An American scientist studying the origins of Black Death has died from an infection linked to the disease.
Professor Malcolm Casadaban was killed by a strain of the bacteria responsible for millions of deaths over the centuries, officials at the University of Chicago revealed.
An autopsy on the 60-year-old professor showed no obvious cause of death, except for the presence in his blood of the bacteria Yersinia pestis.
This strain of the plague is not thought to be fatal. It has actually been used as a vaccine. Obviously, there may have been complications of some kind. There is no known risk to the public associated wiht this incident.
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There seems to be some similarity to the situation of Karen Wetterhan here. Wetterhan was a chemist at Dartmouth who was working with dimethylmercury and following all the safety precautions. Despite that, she ended up with mercury poisoning that killed here. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Wetterhahn
Sometimes we just don’t understand the risks involved with something until after a serious problem (the Curies come to mind also in that respect). And sometimes there are just freak accidents.
Don’t forget Louis P. Slotin.
Yes, although Slotin was actually the second radiation fatality at Los Alamos. The first was actually Harry Daghlian in an accident very similar to that with Slotin. For some reason he is forgotten. Slotin and Daghlian aren’t in quite the same category as Casadaban and Wetterhan in that the dangers of critical configurations of plutonium were understood by the time they did their work. There were multiple issues going on there including that they didn’t have very carefully outlined safety procedures and in both the cases of Slotin and Daghlian there were minor violations of normal protocol that had become routine. In the Slotin case at least, the use of a screwdriver rather than a shim may have contributed to the slip which resulted in the formation of the critical mass. In Slotin’s case, a lot of people owe their lives to his quick thinking and reacting.
(Now moving very off topic, I wondering if Slotin was an inspiration for the Stargate SG-1 episode where Daniel Jackson hand disassmbles a configuration about to go critical.)
Louis P. Slotin is the last, certainly not the least, on this list that shows that research, particularly nuclear research, has cost lives:
http://www.atomicheritage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=92