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The Collectors of Lost Souls - Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Paperback, updated edition)
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The Collectors of Lost Souls - Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (Paperback, updated edition)
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This riveting account of medical detective work traces the story of
kuru, a fatal brain disease, and the pioneering scientists who
spent decades searching for its cause and cure. Winner, William H.
Welch Medal, American Association for the History of Medicine
Winner, Ludwik Fleck Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science
Winner, General History Award, New South Wales Premier's History
Awards When whites first encountered the Fore people in the
isolated highlands of colonial New Guinea during the 1940s and
1950s, they found a people in the grip of a bizarre epidemic. Women
and children succumbed to muscle weakness, uncontrollable tremors,
and lack of coordination, until death inevitably supervened. Facing
extinction, the Fore attributed their unique and terrifying
affliction to a particularly malign form of sorcery. In The
Collectors of Lost Souls, Warwick Anderson tells the story of the
resilience of the Fore through this devastating plague, their
transformation into modern people, and their compelling attraction
for a throng of eccentric and adventurous scientists and
anthropologists. Battling competing scientists and the colonial
authorities, the brilliant and troubled American doctor D. Carleton
Gajdusek determined that the cause of the epidemic-kuru-was a new
and mysterious agent of infection, which he called a slow virus
(now called a prion). Anthropologists and epidemiologists soon
realized that the Fore practice of eating their loved ones after
death had spread the slow virus. Though the Fore were never
convinced, Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for his discovery. Now
revised and updated, the book includes an extensive new afterword
that situates its impact within the fields of science and
technology studies and the history of science. Additionally, the
author now reflects on his long engagement with the scientists and
the people afflicted, describing what has happened to them since
the end of kuru. This astonishing story links first-contact
encounters in New Guinea with laboratory experiments in Bethesda,
Maryland; sorcery with science; cannibalism with compassion; and
slow viruses with infectious proteins, reshaping our understanding
of what it means to do science.
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