Two scientists at a federal virus laboratory in Montana are facing criminal charges over vials they carried home from Africa, and the scientific community around them is arguing loudly that the case is a documentation dispute rather than a safety event.
Vincent Munster, chief of the virus ecology section at the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Montana, and research fellow Claude Kwe were charged in a criminal complaint unsealed in federal court in Detroit on June 2. Prosecutors allege they brought biological specimens into the United States without proper documents and lied to investigators during interviews at a Michigan airport.
