The Best Australian Science Writing 2013 by Jane McCredie Read Free Book Online

The ones involved put on masks to protect the tissue and I had gloves.
    â€˜The father, or a close relative, would hold the head, and I would take the top of the skull off with a bone handsaw. It would take maybe 20 minutes … like cutting an avocado. I would go to particular parts of the brain … take out small cubes. My assistant would hold out the bottle that was relevant, take the lid off, and I’d pop it in.
    â€˜Then I’d take the whole brain out and put it in a bucket full of formalin and cotton wool so it wouldn’t be deformed, and putthe lid on. All our samples would go into an insulated box. Then I put the skull cap back on, and sewed up. Then we said goodbye… gave everyone a hug, and took off. I did this five times. It was enough.’
    The insulated box would be taken immediately to the station at Okapa and put in the freezer. The next morning a chartered aircraft would come to collect it and fly it to Lae.
    From Lae the box would catch a flight direct to Melbourne, where it was collected by a haematologist from the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories, who would store the tissue in a deep freezer until it could be sent to the United States National Institutes of Health in Washington DC where Carleton Gajdusek had assembled some chimpanzees in a primate facility for the next phase of the experiment.
    In early 1964 Alpers followed the samples to Washington, where he would spend the next four years exploring kuru ’s epidemiology and genetics, but even at that distance, the emotional backwash was inescapable. By now the tissue he had taken from Kigea and another young boy called Eiru had been inoculated into a pair of chimps – Daisey and Georgette – and Alpers would visit them twice a week, examining them, shooting footage, growing fond of them and their quirks and characters. ‘Chimps are so close to humans it made them difficult to use in lots of ways, but we felt we had to do it.’
    Two years into the experiment, Daisey and Georgette started behaving strangely. Their gait changed, they had difficulty walking, and lost co-ordination. When they couldn’t pick up pieces of apple and put them to their mouths, they improvised, using their lips to scoop the apple from the ground. Alpers had seen it all before.
    â€˜One day I was examining them and wrote down “clinical impression – kuru ”. It was just striking. The tremors, the gait … the intention tremor which is a classic sign of cerebellar disease,which is what kuru is.’ Gajdusek was again in PNG and Alpers sent a telegram summoning him back. By the time he arrived a week later, ‘Daisey was falling all over the place … it was awful. But at the same time there was this elation that our experiment was going to be successful.’
    Alpers was convinced Daisey was sick from the agent that had come to her from Kigea, and Georgette from Eiru’s brain, but it would be several more months before that could be proved, with samples taken from Georgette’s brain at autopsy travelling to London for scrutiny by a neuropathologist.
    The day the telegram arrived back in Washington advising that the chimp’s brain pathology was ‘indistinguishable’ from human kuru ‘we knew transmission was true’. Alpers, Gajdusek and their colleague Joseph Gibbs ‘wrote our paper in a day, dividing it in three, and posted it at midnight’.
    Unusually the paper identified Kigea and Eiru – as well as Daisey and Georgette – each by name. Normal scientific convention is to scrub the documentation clean of such emotionally charged contaminants as identity. But in this instance, somewhere in their haste, the scientists’ instinct was to give credit where it was painfully due.
    The paper appeared in the journal Nature , just two weeks later. It was a watershed finding, identifying kuru as a new category of infectious disease that caused the degeneration of the brain