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. 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.... more » 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.The Collectors of Lost Souls 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 kuru was a new and mysterious agent of infection, which he called a slow virus (now called prions). 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. The study of kuru opened up a completely new field of medical investigation, challenging our understanding of the causes of disease. But The Collectors of Lost Souls is far more than a tantalizing case study of scientific research in the twentieth century. It is a story of how a previously isolated people made contact with the world by engaging with its science, rendering the boundary between primitive and modern completely permeable. It tells us about the complex and often baffling interactions of researchers and their erstwhile subjects on the colonial frontier, tracing their ambivalent exchanges, passionate engagements, confused estimates of value, and moral ambiguities. Above all, it reveals the "primitive" foundations of modern science.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.

ISBN-13: 9780801890406
ISBN-10: 0801890403
Publication Date: 10/6/2008
Pages: 328
Rating:

Currently 0/5 Stars.

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 2
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Similar books to this author and title:

$Galileo\'s Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy$ $The People\'s Peking Man: Popular Science and Human Identity in Twentieth-Century China$

The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation

Heredity Produced: At the Crossroads of Biology, Politics, and Culture, 1500-1870 (Transformations: Studies in the History of Science and Technology)

The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution

Genres:

Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Anthropology >> General
--
Science & Math >> History & Philosophy >> History of Science
Science & Math >> History & Philosophy >> General
--
Medicine >> Diseases >> General
--
Medicine >> Internal Medicine >> Neurology >> General
--
Medicine >> Special Topics >> History
Medicine >> General
--
Medical Books >> Medicine >> Internal Medicine >> Neurology

My Account
Post Books
Wish List
Bookshelf
Member Tools
Under the Hood
Newsletter Archive

Search for a Book
Browse My Favorite Genres
Advanced Book Search
Book Browser
Club Tag Cloud
NYT Best Sellers
Newbery Medal Winners
Pulitzer Prize Winners
Books Posted Today
Award Winning Books
Mobile / PDAs

Help Center
How to Swap Books
Ask the Librarian
Live Help
Browser Test
Feature List
Amazon Search

Community
Spread the Word
Widgets & APIs
Feeds RSS/XML
Box-O-Books
Discussion Forums
Blog
Facebook
Twitter

Company
Press & Media
Pulse of PBS
Contact Us
Careers
Privacy & Security

Sister Sites
SwapaDVD.com
SwapaCD.com

Back to the Top ↑

Tell a friend about this book...

Search - The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen