> "A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Nature that parasitic roundworms can cause significant damage to crops, leading to economic hardship for farmers. The criminal complaint filed with the case doesn’t mention parasitic roundworms — only Caenorhabditis elegans, a type of roundworm frequently used in the laboratory as a model organism."
A PhD researcher at U. of Michigan was arrested and charged for possession of... C. Elegans? And the secret police dude is telling the media it was a national security threat to US farms?
You parsed that one specific incident correctly, but sems like you also missed key parts of the article that helped bring a bit more nuance into the discussion. I thought this rather short Nature article was actually pretty balanced. Two key quotes are:
* "“The rules have not changed” under the Trump administration, Grode says."
* "The hazardousness of the materials that the scientists sent will need to be assessed in each case, as will the scientists’ intent in using the materials, but their lack of transparency will make their cases more difficult, Grode says. “It’s not so much what was being sent, __but the effort to conceal what was being sent__,” he says."
Nor nuance in the Director of the FBI personally getting himself involved, to tweet falsely about this student's "pathogen [sic] smuggling". There's no nuance in those words—words that incited three thousand conspiratorial-minded comments, by the way—three thousand commenters who sincerely, truly believe this C. elegans scientist is a bioterrorist. (Read them for yourself if you like). Where's the nuance in any of that?
A PhD researcher at U. of Michigan was arrested and charged for possession of... C. Elegans? And the secret police dude is telling the media it was a national security threat to US farms?
Did I parse that correctly?