According to Buffalo News and The Scientist, Robert E. Ferrell, a 64 year-old genetics researcher from the University of Pittsburgh "was fined $500 and given no jail time today in a controversial mail fraud case involving a Buffalo artist" - Steven Kurtz, a University at Buffalo art professor.

Accoding to TS, "The men were originally charged with mail and wire fraud in connection with Ferrell's purchase of samples of two common bacteria, Serratia marcescens and Bacillus atrophaeus, for Kurtz."

The blog goes on to say... Over the course of the trial, Ferrell and Kurtz accumulated support from several organizations, including the American Association of University Professors and the American Civil Liberties Union, along with medical researchers. The indictment "is just part of the 'select agent' hysteria," C.J. Peters, a professor and bioterror researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston, told us in June, 2004. "Making common organisms sound as though they should be under lock and key is very confusing to law enforcement and the public."

"I am dismayed by what appears to me to be yet one more instance in which knowledgeable persons in the field of bioterrorism are not being brought in and consulted to ascertain what might be real problems and what are purely spurious problems," D.A. Henderson, senior advisor of Pitt's Center for Biosecurity, said after Ferrell and Kurtz were indicted.

Rather a shallow report. The charge is mail/wire fraud because he used university funds to purchase bacterial cultures for a self-styled anti-technology artist. There was initial discussion about bioterrorism but there were no related charges and bring in a bioterror expert would have been as irrelevant.

The guy was guilty by his own admission and technically irresponsible by any standards.