The Possession of Kuru: Exchange Relations In Modern Science

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

Proposal Abstract Warwick Anderson, University of California -San Francisco THE POSSESSION OF KURU: EXCHANGE RELATIONS IN MODERN SCIENCE This project explores the material cultures of modern by looking intensively at the case of D. Carleton Gajdusek's investigations of the disease of kuru, conducted among the Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s. This focus is on the circulation of goods in global biomedical science. This is a multi-sited historical study designed principally to describe and explain transactions involving local inhabitants, anthropologists and biomedical scientists, exchanges clustered around contested kuru material, principally brains, blood and corpses. The goal is to outline some of the basic features of the material cultures of late colonial, postwar scientific exchange, and to see how these material cultures structured and transformed the identities of transactors. The transaction of kuru material can help us to think more generally about the creation of value and the circulation of goods in global science. In view of Gajdusek's later (1990s) involvement in the patenting of cell lines, this study will additionally present an unrivalled opportunity to consider how local exchange regimes of science may have changed over the last fifty years, in particular to investigate whether science has become more commodified and marketable. The study of the character of kuru transactions etches in especially clear relief the more recent global traffic of genetic material (including that proposed in the Human Genome Diversity Project). Moreover, the analysis of the changing transactional orders of global science can serve to illuminate contemporary tensions between ownership and authorship in science, and prompts us to reconsider scientific authorship as an exchange function, possibly now an imperiled form of exchange, not just as a writing process. This is essentially a historical study that addresses issues usually in the province of anthropology or sociology: it describes how scientific identities are fashioned in collection and exchange; it advances the analysis of the material cultures of late-twentieth century science; it explores new ways of describing the increasing global circulation of goods in science, and the creation of value in international scientific transactions; and it brings the Asia-Pacific region into focus in science and technology studies as an important, but previously much neglected, location of scientific production and exchange. The outcomes include a monograph, a series of articles, and enhanced graduate student education.