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The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen

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This is a beautifully written and deep book about important medical research done under difficult conditions. Warwick Anderson has examined the records and met the people who were involved: in New Guinea, Australia, North American and elsewhere. He tells the story in a sympathetic and engaging way.

Kuru is the first of a new class of human diseases to be recognized: first thought to be caused by "slow viruses" and now known to be prion diseases. These diseases pose a riddle whose unraveling has yielded two Nobel prizes so far: D Carleton Gajdusek and Stanley B. Prusiner. If these diseases are ever conquered, that will yield another Nobel. These diseases include kuru, Creutzfeld Jacob disease and its variants (mad cow disease in humans), possibly Alzheimer's disease, and animal diseases such as scrapie.

The story begins in the early 1950s with the work of anthropologists Catherine and Ronald Berndt among the Fore tribes of Papua New Guinea. The Bernts first described the fatal kuru condition, attributed to sorcery by the tribesmen and to a hysterical reaction to cultural contact by the Berndts. It seems quaint to us to attribute a physical disease to sorcery, but many modern westerners attribute physical diseases to possibly imaginary contamination by traces of toxic substances introduced by malign profit-seeking companies. Perhaps our ritual practices are not so far removed from those of primitive peoples? See Horace Miner's classic paper "Body ritual among the Nacirema."

Key roles were played by D. Carleton Gajdusek, a pushy American who invaded this Australian preserve, and Vin Zigas, an Eastern European doctor who worked for the Australian health service in New Guinea. Gajdusek was backed by the considerable resources of a branch of the National Institutes of Health, and the ultimate proof that kuru was transmissible came from experiments with chimpanzees done in Maryland by Gajdusek's colleague Joe Gibbs.

In the late 1950s Igor Klatzo at NIH examined kuru brains sent by Gajdusek and Vin Zigas as having lesions similar to those of Creutzfeld jacob victims, which was, as we now know, right on target. This shows how recognizable features of these diseases are to a pathologist who has seen examples of them.

The path of the research was convoluted, as many varying and appealing hypotheses, genetic, environmental, viral and so on were considered. The various researchers pushed for their points of view and sought to shut out their rivals. Toward the end, all the pieces fitted together and pointed to a transmissible proteinaceous agent that somehow reconfigures proteins naturally found in the body into the forms associated with amyloid plaques and cell abnormality and cell death.

The exact mechanisms by which these agents work are not understood as of this writing. No cures for these diseases are known. We do know enough to recognize and deal with outbreaks such as that of mad cow disease, but we still have a long way to go.

Reading this book, you will see how dependent progress is on the enthusiasm and drive of a few people, and how dependent their work is, in turn, on backing by a team and resources. Anderson rightly casts Gajdusek as central, but his flaws make him a tragic as well as triumphant figure.

This book ranks with the few that describe the full drama of scientific breakthroughs: others are Walter Alvarez's T. REX AND THE CRATER OF DOOM and Andrew Brown's wonderful IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORM.

All highly recommended. Read them.