The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (review)

Warwick Anderson's story of the discovery of the cause of kuru, a "slow virus" caused by prions found predominantly in the Fore people of New Guinea that leads to a horrific death, has been reviewed widely and positively in both the scientific and medical-historical presses since its publication in 2008. It tells the story of Carleton Gajdusek, whose pivotal role in the understanding of this disease earned him a Nobel Prize. This story is told in a sophisticated way which highlights the struggles between different Australian and American laboratories to gain control of this disease (through various genetic and virological approaches). Also of immense importance for understanding these medical practices is the way that the local—New Guinean Highland—context is understood, both in terms of the scientists who visited the highlands occupied by the Fore and who kept journals and correspondences about their scientific activities, but also by employing the recollections of the Fore themselves, many of whom were employed when they were younger as dokta bois (medical assistants). These overlapping stories, including incursions from medical anthropologists essaying to map kinship relations in order to confirm the genetic basis of the disease (incorrectly), have been largely woven together from Anderson's meticulous archival research, and provide with us an elegant account of the personalities and players involved in the birth of biotechnological medicine. The story is at its most remarkable when the collection of the brains of the Fore kuru victims cuts across the practices of two cultures—scientific and indigenous.

At this intersection, the emerging discipline of medical anthropology can also be found. Anderson shows compellingly how changes in medical practice in postcolonial contexts were mediated through these medical anthropologists, with much of Gajdusek's own field work among the Fore blurring the boundaries between biomedicine and anthropology, where at the very least he required an anthropologically informed understanding of the Fore in order to practice biomedical research. The tying together of these various worlds via the disease kuru is in many ways reminiscent of the method used by medical philosopher Annemarie Mol (The Body Multiple, Durham, Duke University Press, 1998), although Anderson does not cite her work. More than one kuru emerges in this book: in the Fore, in the competing laboratories, in the anthropologist's notebook, and in Anderson's historical reconstruction.

Anderson's book achieves many things. Not only is it an exemplary account of the discovery of the causes of a disease, as rich as other sociological works that have addressed the discovery of the cause of AIDS, or the links between vitamin C and cancer prevention; it is also a work of great theoretical insight. Unlike many works in the history of medicine, it is an explicit combination of Science and Technology Studies (STS) theory and postcolonial medical history. Anderson's understanding of his concept of "postcolonial technoscience"—with his full appreciation of the ways to interpret the construction of scientific knowledge and the experiences of medical practices in these postcolonial settings—is therefore a major contribution to both the fields of STS and medical history, as it simultaneously introduces the methods and theories of the other field. It is an ideal case study for showing how medical history can be enriched by the epistemological questions STS raises, and by appreciating the nuanced practices that are found in laboratory work and the field; at the same time, it provides an antidote to the STS studies that are diachronically thin, narrowly local in focus, and which do not ask questions about how the networks they are depicting came to exist. This double success is no mean feat.