Book Accuses Anthropologist of Epidemic
B O S T O N, Sept. 29 -- U.S. scientists sparked ameasles epidemic that killed “perhaps thousands” of AmazonIndians, according to a not-yet published book that has alreadysparked a firestorm of controversy on the Internet.
Patrick Tierney’s Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientistsand Journalists Devastated the Amazon, presents evidence thatscientists during a 1968 expedition inoculated Yanomami Indiansagainst measles and possibly contributed to an epidemic of thedisease that killed “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of theisolated tribe in a remote region of Venezuela.
The expedition was funded by the former Atomic EnergyCommission and led by the late geneticist James Neel of theUniversity of Michigan and then-University of California atSanta Barbara anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon.
Book Questions Vaccinations
At the time the expedition arrived in the Amazon Basin tostudy the relatively isolated Yanomami, the tribe’s populationnumbered around 20,000. It is now estimated closer to 10,000.
Tierney suggests that Neel’s inoculating the Yanomamiactually gave some of them measles and they infected others.But medical scientists said such a thing has never been shownbefore.
The Edmonston B measles vaccine did have side-effects andeventually was withdrawn from the market in the early 1970s,but was a standard treatment in 1968.
The epidemic charge is the most explosive in the book,which also accuses the now-retired Chagnon of debauchedbehavior.
Sparks Academic Firestorm
The sedate world of anthropology has been turned upsidedown by reports of the book’s scandalous accusations, whichhave sparked a rash of e-mails, accusations and papers that arewhipping around the World Wide Web.
One of Chagnon’s critics and one of the few people to haveactually read the book, Professor Thomas Headland of the SummerInstitute of Sociology in Dallas, has his doubts aboutTierney’s book.
“There is no love lost between Chagnon and me. He hascriticized me in print, and I him,” Headland said in an e-mailto Reuters. “But I don’t believe, after reading Tierney’s book,that Chagnon is guilty of genocide, or that he purposely helpedintroduce and spread measles into the Yanomami population.... Idon’t believe that Chagnon ‘demanded that villagers bring himgirls for sex...’”
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