the magazine's editor made by Mims with his attorney's advice explaining why he planned to terminate Mims' assignment to "The Amateur Scientist." The editor stated: "There's no question that on their own merits the columns are fabulous. If you don't do them for us you ought to do them for somebody, because they're great. ... What you've written is first rate. That's just not an issue. It's the public relations nightmare that is keeping me awake." The magazine agreed to publish only the three columns they requested that Mims write. According to The Washington Post after Mims appealed to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Sheldon Krimsky, chair of the AAAS Committee on Scientific Freedom and Responsibility, replied in a letter that: "... Mims—and indirectly Scientific American—was told that 'even if a person holds religiously-derived beliefs that conflict with views commonly held in the scientific community, those beliefs should not influence decisions about publication of scientific articles unless the beliefs are reflected in the articles.'" The ACLU of Texas offered to take Mims' case, but he declined. Meanwhile, the affair received widespread publicity in major publications such as the New York Times. Eric Pianka In 2006, Mims expressed concern with a March 3, 2006 lecture by scientist Eric Pianka. The lecture was held at the 109th Annual Meeting of the Texas Academy of Science and hosted by Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. Mims alleged that Pianka advocated genocide with a genetically enhanced Ebola virus with the goal of exterminating up to 90% of the human population. Pianka has stated that Mims took his statements out of context and that Pianka was explaining what would happen from biological principles alone if present human population trends continue, and that he was not in any way advocating genocide. Using LEDs as narrow band light sensors Mims' interest in LEDs began in 1962, when he was experimenting with photosensitive devices and discovered the inverse effect. In the "Backscatter" section in an online issue of The Citizen Scientist, Mims describes this himself: While a high school senior in 1962, I first got the idea that light sensors should be able to double as light detectors.[sic] So I connected an automobile ignition coil to a cadmium sulfide photoresistor, switched on the power, and observed bright flashes of green light emitted by the semiconductor. The green flashes were distinctively different from the yellow flashes of