Thanks, its an interesting review and Gajdusek was obvs a disagreeable personality regardless of his integrity. I'm not convinced by the counter-arguments against the cannibalism-prion hypothesis though: firstly Arens is just wrong and his work is considered incorrect even amongst today's anthropologists, but the sentiment that cannibali…
Thanks, its an interesting review and Gajdusek was obvs a disagreeable personality regardless of his integrity. I'm not convinced by the counter-arguments against the cannibalism-prion hypothesis though: firstly Arens is just wrong and his work is considered incorrect even amongst today's anthropologists, but the sentiment that cannibalism was a colonial fantasy was strong between the 50's and the 70's, and researchers working with the Fore at the time were both squeamish and sensitive about the subject, hence a lot of back and forth in the field notes and later on about it. Secondly, the review was written before definitive knowledge of the prion protein and folding disorders. We have both the brains of kuru victims and their genetics, which show that fibril plaques and vacuoles formed in the cerebral tissue, along with the SNP polymorphisms at codon 129 on the PRNP gene. Kuru has been transferred into multiple animals and the exact protein sequence and isomers are known. Fore people have been carefully studied by age and sex and there is distinctive and reproducible loss of the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium at codon 129 amongst females born prior to the end of the cannibalistic mortuary feasts, and weaker disequilibriums for males who would have been children at the time. Add to this that kuru behaves in the same way as other prion diseases, it seems a watertight case imo.
Sorry that is not an honest summation of the article. This is not about PC squeamishness this is about whether anyone actually observed a practice Gajdusek makes central. If it is prions (IF), that women are tasked with handling corpses and heads of corpses specifically is widely attested by direct observation and thus a more plausible transmission source. Less titillating than cannibal ladies but life bees that way sometimes.
I now also wonder… when I say Gajdusek’s lack of personal integrity are you aware of what I mean? It is not “oh he was kind of a jerk”.
You can make a perfectly valid case for both the vector of transmission and the existence of prions without Gajdusek's work - Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse were the anthropologists who conducted the field work on Fore kinship and mortuary traditions, and it was they who demonstrated that Fore endocannibalism matched the spread of kuru. Ignoring Gajdusek's work on transmission, kuru brains and the discovery of prions and subsequent work on prion protein genetics is enough on its own to prove how kuru began and spread. Otherwise we have a massive coincidence that some other unknown cause of death was also operating on people who separately happened to have a degenerative prion disease.
Thanks, its an interesting review and Gajdusek was obvs a disagreeable personality regardless of his integrity. I'm not convinced by the counter-arguments against the cannibalism-prion hypothesis though: firstly Arens is just wrong and his work is considered incorrect even amongst today's anthropologists, but the sentiment that cannibalism was a colonial fantasy was strong between the 50's and the 70's, and researchers working with the Fore at the time were both squeamish and sensitive about the subject, hence a lot of back and forth in the field notes and later on about it. Secondly, the review was written before definitive knowledge of the prion protein and folding disorders. We have both the brains of kuru victims and their genetics, which show that fibril plaques and vacuoles formed in the cerebral tissue, along with the SNP polymorphisms at codon 129 on the PRNP gene. Kuru has been transferred into multiple animals and the exact protein sequence and isomers are known. Fore people have been carefully studied by age and sex and there is distinctive and reproducible loss of the Hardy–Weinberg equilibrium at codon 129 amongst females born prior to the end of the cannibalistic mortuary feasts, and weaker disequilibriums for males who would have been children at the time. Add to this that kuru behaves in the same way as other prion diseases, it seems a watertight case imo.
Sorry that is not an honest summation of the article. This is not about PC squeamishness this is about whether anyone actually observed a practice Gajdusek makes central. If it is prions (IF), that women are tasked with handling corpses and heads of corpses specifically is widely attested by direct observation and thus a more plausible transmission source. Less titillating than cannibal ladies but life bees that way sometimes.
I now also wonder… when I say Gajdusek’s lack of personal integrity are you aware of what I mean? It is not “oh he was kind of a jerk”.
You can make a perfectly valid case for both the vector of transmission and the existence of prions without Gajdusek's work - Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse were the anthropologists who conducted the field work on Fore kinship and mortuary traditions, and it was they who demonstrated that Fore endocannibalism matched the spread of kuru. Ignoring Gajdusek's work on transmission, kuru brains and the discovery of prions and subsequent work on prion protein genetics is enough on its own to prove how kuru began and spread. Otherwise we have a massive coincidence that some other unknown cause of death was also operating on people who separately happened to have a degenerative prion disease.