Declan Butler, reporter This is the personal blog of Declan Butler, a senior reporter at Nature. All views expressed here are mine, and not those of Nature. Contact me at d.butler@nature.com

I haven’t been blogging for a while; been taking some time out for other projects, and the blog had become almost entirely devoted to original posts on the Libya death penalty case, a hard act to follow. An article in the November issue of Discover magazine, now free online, provides an opportunity to close that chapter, and start blogging on more mundane matters. The long article, by John Bohannon, a journalist colleague who writes for several science publications including Science, tells the story of scientists’ actions in the Libya case. It covers many of the events blogged here as they happened — see summary here — but as a gripping detective story — it makes a good read.

Excerpts:

Late in September 2006, Nobel Prize–winning molecular biologist Richard Roberts was thumbing through the journal Nature when he read an article by one of their senior reporters, Declan Butler, about a group of foreign medics on death row in Libya. Butler’s article, along with an anonymous editorial entitled “Libya’s Travesty,” described how the medics’ appeals were nearly exhausted. “I had been aware of the situation through the media,” says Roberts, the chief scientific officer at New England Biolabs in Ipswich, Massachusetts. “But the case seemed so open-and-shut, I’d assumed that diplomacy would sort the situation out.” But as the editorial warned, “Diplomacy has lamentably failed to deliver,” and “scientific leaders need to use all their influence” to persuade their governments to take action.

“It was a call to arms,” says Roberts. So he picked up the phone and contacted Butler, who painted a grim picture of the situation. Ever since the death sentence was handed down in 2004, the absurd case had been bouncing between Libya’s courts as the medics languished in jail; there had been at least one suicide attempt among them. Butler was glad Roberts wanted to help. After watching the Libyan affair from a journalist’s vantage point, says Butler, “I found myself in a position to be useful. What was needed was for someone to work behind the scenes, connecting influential scientists with each other and with diplomats involved with the case.”
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