This riveting account of medical detective work traces the story of
kuru, a fatal brain disease, and the pioneering scientists who spent
decades searching for its cause and cure.
Winner, William H. Welch Medal, American Association for the History of
Medicine
Winner, Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science
Winner, General History Award, New South Wales Premier's History Awards
When whites first encountered the Fore people in the isolated highlands
of colonial New Guinea during the 1940s and 1950s, they found a people
in the grip of a bizarre epidemic. Women and children succumbed to
muscle weakness, uncontrollable tremors, and lack of coordination, until
death inevitably supervened. Facing extinction, the Fore attributed
their unique and terrifying affliction to a particularly malign form of
sorcery.
In The Collectors of Lost Souls, Warwick Anderson tells the story of
the resilience of the Fore through this devastating plague, their
transformation into modern people, and their compelling attraction for a
throng of eccentric and adventurous scientists and anthropologists.
Battling competing scientists and the colonial authorities, the
brilliant and troubled American doctor D. Carleton Gajdusek determined
that the cause of the epidemic--kuru--was a new and mysterious agent of
infection, which he called a slow virus (now called a prion).
Anthropologists and epidemiologists soon realized that the Fore practice
of eating their loved ones after death had spread the slow virus. Though
the Fore were never convinced, Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for his
discovery.
Now revised and updated, the book includes an extensive new afterword
that situates its impact within the fields of science and technology
studies and the history of science. Additionally, the author now
reflects on his long engagement with the scientists and the people
afflicted, describing what has happened to them since the end of kuru.
This astonishing story links first-contact encounters in New Guinea with
laboratory experiments in Bethesda, Maryland; sorcery with science;
cannibalism with compassion; and slow viruses with infectious proteins,
reshaping our understanding of what it means to do science.
