Rachel Aviv Exposes Carlton Gajdusek’s Controversial Child Transfers
On 17 August, The New Yorker published an investigation by Rachel Aviv about D. Carlton Gajdusek and Luvi Ikabale. Aviv compared the scientist’s journals with Ikabale’s memories and those of others he raised in the United States.
Gajdusek studied kuru, a fatal brain disease among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, which especially affected women and children. Researchers linked the disease to a funerary ritual in which relatives consumed the tissues of the dead, and inoculation of brain tissue from kuru victims into chimpanzees produced similar symptoms after a long incubation, showing an infectious agent with a prolonged period. He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for discoveries concerning new mechanisms of the origin and spread of infectious diseases.
He also acted as guardian for children from Papua New Guinea and Micronesia, bringing them to the United States. His résumé lists 36 children whom he cared for from the 1960s-1990s.
In 1981, a school principal summoned Ikabale and his desk mate; Gajdusek was waiting to take them to the USA, accompanied by two other Fore children. He wrote in his journal that he had convinced the principal to release the children because he was already their legal guardian.
Ikabale recalled having
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PubMed Central (PMC)
The changing face of kuru: a personal perspective
The epidemic of kuru is now known to have been transmitted among the Fore by ritual consumption of infected organs from deceased relatives. As cannibalism was suppressed by government patrol officers during the 1950s, most transmission had ceased by ...
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