Rachel Aviv described how kuru researcher Carleton Gajdusek took children from Papua New Guinea to the United States

Rachel Aviv described how kuru researcher Carleton Gajdusek took children from Papua New Guinea to the United States

On 17 August, The New Yorker published an investigation by Rachel Aviv into D. Carleton Gajdusek and Luwi Ikabala. Aviv compared the scientist’s journals with the accounts of Ikabala and others whom he raised in the United States.

Gajdusek studied kuru, a fatal brain disease that affected the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. The disease was particularly common among women and children. Researchers linked this pattern to a funerary ritual in which women and children consumed tissue from deceased relatives. When brain tissue from people who had died of kuru was injected into chimpanzees, the animals developed similar symptoms after a long delay. This experiment showed that the disease was transmitted by an infectious agent with a long incubation period.

In 1976, Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and spread of infectious diseases. He also obtained legal guardianship of children from Papua New Guinea and Micronesia and took them to the United States. His résumé lists 36 children whom he raised there from the 1960s through the 1990s.

In 1981, the school principal summoned Ikabala and the boy who sat beside him. Gajdusek was waiting there to take them to the United States, along with two other Fore children. Gajdusek wrote in his journal that he had persuaded the principal to release the children because he was already their legal guardian. Ikabala recalled that he had no time to decide whether he wanted to leave. He was given only a few minutes to pack his belongings.

Ikabala later described what had happened:

“The researchers who came to take part in the history of kuru took more than the brains of those who died from kuru. They also took living children.”

Describing the consequences for his community, Ikabala said:

“They took what they wanted and left us with an empty bowl.”