Bennett proposed that a mutant kuru gene “K” was dominant (K) in females but recessive (k) in males. Accordingly, only males who were KK (and who had inherited a dominant form of the gene from each parent) died of kuru, while males who were either normal (kk) or carriers (Kk) were unaffected by the disease. Alternately, females who were either KK or Kk died of kuru, while only those females who were normal (kk) were unaffected.
In the end, the fact that kuru victims included equal numbers of male and female children, but few adult males, was deeply troubling to Gajdusek, and it raised serious questions about Bennett’s gene-based disease hypothesis, which was soon abandoned.
By this time the researchers had already been dealing with another problem—this one related to the sensationalized slant the press had given the kuru story. Time magazine, for example, opened its November 11, 1957, article “The Laughing Death” with the following:
In the eastern highlands of New Guinea, sudden bursts of maniacal laughter shrilled through the walls of many a circular, windowless grass hut, echoing through the surrounding jungle. Sometimes, instead of the roaring laughter, there might be a fit of giggling. When a tribesman looked into such a hut, he saw no cause for merriment. The laugher was lying ill, exhausted by his guffaws, his face now an expressionless mask. He had no idea that he had laughed, let alone why. . . . It was kuru, the laughing death, a creeping horror hitherto unknown to medicine.
The Time story then went on to describe how the Fore were “only now emerging from the Stone Age” and that they still practiced cannibalism and the ritual murder of kuru sorcerers (“when they think they can get away with it”). Even when dealing with the scientific aspects of the story, the article’s anonymous author took ghoulish satisfaction in reporting Gajdusek performed autopsies without gloves, atop the same dining-room table where meals were eaten. Additionally, the article continued, the researcher, “had to haggle with victims’ relatives for the bodies” of kuru victims and “he got some bodies at the bargain price of only one ax.” For his part, Gajdusek hated the media coverage and he considered the term “laughing death” to be a “ludicrous misnomer.”
The worldwide media coverage did have at least one positive effect, in that it increased the public’s awareness of the deadly problem facing the Fore. Because of this, universities began to funnel funds into kuru research, and this money helped support a new influx of professional researchers into the region.
Two of the first to arrive were cultural anthropologists Robert and Shirley Glasse (now Shirley Lindenbaum), who came from Australia to New Guinea on a university grant in 1961. Studying kinship among the Fore, they returned to continue their research in 1962 and 1963. Their work in the New Guinea Highlands would ultimately allow them to make the connection between kuru and cannibalism.
I met Dr. Shirley Lindenbaum half a century later at an Upper West Side apartment, which had been decorated with art and other memorabilia collected during a long and distinguished career. In a voice that still retained the hint of an Australian accent, she talked about her studies.
“What was it that finally convinced you that cannibalism was the mode of kuru transmission?” I asked her.
Lindenbaum explained that once the epidemic began in the New Guinea Highlands, she and her husband were instructed to gather genealogical data about people who had kuru. In doing so, they spoke to Fore elders who had seen the first cases of the disease in their villages.
“They could remember these cases and even the names of the people in the North Fore who came down with the disease some couple of decades earlier. There were these tremendously convincing first stories and we said, ‘What happened to those people?’ And the Fore said, ‘Well, they were consumed.’ We knew they were cannibals.”
I pressed on, asking Lindenbaum how she knew for sure that the Fore were cannibals. Without hesitation, she cited “fieldwork in the area by Ronald and Catherine Berndt in the 1950s” as well as “government patrol reports throughout the Eastern Highlands.”
I may or may not have raised an eyebrow at the mention of the Berndts but I did ask Lindenbaum if she was bothered by the fact that no anthropologist, including the Berndts, had ever seen ritualized cannibalism firsthand.
“No,” Lindenbaum replied. “Because there are a lot of things we haven’t seen firsthand—sexual intercourse among them. But there’s evidence that it occurs.”
At this point, something like an alarm went off in my brain. Basically, this line about sexual intercourse has become something of a mantra for those anthropologists who claim that ritual cannibalism occurred in a particular group, even though they had not seen it with their own eyes.