Kuru: The Science and The Sorcery

[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]