Two weeks ago, Albert Harris was a respected professor at UNC-Chapel Hill who labored in obscurity teaching biology to pre-med students. By most accounts, he did a pretty good job.

Then he wandered into the klieg light of media coverage, and his life hasn't been the same. His e-mail box is full of messages damning, some threatening, the 64-year-old prof. People are calling for him to be fired, and he says wealthy alumni are making unhappy noises to the university.

Harris' sin was to suggest to his embryology class on Feb. 11 that fetuses with Down syndrome should be aborted. At least one student was offended, a right-to-life organization swung into action, and the next thing he knew, Harris was the archetype for all arrogant professors jamming immorality into the impressionable minds of their captive classroom audiences.

The News & Observer wrote about Harris on Feb. 16, in a story headlined "Abortion remark angers students." It quoted Harris' lecture notes (posted on his class Web site) saying, "In my opinion, the moral thing for older mothers to do is to have amniocentesis, as soon during pregnancy as is safe for the fetus, test whether placental cells have a third chromosome #21 and abort the fetus if it does." The extra chromosome is associated with Down syndrome.

The reaction was swift and angry. The N&O invited readers to discuss the topic on a Web site forum, and more than 1,200 visited the site (compared with 135 on Castro's resignation). Comments accuse the professor of playing God and of promoting eugenics. "One has to wonder which chromosome was missing in Professor Albert Harris when he was born," said one commenter. "Perhaps it was the one called 'compassion.' For a tenured university professor to inject his liberal eugenic social philosophy in a class on embryology is unconscionable."

Many comments were from parents of Down syndrome children, understandably upset at the suggestion that their children shouldn't have been born.

Predictably, the story was picked up and distributed nationally by The Associated Press, and it spread to television, talk radio and the Internet. Harris told me he spent 14 hours replying to e-mails the Monday after the story appeared. He said the response was "massive, obscene, 'you should have been aborted,' demanding that I be dismissed." Harris is worried about his career, even though he's tenured. But he also said he was more concerned about the damage to the university than to him personally.

(Steve Matson, chair of the Biology Department, said there would be no sanctions. "I met with the (complaining) student this morning, and from her perspective and from my perspective, the issue has been resolved," he said Friday.)

Harris and his defenders contend that the coverage was unfair -- that his comment was taken out of context and that the N&O story gave disproportionate attention to a few -- one student out of a class of more than 100 complained. "I sat through that lecture and know that this reporter has not adequately represented the facts in this article," one student wrote in the comment forum.

Harris said that he has made similar remarks in his classes over 35 years and that the opinion is just that -- opinion -- offered not as doctrine but to stimulate discussion about moral issues related to embryology. He said he worries that his educational intention is set back by the publicity. "Somebody may agree with the extreme position attributed to me, when the whole purpose was to have a class discussion and have different points of view," he said.

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