91av

THIRTY-TWO years ago, two American researchers carried thousands of doses of
measles vaccine through the Amazonian rainforest to study the remote Yanomami
people. This much of the story everyone can agree on. But whether this
scientific duo were medical heroes or imperialistic villains is the basis of a
fierce row that is brewing in the scientific community—and threatens to
destroy anthropology’s good name.

In a book to be published in the US next week called Darkness in El
Dorado: How scientists and journalists devastated the Amazon, author
Patrick Tierney presents the case that anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of the
University of California, Santa Barbara, and the geneticist James Neel of the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, who died this year, helped place “one of
the Amazon basin’s oldest tribes on the cusp of extinction”, as the publisher’s
blurb puts it. The most sensational of the allegations is that Neel’s use of
measles vaccine unleashed a lethal epidemic among the Yanomami people that
killed up to one in five of those who became infected.

As rumours of the book’s contents have leaked out, many have rushed to defend
the accused. The debate is likely to get even more heated next week at the
American Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in San Francisco, where
the two sides will meet in a special forum.

The way the hostilities have broken out before the book has even been
published might make an interesting study for future anthropologists of the
information age. In early September, two reviewers of the book, anthropologists
Terry Turner of Cornell University in New York and Leslie Sponsel of the
University of Hawaii at Manoa, sent a confidential e-mail to Louise Lamphere and
Don Brenneis, the president and president-elect respectively of the American
Anthropological Association. It warned them of the book’s allegations and the
unwelcome publicity it would bring to their profession. “It was dynamite, it was
a bomb and we knew it would cause a commotion,” says Turner. Many of the
allegations, they warned, would become public in October when an excerpt was
scheduled for publication in The New Yorker magazine.

Two weeks after the reviewers sent their supposedly private e-mail, it was
still zipping back and forth through cyberspace, and people with even remote
connections to anthropology were getting copies forwarded to them. “I received
four in one day from different corners of the world,” says Susan Lindee, a
historian at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Turner and Sponsel
say they don’t know who leaked their message.

As 91av went to press, crucial parts of the book appear to
have been toned down in the version that will appear in the shops next week,
compared with the proofs sent to reviewers.

Chagnon says: “Tierney puts the most negative twist on virtually everything I
did to the point of…implying motives I didn’t have.”

Chagnon and Neel have attracted publicity before, but often of a more
positive kind. Chagnon began his study of the then obscure Yanomami people in
1964, when he was still a graduate student. In his 1968 book Yanomamö:
The fierce people, he depicts a culture where violence, hostility and even
killing help enhance social status, challenging widely held notions of the
natural peacefulness of humans. The book led to films by Chagnon and others and
sold more than a million copies, becoming a standard text for anthropology
students.

In 1968, Chagnon teamed up with Neel, who was already an eminent geneticist
and doctor. When Neel died in February this year, Francis Collins of the US
National Human Genome Research Institute said he was a pioneer who had “birthed
the field of human genetics”. Among his other distinctions, Neel had been in
charge of the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, which among other things studied
how the Japanese victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been affected by exposure
to radiation. For him, the Yanomami were a perfect control population, whose
isolation guaranteed they had never been exposed to anything but background
radiation. In addition, he wanted to observe their immunological response to a
vaccine.

The way in which the Yanomami’s immune systems reacted to the weakened form
of measles virus might also have given them valuable information about why
measles proved so deadly to isolated peoples. But when Chagnon and Neel arrived
in the Amazon, they reported finding a measles epidemic already gathering
momentum, possibly originating from other outside contacts. Tierney argues that
the extreme isolation of the Yanomami would have made this unlikely.

In the final version of the book, Tierney accuses Neel of recklessly
selecting a vaccine that posed a higher risk of measles compared with other
vaccines in order to test his theories that those higher up the social scale
would be better at fighting disease. For his tests, Neel chose to use the
Edmonston B measles vaccine, which contained a live, weakened form of the virus.
Tierney argues that Edmonston B was a strangely dangerous choice, given that
weaker strains of the vaccine were available and that most Yanomami had never
been exposed to measles and were chronically sick and malnourished.

Neel’s defenders say Tierney’s claims are wrong. The University of Michigan,
in an extensive statement, calls the book the “literary equivalent of a
professional ‘hit'”. It claims that Tierney’s book is the result of a
long-standing professional vendetta by Chagnon’s critics. They dismiss as absurd
any notion that the researchers’ activities created a climate of aggression in
Yanomami society, since records of their violence date back to before Chagnon’s
birth.

And at least two of the scientists whom Tierney quotes as questioning Neel’s
choice of the vaccine came to Neel’s defence when contacted by New
Scientist. Samuel Katz of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, who
helped develop the Edmonston B vaccine, says that it was approved and used on
millions of children in the US and abroad until 1975, including some who
suffered as much from malaria and malnutrition as the Yanomami. And these
children weren’t able to transmit measles.

“I might have made a different choice, but Neel’s was also logical,” says
Yale University epidemiologist Francis Black, whom Tierney describes as reacting
with disbelief when informed of Neel’s use of Edmonston B. “It gave stronger
adverse reactions, but was a better studied vaccine and was known to give
immunity for ten years.” Neither scientist recalled talking to Tierney, although
both said they could have easily forgotten short telephone conversations.

Tierney hasn’t yet responded to these volleys. His publicist says that an
agreement with his publisher prevents him from commenting on the book before its
publication. The review proofs had only limited circulation, so most of the
criticism of the book has been centred on the content of Turner and Sponsel’s
leaked e-mail and the extracts published in The New Yorker. Sponsel
says the full scale of Tierney’s charges isn’t yet understood. “So far, 95 per
cent of the fight has been over the vaccine,” says Sponsel. “But 95 per cent of
the book is about other things.”

Both sides in the controversy agree that its implications extend beyond
personal animosities. Critics of the book say it may make indigenous peoples
suspicious of medical help and impede vaccination efforts around the world.
Others say that if any of the allegations are true, then reparations should be
paid to the Yanomami. Chagnon is considering legal action.

With the publication of the book and the lifting of the gag on Tierney, a
fuller analysis can begin. Whether or not his allegations are confirmed, they
may inflict permanent damage on anthropology. Alternatively, they might help the
science of anthropology to emerge all the stronger, with stricter ethical
standards in place. The future of an entire field of study will be affected.