In the Science Zone II: The Fore, Papua New Guinea, and the Fight for Representation

Four questions—two for Dr. Anderson, the medically trained historian and STS scholar, and two for Professor Anderson, the historian of medicine and anthropology—arise as I read Warwick Anderson's The Collectors of Lost Souls: Who speaks for natural history? Who speaks for the protein or prion? Who speaks for today's Fore? And who speaks for Asian Pacific science and technology studies, or (given Professor Anderson's two manifestos on the subject) is there a postcolonial in this text?

But let me begin with an appreciation of how I read what my friend Warwick has achieved so brilliantly in this book already awarded multiple well-deserved prizes. Let me also note in passing the sixty photographs that provide a useful supplement to the "tangles of plaque" in the text. The photographs reveal the humanity of the victims of the neurodegenerative kuru epidemic (relatives helping the afflicted, pp. 111, 113, 130, 156; the juxtaposition of gnarled people "from the stone age or primitive past" with handsome children and adults, pp. 27, 73, 100) and of the well-groomed boys who accompanied Carleton Gajdusek to collect his Nobel Prize and at home in Maryland (pp. 188, 227); track Gajdusek's maturation from eight-year-old pirate to young scientist to Nobel laureate (pp. 36, 55, 186, 218, 222); portray key scientists and anthropologists in the story, including their work in the field examining patients, taking blood, filming, and posing; and memorialize the primates whose infection and death contributed to our recognizing the disease's infectious transmission (pp. 140, 158).

Two pictures are particularly layered with meaning for interpretive insight. The cover image, interestingly, is of the Estonian-born physician Vin Zigas (not Gajdusek), admitted among refugee physicians after World War II as an Australian medical officer for New Guinea, and the first to study kuru. Zigas, recumbent, eyes closed, and smiling, is surrounded by happy young Fore men, perhaps turning him into their Whiteman with their gazes, including one turned toward the camera/us.

The other is of "Zigas, [Jack] Baker, and Gajdusek at the dining table/desk/ autopsy bench at Okapa. Human brains on the plate, specimen bottles on the windowsill, and census books on a folding table," with Gajdusek looking through a microscope. The ambiguity or "multivocality" of the photograph lies in its potential on the one hand to reveal the backstage of exploratory fieldwork and medical research (often makeshift bricolage, with its multiple diagnostic and correlating tools), or on the other hand to raise questions about whether Gajdusek and others unwittingly were putting themselves at risk of infection from the sticky protein during their autopsies. The latter is very unlikely, though unkind joking sometimes suggested that Gajdusek's erratic behavior in later life was due to such infection. More to the point is that the image enigmatically suggests the adventure and dangers of infectious disease research, and the border between bureaucratic containment protocols and good lab practice in dealing with infectious materials.¹

I divide my comments into four parts: placing the kuru story in conversation both with parallel projects in the 1960s among the Yanomani and others and with today's successor projects; exploring three different meanings in Anderson's subtitle; using my four questions to probe the limits of Anderson's framing in order to suggest complementary directions for future work; and reflecting on Anderson's ethical tact in his ending and on implications for other work in Asian Pacific STS.

1. Carleton Gajdusek and the National Institutes of Health's International Biological Programs

The book The Collectors of Lost Souls succeeds far beyond the biography-of-a-Nobel-laureate format that Anderson's extraordinary access to Carleton Gajdusek's journals and confidences might have created.² Indeed, the book aspires to be "a sort of biology and cultural sentinel capturing the culture of biomedical investigation in the second half of the twentieth century" (5). It is partly the story of one of the multiperson, decades-extended research programs of the 1960s, the International Biological Program, in which biologists and anthropologists participated. Using...