In a letter published in the January 2007 "Notices of the American Mathematical Society", commenting on the "New Yorker" article, Joan Birman asserts that the mathematical profession has taken a "very public and very bad black mark" from the circumstances of the publication in the "Asian Journal of Mathematics" of the Cao-Zhu paper. Describing the paper as making "a serious assertion" about gaps in Perelman's proof and their filling by Cao and Zhu, she questions why the "AJM" editorial board apparently assented to publication of such a paper by authors known to have "deep personal attachments" to the "AJM" editors-in-chief, and based not on consultation but on notification a few days before publication, without a copy of the paper, its abstract or the reports of independent referees.