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In the New York Times, Gina Kolata writes that some saw Amy Bishop’s case for tenure as falling short of the mark. Other neuroscientists say that Bishop did not have a good new idea for treating degenerative nervous system diseases and that her improved Petri dish wasn’t actually something labs need. Feng Zhou at the Indiana University School of Medicine says that her publication record is “very skimpy.” Kolata also points out that one of Bishop’s publications in The International Journal of General Medicine lists her children as co-authors. The Times also looks deeper into Bishop’s past, with more details about her brother’s shooting and an assault charge stemming from a disagreement with another woman over a booster seat at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The Times says that “over the years, Dr. Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her.”
Amy Bishop’s lawyer, Roy Miller, says that she has no recollection of last week’s shootings, reports the New York Times. Bishop, a neuroscientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has been charged with capital murder in the deaths of her colleagues Maria Ragland Davis, Adriel Johnson, and Gopi Podila and with attempted murder in the shootings of three others. “She just doesn’t remember shooting these folks,” Miller says. “She’s very sorry for what she’s done.” The Times notes that Miller appears to be laying the groundwork for an insanity defense, but that he is distancing himself from his earlier remarks in which he said Bishop was a paranoid schizophrenic. “This is not a whodunit,” Miller adds. “This lady has committed this offense or offenses in front of the world. It gets to be a question in my mind of her mental capacity at the time, or her mental state at the time that these acts were committed.”