As much as one might wish, the cartoon above does not depict the insane Cornell Med. prof's scheme, but it was, like they say, "too good" not to use. No, the (much) lesser Moriarty's plan was less technically challenging, and more along the lines drawn below that are from a classic Disney cartoon of the 30s, in which an "evil scientist with a loud voice kidnaps Pluto and wants to graft his head onto a hen's body":
After receiving (along with his dean and a few choice others) written receipt of my extreme displeasure [1] with the not humorous, badly disguised, libelous 'monkey business' he had attempted at my Wikipedia page [2], John wrote me back (although he copied no one else) the following adolescent email:
From: John P. Moore, PhD
Date: Apr 6, 2007 11:17 AM
Subject: Re: Fwd: you really are 10 years old
To: bialy harvey
Harvey,
My dear old thing!!! You are in a bad mood!! You pointed out to me in an email the other day that I lack the computing skills necessary to use PubMed. How, then, could I possibly do something as technically sophisticated as editing a Wikipedia entry? I'm afraid you can't have it both ways. I'm afraid you'll need to direct your venom elsewhere. I did get a laugh out of the altered entry though. I don't know what the original said, but the revised version does seem pretty good!
Best wishes to our strongest asset. John
I returned it to him (and did copy his dean and a few, select others) adding ..."is this your defense? good luck in court chump." [Since then, he has not written to me directly.]
After a few minutes, I sent a more personal note to JP (but not his dean) inviting him to Cuernavaca, and informing him that this "old thing" was in more than good enough shape to make him eat his words, and whilst happy to pay his airfare, the ensuing hospital bills would be his own. I wrote this in more succinct and cruder language than would be appropriate to reproduce verbatim here as its humor is apparently not for all.
No need, however, since it turned out that the real scheme of the mastermind was to devote an entire page of AIDSTruthiness.org(asm) to denouncing my worthless, insignificant, denialist self as a homophobic of the first water, who resorted to threats of physical violence as exemplified by the cruder version of the e-missive described just above, neglecting to include (in typical, AIDS criminal mastermind mode) the email of his own to the "old thing" that precipitated my "threat".
[Very recently, the AIDSTruthiness site has hatched a number of quasi-clonal replicates of the revenge ploy above that are examined in contemporaneous-with-this items located in the "Bad Manners and Good Gossip" sidebar.]
Harvey Bialy is the founding scientific editor of Nature Biotechnology, and the editor of "You Bet Your Life".
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