… yesterday took extremely dangerous amounts of cyanide out of a lab there.
She brought them to her house and used some of the cyanide to kill herself.
She had just lost her job. She wrote various farewell entries on Facebook, including this moving one: “Today… my heart shattered, and I left my soul behind somewhere.”
Beyond the sadness of this story lies a good deal of worry from security agencies about how easy it was for Emily Staupe to lift so much deadly material from the lab.
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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
September 13th, 2010 at 8:59AM
Thoughts of a chemist:
The lethal dose of potassium or sodium cyanide is 200 to 300 mg.
Let’s assume that “cynanide” mentioned in story is the solid form… Let me know otherwise if this is incorrect.
As bad shit goes, this material, on a weight basis is a helluva lot less toxic than, say, ricin. If you wet your finger and put it in your mouth after touching a little mound of cyanice, you would survive. Not so with ricin. Still, a kilo of this – and that is a lot of material – could still kill three to five thousand people.
Really not particularly controlled substance. Someone could walk out of a lab with a small bottle a day – say 250 g – and not even be noticed.
One of the great tragedies in science is the death of Carothers who invented nylon at DuPont. He committed suicide by drinking a glass of orange juice to which he had added cyanide, at least that’s what I’ve heard…
This stuff needs to be better controlled. I used to work with it every day for many years and did not feel endangered. But with this publicity, the whackos will be out looking for cyanide.
September 13th, 2010 at 7:02PM
A friend of mine at college committed suicide with arsenic over 30 years ago. I still miss her. She was a chemistry major and ate the arsenic over a period of time. She then checked herself into the infirmary and told them she had the flu. They did not catch on until too late. She had recently started treatment for depression. There were investigations but the only thing that happened was the arsenic was locked up.
September 13th, 2010 at 9:29PM
Nora: Even in your brief rendition, what a sad and moving story.