[intro music]
[narrator] Australian scientist Professor Michael Alpers has dedicated over 50 years
researching kuru, an incurable brain disease unique to Papua New Guinea.
[music]
[Alpers] Kuru was a new disease that was killing lots of people and was a complete
mystery.
[narrator] But this obscure disease, found deep within these jungles, holds the key
to unlocking vital information for understanding two of the word's most
frightening diseases, mad cow disease and its human form variant CJD.
[man] Quite clearly now the outbreak of variant CJD is very closely entwined
with kuru. And now we're looking at the tip of the first iceberg in Europe.
What we're learning from out here is there is much more to come.
[narrator] It's a medical detective story that unearths cannibalism...
[narrator] ...and a world of sorcery....
[narrator] ...and one that is far from over.
[Alpers] And who could believe that 50 or more years after kuru
investigations started, we'd still be looking for cases?
[haunting music]
[wind blowing]
[upbeat music]
[narrator] It was in Adelaide in 1957 when Michael Alpers, then a young medical
student, first heard about kuru.
[Alpers] I read about kuru in the Adelaide Advertiser, and they called it the
"laughing death." But reading into the article a bit more indicated that this was
an important neurological disease. Instead of going to two o'clock lectures...
[laughs]
...I'd go to the library, and I had all these notes that I made and I'd write down
what I was doing and little summaries and so forth. So I was really quite
obsessed by this.
[haunting music]
[narrator] When Michael was at medical school in the 1950s, Papua New Guinea
was an Australian territory and patrol officers had only recently ventured into
its uncharted regions.
[indistinct chatter]
[narrator] There, they encountered a totally alien world of Stone Age cultures,
cannibalism, sorcery, and tribal conflict.
[haunting music]
[narrator] Reports started to emerge of a mysterious brain disorder affecting only
the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands. Its victims described as trembling,
laughing, and falling over.
[laughter]
[Alpers] The first reports about kuru in the general literature came from
anthropologists describing kuru as a psychosomatic disease, some kind of
reaction to the change in the world with the advent of the
Australian administration.
[thunder]
[narrator] Tragically, kuru seemed to be concentrated among the women and
the children.
[baby crying]
[Alpers] There were 200 dying every year throughout the whole kuru region.
But it was a little hard to believe that the young children were getting this
psychosomatic disease and they were all dying from it. It didn't seem to make
any sense at all.
[music]
[narrator] But what was even more puzzling was that kuru was only affecting the Fore
people, at the time only 20,000 of the total population of 1.7 million on the
whole island of New Guinea.
[Alpers] It was confined to this very remote area. Why? We don't know.
An infection would have come to mind first. There was a possibility that it
was genetic, but you know there was so many other possibilities.
In 1961, Michael seized the opportunity to become the first Australian medical
officer to be sent into the kuru region.
[Alpers] When it was discovered that I was going to work on kuru, all my teachers
said, you know, "Why waste your time doing that?" And this was serious. It wasn't in
anybody's mindset as the proper career path for a doctor.
[music]
[narrator] Three years after first hearing about kuru, Michael abandoned a
conventional career in medicine and arrived instead with his young family
at a colonial outpost in the north Fore area.
[music]
[Alpers] The general expectation before I left was that I was going to a wild and
dangerous place and that the natives were dangerous people.
[chanting and music]
[music]
[Alpers] There was a real connection with the traditional past. It was
something quite different from anything I've experienced before and I found it
exotic.
[narrator] Michael decided to leave the security of the colonial outpost to
live in Waisa, the small village at the very center of the epidemic.
[Alpers] I wanted to work in a community, follow patients from beginning to end of
their clinical course. And I wanted to photograph them. Kuru was just something
I knew about from reading and it was something in my head, but I had no
experience of it.
[narrator] Michael began to track the full effects of the disease, filming and
observing patients from the first symptoms of kuru with headaches and pains through
to their final agonizing stages, trapped inside their bodies, barely able to move
or communicate.
[Alpers] We didn't know whether it was going to continue to expand.
The whole community might come down with kuru. I mean, it was unknown for me.
And unknown for the people experiencing this.
There were a lot of diseases that were killing people. People accepted the
fact that children were more likely to die perhaps than to live. It was the general
tenor of life in a traditional community, but there was the additional fear about
kuru, and in particular about kuru's sorcery.
[narrator] Sorcerers were feared members of Papua New Guinea's society.
And sorcery is the local explanation for the cause of kuru, a belief that remains
even today.
To try and understand more about sorcery and the Fore, Michael
turned to anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum, working in a nearby village.
[Lindenbaum] People talked about sorcery all the time. Any outsiders who walked
through the village were watched in case they picked up little particles of
peoples' food or hair clippings. So sorcery was an obsession.
[narrator] To the people of Papua New Guinea, sorcery is likened to a
form of murder, and justice was commonly sought through revenge killings.
These were the second highest cause of death after kuru amongst the Fore.
[Alpers] This was a shifting boundary between friends and enemies.
And why would anyone be so evil as to kill members of your family?
Your daughter, your wife.
This was a tragedy in this community.
[narrator] Michael knew that he was dealing with a totally new type of
disease, and after three months in the field, he was no closer to solving
the puzzle that was kuru. Then he met American virologist Carleton Gajdusek,
the only other medical researcher dedicated to trying to understand this
strange disease.
[Alpers] Didn't take very long to realize that we were both on the same
wavelength in terms of an attitude to the world and where we thought what
we were doing would fit in. And I had great respect for Carleton because of all
the work that he'd already done.
[narrator] It was Carleton's early pioneering work that had identified
kuru as affecting only the Fore, but more importantly, he had also established that
it was a totally new disease of the brain.
[Alpers] Kuru is a new disease, and that doesn't happen very often. And Carleton
recognized that this was extremely important and this was something that
had to be investigated. It was an opportunity to learn. And it might
provide information not only that would help the people that were dying of the
disease, but to give us understanding about neurological diseases in general.
I mean, he understood that right from the beginning.
[narrator] Carleton had done every medical test known to science,
in particular investigating the prime suspect: cannibalism.
[Carleton] Everybody's been thinking cannibalism. Everybody I met from before
I saw kuru. But we found that that couldn't be the case. We had no
information. All the medical reasons for not—and we threw it out.
[narrator] Cannibalism had to be dismissed when every one of Carleton's
tests on animals demonstrated that kuru was neither infectious nor transmissible.
[Carleton] We inoculated everything from snakes to bears, and we had
watched them for one, two, three, four, six months. Zero.
This was something new. I didn't know anything about what it was. But it was
certainly new.
[music]
[narrator] For the two kuru researchers, there was still no explanation for the
cause of this strange disease and how it was spreading. Kuru remained a
complete and utter mystery.
[narrator] By the time Kuru investigators Michael Alpers and Carleton Gajdusek
joined forces in 1962, every avenue of human medical research had been
exhausted. But the brain disease killing the Fore people was still a
complete mystery. So Michael and Carleton had to explore other possibilities.
[Alpers] We were forced to look beyond human disease, and then we were given
a vital clue from veterinary sources. It was a neurodegenerative disease of
sheep that had been known for 200 years or more. The French called it the
"trembling disease," and the English, "scrapie."
[narrator] Few medical scientists had even heard of scrapie, as no human brain
disease had ever been linked to an animal disease before.
But for Michael and Carleton, the evidence was compelling.
[Alpers] The similarity of these two diseases was uncanny. And the most
striking thing, when you look at them under the microscope, were the holes
in the brain cells, and this spongy-like effect with thousands of tiny holes
throughout the brain.
[narrator] But what was of more interest was that scrapie had been proven by
veterinarians to be transmissible, with unheard-of incubation periods.
[Alpers] It was transmissible from sheep to sheep, but the incubation period on
these transmission experiments was measured in years. And that was
extraordinary—never been described in any infectious disease before.
So this was significant, and of course the implication of this was that kuru itself
might be infectious, it might be transmissible.
[narrator] No human disease had ever taken more than a few weeks for
infection to surface. And more significantly, no degenerative brain
disease had ever been shown to be transmissible between humans.
[Alpers] And if we were able to show that kuru was transmissible, this would open
up a new field in human medicine. There was no question about that. People would
have to take notice.
[narrator] But first, Michael and Carleton had to embark on something no
scientist had ever attempted.
[Alpers] This meant that we had to do transmission experiments with the
expectation of incredibly long incubation periods.
[narrator] So they planned an experiment that could take up to ten years.
[Carleton] Irrespective of anything else, one had to test whether this disease,
kuru, was transmissible to primates.
[narrator] And there was only one way they felt they could do this: by using
chimpanzees, the closest primates to humans. The plan: to inject them with
brain tissue taken from a kuru victim straight after death.
[Alpers] We were going to go beyond what anybody might have expected.
We were going into an unknown. But it was clear that that's what had to be done.
[narrator] Michael then set about finding a suitable patient for the autopsy.
[eerie sounds]
[Alpers] I knew Kigea as a young girl in the village. The rumor was that she had
kuru, so I went to see her. And she would've been a little bit unsteady on
her feet. In this context, here, where kuru is the dominant disease, you know what
the outcome is. Even an 11-year-old will know that she's got this disease and
she's gonna die.
[narrator] Michael meets with Kigea's family to seek permission to perform
the autopsy.
[Alpers] They used to cut up the bodies all the time, and everyone was familiar
with the parts of the body. So it wasn't a mystery to do an autopsy. But
obviously, for me to do it was another matter.
[narrator] The family agrees, and over the next six months, Michael observes and
records the deterioration of Kigea as kuru begins to take its course.
[Alpers] She couldn't talk, but she couldn't indicated whether she was feeling
okay or whatever. I mean, in this locked-in state, as it was, and knowing she would
die—very, very awful situation to be in. And to watch, to be part of it—it was
emotionally very draining.
[Alpers] Tender love and care was very important. Not only psychologically,
but also physically. It was wonderful to go and see her, but also very distressing.
So it was a—she was—she was a wonderful young girl. I will never forget her.
[somber music]
[narrator] A call goes out from the small hamlet: Kigea has finally died.
Within half an hour, Michael arrives at the house.
[Alpers] There was grieving, shouting, wailing. And all the wailing and the
crying didn't help really the professional activity of doing a good autopsy.
But I shut that out. I couldn't look at Kigea's features. She was a head.
I had to get the skull off. I had to get the brain out. And we had to go quickly.
And we did that. There was no turning back.
[Alpers] Then we gave everybody a hug and we left with the samples.
[narrator] Michael leaves the Fore for Washington, D.C., where Carleton has
organized a facility for the transmission experiment.
[music]
Here, the samples of kuru are injected into the brains of two chimpanzees,
Daisy and Georgette.
[Alpers] For me. it was a real sense of ambivalence about the fact that we
had inoculated these animals. But from our point of view, thinking about all
the suffering that had gone on with the kuru patients, we had a firm
responsibility to do this experiment and to do it right, and to do that, from our
perspective, we had to have chimpanzees.
We couldn't assume a positive outcome, but the implications of positive
transmission were immense.
[narrator] If the chimps contract kuru, Michael and Carleton will have
unearthed an entirely new category of human disease. But even if the
experiment is successful, they will still have no idea why kuru was affecting
only the Fore people. So Michael now focused on epidemiological research,
looking for clues about how kuru might be spreading, sifting through his field
notes and crucially earlier annual census records.
[music]
[Alpers] The reports that the patrol officers got on their census were pretty
accurate, and they would collect information on who had died and whether
they'd died of kuru and who had started kuru since the last census.
[Alpers] So they had information on the mortality from kuru, the prevalence of
Kuru, and incidence—the new cases that had risen since the last census.
And also of course they had the sex, age, and name of these people.
[music]
[narrator] This proved to be crucial information. For the first time, Michael
had collated seven years of records and was able to compare the data.
What he found was startling.
[Alpers] I remember coming into the lab and then suddenly it sprung out at me—
"My goodness." This is a major change. The disease seemed to have disappeared in
the very young patients.
[narrator] He had discovered that no child born after 1960 had come down with kuru.
The question was, why?
[singing]
[narrator] It was 1964 when Michael Alpers got his first real breakthrough in solving
the puzzle of kuru, with the discovery that no Fore child born after 1960 had
developed the disease.
[Alpers] The implication of this change was that the mode of transmission
probably had stopped, and those born since then were growing up free of the
disease. Now, of all the changes that took place at this time, we had to try and
determine which was the most significant or the most relevant kuru.
[narrator] New laws under the Australian administration saw the eradication of
many social and cultural practices throughout the territory.
[Alpers] The people are being told that they had to stop fighting, they had to
build roads, stop child marriage, and they had to plant coffee. And they did
all these things.
[narrator] The Fore had been forced to undergo many changes, but there was
one that stood out.
[narrator] The Fore had stopped their consumption of human meat by
1959, so cannibalism—previously dismissed because of Carleton's earlier
experiments—was now back as a suspect.
[Alpers] If kuru was transmissible, then the most likely to be the transmitting
mode of kuru was the mortuary practice, consumption of the dead during the
mortuary feast.
[eerie music]
[Alpers] These had been essentially religious practices, helping to free the
spirit of the dead. The mortuary practices had been very important, had
been universal, and had been stopped.
[narrator] The mortuary feasts were part of the Fore's customary
funeral rites. And it was only the close relatives of the deceased that ate
the body.
[narrator] The further Michael investigated the Fore's mortuary
practices, the clear it became to him why kuru was affecting mostly the women
and children.
[Alpers] That it was the women and children who were the ones that consumed
the dead body and not the men.
[narrator] The argument that cannibalism was the cause of the spread of kuru
was compelling, but proof would depend on the outcome of the transmission
experiment. As it happened, Michael and Carleton didn't have to wait ten
years for their answer. Two years after being injected with infected brain tissue,
the chimpanzees developed kuru.
[Alpers] Daisy was walking around, falling over, looking just as if she was a kuru
patient. And this bowled Carleton over. He couldn't believe it. It was uncanny
how similar Daisy was. This was a defining moment. We knew that the transmission
of kuru to chimpanzees had been positive— that these animals did have kuru.
[narrator] The significance of this outcome couldn't be overstated.
They had discovered a totally new type of human disease. It was the first
time a human degenerative brain disease had been shown to be transmissible.
And what's more, it had the longest incubation period of any human
disease known to science. Carleton's earlier experiments simply hadn't been
followed for long enough.
[Alpers] This was the outcome of our hopes and dreams, but somehow we
never thought it would happen, and it had happened.
[narrator] In February 1966, Michael and Carleton's groundbreaking discovery
is published to the world.
[music]
[Alpers] I included the names of the chimpanzees, and also the names of
who provided the inoculate. That would be considered very unusual today.
But for me, it was a mark of honor.
[music]
[narrator] With transmission established, there was now no doubt in Michael's mind
that cannibalism was the cause of the spread of kuru.
[Alpers] It suddenly became very clear that we now had the fact of transmission.
We knew this was infectious. It wasn't simply a hypothesis. It was a fact.
It's like the jigsaw puzzle. All the pieces fitted in, and it explained things
that you hadn't expected it to explain.
[narrator] Because it was only close relatives who consumed the dead kuru
victims, this explained why the disease never spread beyond the Fore region.
But what still remained a mystery for Michael was how kuru started
in the first place. To help answer this question, he looked once again to
anthropologist Shirley Lindenbaum.
[Shirley] It was thought when we first went there that because they were not
literate people, they didn't have historical memory.
But there are many ways of placing the particular moment in the history
of Papua New Guinea. They can date things by the year they were married,
the year a child was born, in sort of five-year batches. So we did kind of a
track getting history of first cases stories and just followed it wherever
it took us. Sort of a historical epidemiology. We just followed a path.
And it took us to a point just outside Fore territory in the [inaudible] area.
[music]
[narrator] Shirley traced kuru back to just one case around the beginning
of the 1900s.
But if this single case was the origin of the kuru epidemic, then how did it
appear in the middle of New Guinea? Seemingly, from nowhere.
[Alpers] Where did it come from? We had no idea and nobody could explain that.
There were all kinds of attempts to explain it.
So we postulated that it began spontaneously in an individual.
[narrator] The only suspect to fit this profile was a rare disease that occurred
throughout the world called Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, or CJD.
And for Michael, the symptoms appeared all too familiar.
[Alpers] The characteristics of it were so clearly like kuru, and we knew
that Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease appeared spontaneously in every human population
at about 1 per million per annum. But it'd been completely ignored by
scientists—it was so rare.
[music]
[narrator] With only 20 cases ever reported since its discovery 40 years
earlier, the scientific community had never really paid much attention to the
disease. But Michael and Carleton decided to go out on a limb, attempting
to see if this rare disease could also be transmissible.
[Alpers] We were on our own, very much. There was really nobody else at
that stage who would even dream of trying to see if Creutzfeldt–Jakob
disease was transmissible.
[narrator] So they repeated the kuru transmission experiment, this time with
CJD. And after 18 months, to the surprise of the science community,
the chimpanzees contracted the disease.
And for Michael, the conclusion was now obvious.
[Alpers] The two diseases, kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, were of
the same kind. The most logical explanation was that kuru began in
the same way as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, and one individual came down
with a spontaneous change in their brain and became, sadly, in that
community, the origin of this terrible and vast epidemic.
[somber music]
[Alpers] Transmission of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease was a very exciting outcome,
because this clearly indicated that our belief that kuru would open up a new
area of human medicine was justified.
[narrator] Michael and Carleton had now linked three transmissible diseases.
Their chain of discoveries were setting a new course for human medicine,
and they now gained the recognition from the world's scientific community.
[Alpers] These are very exciting times. I mean intellectually, very exciting.
You know, we'd achieved a lot and it was clear that this probably meant a
Nobel Prize.
[Shirley] They rewards are bigger for medicine than they are for anthropology.
There was always the odor or the smell or the promise of a Nobel Prize in kuru.
[Alpers] When Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease was transmitted, Carleton changed
somewhat because I think he knew that there was a Nobel Prize. More and more
he was spending time giving lectures, going around making sure that everyone
got the message about what had been achieved.
[music]
[narrator] With his eye on a Nobel Prize, Carleton then concentrated on trying
to identify the culprit. The agent causing these diseases was unlike any virus
or bacteria known to science.
[Alpers] They had very weird properties. And those properties continued to be
more and more weird as it was investigated.
[narrator] Carleton's team discovered that the particle causing the disease was
a thousand times smaller than any other known infecting agent, and found only
in the brain and spinal cord. But exactly how it caused the infection was still
a complete mystery.
[Carleton] But I couldn't find an antibody. We still can't. So everything
about it is unique. The rule is still today that every infection on earth
produces antibody. No exception on earth. No AIDS patient on Earth.
Catch on? That's the important rule. So I called it an unconventional virus.
[narrator] And in 1976, Carleton finally won the Nobel Prize for his discovery
of what he called an unconventional virus. But he wasn't the only one hungry for
a Nobel Prize.
[Prusiner] I didn't think these particles were viruses, I didn't think they were
slow viruses, I didn't think they were unconventional viruses. I thought they
were different.
[Carleton] Bullshit. It's a virus.
[narrator] However, biochemist Stanley Prusiner disagreed and gave Carleton's
virus a name, identifying it as a protein particle he called a prion—
starting one of the most bitter rivalries in science.
[Carleton] Stan says, "It's not a virus. It's a prion." That's not a discovery.
That's a word.
You have to realize that this was the first new pathogen in 100 years.
We knew about viruses and bacteria and parasites and fungi for 100 years.
So there was not a lot of—there was not a lot of, I should say, happiness
associated with the introduction of this term on the part of a lot of
scientists. They were really quite antagonistic.
[narrator] Prusiner would have to wait another 20 years to win his Nobel Prize.
His findings turning the world of science upside down.
[music]
[Carleton] Prions cannot be classed as living organisms because they contain
no DNA or RNA, and therefore, how can they reproduce?
And if they're not organisms, how can they cause disease?
[mysterious music]
[narrator] Prions ignore the rules of normal biological reproduction.
They recruit rather than reproduce, targeting normal proteins and converting
them into replicates of themselves. These in turn attack and convert more,
building ever increasing numbers that kill cells in the brain.
[music]
[Stanley] So now we had an entirely new disease paradigm that evolved out of
these basic studies and the discovery of the prion protein.
[narrator] Whilst two of the world's top scientists squabbled over what to call
the infecting agent, Michael was back in Papua New Guinea, where large
numbers of Fore adults and adolescents were continuing to die,
even 15 years after they had stopped eating their dead.
[Alpers] To other people, we're forgetting about kuru. Kuru is something that had
done its work as it were and could be forgotten about. But that wasn't true
for me. We had to continue with the epidemiological surveillance to follow
the epidemic to find out in fact how long it will go to establish the possible
length of the incubation period in a human prion disease.
[narrator] The determined Australian decided to remain in Papua New Guinea
to record every case of the disease. But just how long could these extraordinary
incubation periods extend? And for how many years would Michael have to
track the kuru epidemic?
[narrator] In 1984, 25 years after the cessation of cannibalism, close to 30
adults were still dying of kuru every year. Incubation periods were reaching
lengths way beyond what Michael had ever imagined as possible.
[Alpers] I had no idea how long the epidemic would continue. In the literature,
there's the statement that we have to continue for another decade. And every
decade we kept saying that.
[news reporter] Fear has quickly spread through Europe...
[narrator] And then in 1985, a modern cannibal practice hit headlines around
the world.
[news reporter] Shock waves through an industry worth some 54 million...
[Alpers] Then came BSE. Mad cow disease was clearly in the same group of
diseases as kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, scrapie.
And of course the analogy with kuru and the consumption of the dead was immediate,
because of this practice of feeding calves meat and bone meal which derived
from brain material and spinal cord.
[Alpers] We know with kuru that they are the infectious parts of the body.
And the big question of course was, was it transmissible to humans?
[music]
[narrator] And it was ten years after it first surfaced in Britain that mad cow
disease was found to have crossed over to the human population.
Called variant CJD, there have been over 150 cases in the UK since 1995 from
eating infected beef.
[John Collinge] A large majority of the UK population has potentially been
exposed to BSE. We don't know what the infectious dose or the lethal dose
that you need to be exposed to to develop the disease is.
We don't know what lies ahead. We don't know how many people are actually
silently harboring the infection.
[narrator] Professor John Collinge spearheads the research into variant CJD
in the UK. One of the first people he contacted for help was Michael Alpers
in Papua New Guinea, where, remarkably, he was still finding one or two kuru
cases every year.
[Alpers] The natural thing to do was to turn to the only other known human
epidemic of prion diseases, which was kuru.
[Collinge] Kuru has been an immense interest to everyone working in the prion
field for many years. It's been almost historical interest, particularly about
the range of incubation periods. We're particularly interested in what the
upper limit of that might be.
[Alpers] We have documentation on every case of kuru that's occurred.
So it's the full record of a disease. And we knew that in some cases, kuru could
have an incredibly long incubation period of over 50 years.
[narrator] Michael's work is now providing the foundations for predicting the
outcome of variant CJD in the UK, but the fact that this was transmitted from
cows to humans means incubation periods could be even longer.
[Alpers] When you've crossed a species barrier in transmission, you tended to
double the incubation period. So this means that there's a real possibility of
incubation periods in variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease of up to 100
years beyond the normal human lifespan. And that's a big worry from the public
health point of view.
Because kuru, BSE in cattle—that's a disease of the brain. Variant CJD is not
just a disease of the brain; it's a disease of the lymph organs. It's in the
spleen, in the tonsils, in the gut, and in the blood. And this means that there's
a risk that the disease could be unknowingly transmitted by blood
transfusion or organ transplants. And indeed, there already has been transmission
from human to human through blood.
[narrator] Scientific research now focused on genetic studies trying to determine
why some people contracted the disease earlier than others.
[Reeder] The work now is I'm looking at the genetics of the families and
the populations that kuru has affected. Is there anything different about the
people who have gone down with kuru early to those who go down late?
Is there anything different about the people who don't get kuru, even though
they might have been present at the feasting where the prion was?
[narrator] The genetic research has shown that the majority of humans
are likely to have longer incubation periods. And although the number
of variant CJD cases peaked in the UK in 2000 with only a handful of cases
throughout the rest of the world, Michael now believes there could be a much
larger wave of the epidemic for decades to follow.
[Alpers] The first 200 cases of variant CJD were all of the kind genetically
that have short incubation periods. And so we predicted from our knowledge
of kuru that another wave of the epidemic may come, which would be much broader
and longer, and that new wave has probably just begun.
[shouting]
[narrator] But the genetic studies have also revealed a spectacular discovery
about all our ancient ancestors.
[Alpers] There are certain genetic patterns that are found in the Fore.
And they clearly relate to the presence of kuru. And looking in other human
populations, sophisticated genetic studies were done. And the expectation
was the kuru and the Fore would be one pattern and the rest of the world
would be the contrasting pattern. But no. It turned out that these detailed studies
suggested that in the remote human past, the same practices occurred.
Cannibalism and such practices were universal.
[narrator] In other words, we could all be descended from ancient cultures
which practiced the eating of their dead. But even in more recent history,
cannibalism in its various forms was more widespread than we commonly accept.
[music]
[Reeder] I think there's very, very important social aspects that have
come out of the research here that need to be remembered, and that is
the consumption of human flesh is just not unique to this particular area.
It was a very common practice in the British Navy in the 17th century.
The recollections of the "roasting of the long pig," or you see the shipwrecked
sailor sort of stories.
[Lindenbaum] People in England attended hangings to get the first blood to drink
in the 17th and 18th centuries in England. You know, so—so we were cannibals
ourselves. It's our supression of it in ourselves that's given us this attitude
about other people. We think that we're so civilized and other people are not.
[Reeder] This isn't some strange practice by a primitive people in PNG, this is a
fairly common social practice that a millennia ago we might have seen
similar practices all around the world.
[music]
[narrator] Michael has devoted 50 years of his life to helping the Fore.
And today, they're putting on a public feast to honor him.
[clapping
To the Fore, he is family.
[Alpers] Right from the beginning, there was this bond of common humanity.
And this is something you don't get from reading the anthropological literature.
You always get the feeling that these people are so different, that you could
never really connect. But the connection came almost immediately. That was an
extraordinary experience.
[narrator] And for Michael, it's a relationship he hopes will one day
finally emerge from the shadow of kuru.
[Alpers] Kuru has always been central to my life from the moment I started
on it. And it's still there. We haven't snipped that thread yet. And I hope—
I've hoped now for some time that I'll be able to be around when we can say
we've seen the last case of kuru.
[singing]
[narrator] The DVD of this program is available at Dimmick's and JB Hifi.
For more information about the "Secrets of the Human Body" science
season, go to sbs.com.au/documentary.
[singing]