, said he had decided to buy a handful of shares in Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway conglomerate for each of his children. At the time the share price was $400, which, for someone brought up on UK shares, often trading at less than a pound, seemed a wildly extravagant investment.
