24th February 2011
The Radical
for nature.com
“By day, he studied potential treatments for gastrointestinal cancer — work that invariably required the use of animal models. By night, he crusaded against such animal research, sabotaging companies with links to it. Within a month, Harris would be caught vandalizing another company. Ultimately, he would become the first person in the United Kingdom to be convicted under a law intended to crack down on activist extremism.
The judge overseeing the case lamented a career destroyed and a scientist lost. “It may well be that your future inability to continue your research into gastrointestinal cancer will be a great loss to those who suffer that disease,” said Judge Ian Alexander when he sentenced Harris to three years in prison. Harris was released within a year, and has now agreed to speak to Nature about what drove him to commit his crimes.
