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

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Notes

1 Judith Farquhar remembers (personal communication) that Gajdusek refused to secure his lab at the National Institutes of Health on the grounds of bureaucratic interference. What is needed, he would argue, rather than containment facilities is good lab technique. He did have a Level 4 containment facility at Fort Detrick.

2 One of the first games my Massachusetts Institute of Technology students played with Anderson's text was to identify Nobel laureates and how their names would structure the narrative's attribution of value (another way of telling the story). There are eight to eleven: Wendall Stanley (1935, for crystallizing the tobacco mosaic virus, which was important to the Gajdusek story for the irrepressible idea, proved wrong for the tobacco mosaic virus but with staying power for the prion, that it was an autocatalytic protein); Linus Pauling (1954 Nobel Prize in chemistry for work on the chemical bond); John Enders (1954, for cultivating the polio virus), with whom Gajdusek worked at Harvard and Children's Hospital in Boston, learning tissue cultivation techniques; F. Macfarlane Burnet (1960, for work on immunological tolerance), whom Gajdusek first admired and later competed with; Max Delbruck (1969, for work on the replication and genetic structure of viruses), whose phage group coterie at CalTech included Gunther Stent, James Watson, Elie Wollman, and Benoit Mandelbrot as well as Gajdusek; Carleton Gajdusek (1976, for a new mechanism, “slow virus,” of infectious disease, shared with Baruch Blumberg for isolation of the hepatitis B virus, using “the Australian antigen,” a gift of the aborigines of Australia); and Stanley Prusiner (1997, for the prion). Three more are mentioned in passing: John Eccles (neurophysiology), James Watson (double helix), and Joshua Lederberg (genetic recombination).

3 From Vonnegut's 1963 novel, Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut variously attributed the idea to learning about Nobel laureate Irving Langmuir's idea about a form of solid water stable at room temperature, with which Langmuir entertained H. G. Wells; and to Gajdusek's notion of an ever-expansive process of crystallization.

4 Including genes from the neem tree in India, John Moore's hairy leukemia cell line in California, Craig Venter and the National Institutes of Health's early effort to patent genes produced by mapping the human genome, and a cell line from blood taken from the Hagahai of Papua New Guinea with a variant virus promising resistance to, and vaccine against, adult T-cell lymphoma.

5 Appropriately, the book won the 2010 Ludwik Fleck Prize awarded by the Society for the Social Study of Science.

6 “Sound and sentiment” is a reference to Steven Feld's ethnography of that name about the way in which natural sounds of the forest and songs of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea make up an unseen world but also a vocabulary of perception and emotion and a sensorium built more on sound than sight (Feld 1982).

7 Klitzman has a particularly scathing account of local elections.

8 Pat Merz's scrapie-associated fibril (SAF) was called prion rods by Prusiner. The scrapie incubation gene (Sine) of Alan Dickinson et al. was called Prn I by Prusiner. Gajdusek's protein crystallization theory was called infectious prions by Prusiner. Gajdusek acknowledges Prusiner's gaming but philosophically said that he, Gajdusek, was in good company with Newton, who similarly lost out to Leibniz with respect to the terminology of calculus. (See Rhodes 1997 for these disputes. Rhodes's title, Deadly Feasts, plays upon both kuru and the fears in the 1990s that a series of encephalopathies seemed to harbinger slow incubation infections that would become plagues because they would be impossible to detect in time. See Prusiner 2008 for his reflections.

9 This is among the ethically and legally delicate terrains of the book. Although a weak defense of Gajdusek's libidinal attachments to boys was that in New Guinea homosociality and homosexual rites of initiation were culturally appropriate, Anderson says that, while such practices were culturally validated across the river in the groups studied by Roy Wagner (1967a, 1967b, 1978) and Gil Herdt (1981, 1982), such initiation rites were not practiced among the Fore.

10 The names of not just Reo Fortune, Margaret Mead, and Ronald and Catherine Berndt go by, but also A. P. Elkin and S. F. Nadel, all storied names in anthropological lore and of quite checkered and colorful reputations. The training of government anthropologists is mentioned, if only in passing, with contrasting commitments intellectually and otherwise.

11 Judith Farquhar (personal communication). Farquhar recalls that at Gajdusek's funeral a loyal East European colleague eulogized Gajdusek by noting that he was less a virologist than a biologist interested in everything from plants (the potato spindle tumor, for which he would wander over to colleagues at the Department of Agriculture) to tick-borne encephalitis carried in the fur of rats, a problem that came up during the Korean War and that prompted a trip to Siberia to collect rats. He then speculated that rats around his home in Frederick, Maryland, were similar enough to Siberian rats that they might also carry the same encephalitis-bearing ticks. They did. Farquhar says she remembers all this because fur combing was a common lab technique at the time.

12 At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he jokingly confronted New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, reminding him, “You called me a mouse,” to which Revkin smilingly retorted, “Yes, the mouse that roared”: he was referring not to Conrad but to Papua New Guinea as a tiny country confronting the super-power. See Revkin's 22 January 2008 column, as well as a video clip of Revkin interviewing Conrad titled “The Mouse That Roared in Bali” (Revkin 2008). See also the account of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology event in Callison (2010: 270–71).