On Wednesday, a federal judge in Vermont announced from immigration custody that Russian-born scientists and Harvard researchers would deal with criminal charges. Smuggling of frog embryos To the US.
Co-workers and scholars also testified on behalf of Kseniia Petrova and said they were doing valuable research to advance cancer treatments.
“It’s a great science,” biotechnology scientist and entrepreneur Michael West testified in a Petrova research paper. He said he doesn’t know Petrova, but is familiar with her published works. She describes “a new way to intervene in the biology of regeneration and aging by mapping embryo development.”
West said Petrova’s medical research skills were very popular and he himself would hire her “with a heartbeat.”
Petrova, 30, is currently under the control of a former US S-S office in Louisiana. She is expected to be taken to Massachusetts on Friday in preparation for a bail hearing for smuggling charges next week, the lawyer told the court.
Petrova was on vacation in France. So she stopped by a lab specializing in splicing superfine sections of frog embryos to get a package of samples to use for her research.
When she passed the US Customs and Border Patrol Checkpoint at Boston Logan International Airport in February, Petrova was questioned about the sample. She told The Associated Press In the interview Last month, she hadn’t realized she had to declare an item and was not trying to sneak anything into the country. After questioning, Petrova was told that her visa had been cancelled.
After being detained by immigration officers, she filed a petition in Vermont seeking release. She was temporarily taken into custody in Vermont before being taken to Louisiana.
Petrova was charged with smuggling earlier this month after Burlington US District Judge Christina Reese set a hearing date for her petition. Reiss on Wednesday determined that immigration officers’ actions were illegal, Petrova was not at risk, and the embryos were non-organized, unmanned and “subjected no threat to anyone.”
Petrova’s lawyer, Gregory Romanowsky, asked Squirrel to issue an order to stop the ice from being retried if released from Massachusetts custody.
Reiss said it “prohibits enforcement agencies from banning uncertain future lawsuits,” relied on comments from U.S. Department of Justice Attorney General Jeffrey Hartman.
Romanovsky said customs and border protection officials have cancelled Petrova’s visa and there is no legal basis for her to detain her.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on social media platform X that Petrova was “detained after lying to a federal officer about carrying material into the country.” They alleged that her cell phone message “revealed that she was planning to smuggle the materials through customs without declaring them.”
In a statement, Harvard said the university was “continuing to monitor the situation.”
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