Don C. Wiley
Harvard biochemist and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Found drowned in the Mississippi River. Death ultimately ruled accidental but widely covered as part of a cluster of microbiologist deaths in late 2001.
On 16 November 2001 Don Wiley left a banquet at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis sometime after midnight. His rental car was found abandoned on the Hernando de Soto Bridge with the keys in the ignition and the gas tank full. His body was recovered from the Mississippi River three weeks later, near Vidalia, Louisiana.
The medical examiner ruled the death accidental: a fall from the bridge consistent with a seizure or vertigo. The case acquired secondary attention because Wiley died during a six-week period in late 2001 in which several internationally-known microbiologists died under unusual circumstances. No causal link between the deaths has been established.