A Wyoming graduate student was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport while attempting to board a flight to China after allegedly poisoning a colleague’s tea.
Aili Wang, 32, a microbiology doctoral candidate at the University of Wyoming, was taken into custody Oct. 6 with multiple laptops, external storage devices and documents now held by police. She remained jailed without bail Tuesday in Los Angeles as prosecutors seek her extradition to face a felony aggravated assault and battery charge punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Wang allegedly purchased acrylamide, a neurotoxic chemical used in protein and DNA research, on eBay twice last summer and later asked the online retailer to delete her account, according to police. The poisoning was discovered when the alleged victim’s wife and others boiled away water from the coffee maker he used to brew tea, isolating 63 milligrams of white powder that tested positive for the substance.
The alleged victim, identified in court documents as “K.T.,” had been experiencing unexplained symptoms since August after returning from a prestigious conference. Mark Gomelsky, the microbiology professor supervising both students, said the victim suffered extreme tiredness, inability to sleep, worsening finger tingling and numbness, and leg weakness. He also noticed a strange taste in his tea that disappeared whenever he washed his small desk coffee maker.
“Acrylamide is a neurotoxin that cannot be neutralized so it stays in neurons and basically kills them. So it’s unclear if he’ll fully recover or not,” Gomelsky said.
Suspecting foul play, the victim and campus police installed surveillance cameras in the shared office in Laramie. Wang was allegedly recorded Sept. 27 rummaging through the victim’s desk. On Oct. 1, she was captured “taking photos and manipulating notebooks” on his desk and rinsing his mug with liquid from her own mug, according to a campus police officer’s affidavit.
Tak Sumaya, an assistant professor who helped identify the acrylamide in the coffee maker water, immediately found the discovery suspicious. Acrylamide is “not something you would find in that kind of quantity anywhere,” Sumaya said.
Sumaya noted that the alleged victim was working on “a pretty promising cancer therapy method.” Wang, he added, photographed every page of a notebook the victim left on his desk.
“You wouldn’t do that with like your office or lab mate’s notebook unless there’s a really good reason, and there wasn’t,” Sumaya said.
Wang and the alleged victim did not share research areas and did not get along, according to the affidavit. The victim’s federally funded, patent-pending research involved “new technology for cancer, neurological and genetic disease treatment.” Wang “was reportedly working on similar research in China before coming to the US,” the affidavit alleges, and had no legitimate reason to access his desk.
Gomelsky described the alleged victim as a highly successful student from Vietnam who had discovered how to deliver RNA to human cells using bacteria. Wang had failed her first dissertation defense and grew envious of her colleague’s success, the professor said.
During a campus police interview Oct. 5, Wang allegedly claimed she “had not used acrylamide in years.” The following day, she was arrested at LAX carrying “multiple laptops, multiple portable external digital storage devices, related accessories, physical records and written materials,” prompting Wyoming prosecutors to request her bond be “significantly increased” upon extradition.
Albany County Circuit Court Judge Robert Sanford granted that request, raising Wang’s bond to $1.5 million cash-only. Wang had no attorney listed in court documents.
“It’s been disheartening, to say the least, to see that one of your student’s life is in jeopardy and another student may be responsible for that,” Gomelsky said. “That was one of the worst shocks in my professional career.”
The alleged victim continues to suffer symptoms including inability to focus, easy fatigue and loss of sensation in his left hand. Wang had not been doing lab work since June while she worked on her dissertation, Gomelsky said.
Best known as a carcinogenic byproduct of cooking starchy foods and burning tobacco, acrylamide can be acutely toxic in high doses and is commonly employed in microbiology laboratories. The amateur investigators who isolated the powder from the coffee maker water turned their sample over to university police, launching the investigation that led to Wang’s arrest.
Wang’s extradition date to Wyoming remains unclear.