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During the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the late geneticist James Neel brought from the Brazilian and Venezuelan Amazon thousands of Yanomami specimens. The Yanomami gave blood, hair and skin, among other samples, and received -- along with the usual pots, machetes and glass beads -- the promise of clinical help for their increasingly dire health situation. For more than 30 years, the Yanomami did not hear anything else about those specimens, until now. They have just learned that their blood was used as the control group in experiments on the effects of radiation -- a research project financed by the Atomic Energy Commission -- and that in the 1990s the samples were turned over to the Human Genome Project. The Yanomami are shocked to learn that thousands of their blood samples and those of their dead relatives are in storage in an old refrigerator at Penn State University and are the property of the U.S. government.
This information was unearthed by Patrick Tierney and published in Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon, a book that brought enormous controversy to the academic community even before it came out last fall. Accusations that famous American scientists had caused a devastating measles epidemic among the Yanomami in 1968 as a consequence of a callous eugenic experiment with an outdated vaccine made international headlines. Some scholars jumped to the defense of Neel and Chagnon, attempting to discredit the book even before they had a chance to read it. The American Anthropological Association (AAA) has created a committee to investigate Tierney's allegations.
By the time the book arrived in stores, Tierney had toned down his charges on the measles epidemic, and several scholars had begun independent research on the issue. It soon became evident through the opinion of physicians and medical scientists that the vaccine could not have caused the epidemic. The live virus contained in the Edmonston B vaccine used by Neel's expedition can cause strong reactions similar to the disease itself, but it is not transmissible to others. Testimony and...