Patrick Tierney Edmonston measles vaccines
Subject: : Imminent anthropological scandal
Scandal about to be caused by publication of book by
Patrick Tierney (Darkness in El Dorado. New York. Norton.
Publication date: October 1, 2000).
Madam President, Mr. President-elect:
We write to inform you of an impending scandal that will affect the
American Anthropological profession as a whole in the eyes of the
public, and arouse intense indignation and calls for action among
members of the Association. In its scale, ramifications, and sheer
criminality and corruption it is unparalleled in the history of
Anthropology. The AAA will be called upon by the general media and its
own membership to take collective stands on the issues it raises, as
well as appropriate redressive actions. All of this will obviously
involve you as Presidents
of the Association-so the sooner you know about the story that is about
to break, the better prepared you can be to deal with it. Both of us
have seen galley copies of a book by Patrick Tierney, an investigative
journalist, about the actions of anthropologists and associated
scientific researchers (notably geneticists and medical experimenters)
among the Yanomami of Venezuela over the past thirty-five years.
Because of the sensational nature of its revelations, the notoriety of
the people it exposes, and the prestige of the organs of the academic
establishment it implicates, the book is bound to be widely read both
outside and inside the profession. As both an indication and a vector of
its public impact, we have learned that The New Yorker magazine is
planning to publish an extensive excerpt, timed to coincide with the
publication of the book (on or about October 1st). The focus of the
scandal is the long-term project for study of the Yanomami of Venezuela
organized by James Neel, the human geneticist, in which Napoleon
Chagnon, Timothy Asch, and numerous other anthropologists took part. The
French anthropologist Jacques Lizot, who also works with the Yanomami
but is not part of Neel-Chagnon project, also figures in a different
scandalous capacity.
One of Tierney's more startling revelations is that the whole
Yanomami project was an outgrowth and continuation of the Atomic
Energy Comissions secret program of experiments on human
subjects James Neel, the
originator and director of the project, was part of the medical
and genetic research team attached to the Atomic Energy
Commission since the days of the Manhattan Project. He was a
member of the small group of researchers responsible for studying
the effects of radiation on human subjects. He personally headed
the team that investigated the effects of the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki bombs on survivors,. He was put in charge of the study of
the effects of atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and later
was involved in the studies of the effects of the radioactivity
from the experimental A and H bomb blasts in the Marshall Islands
on the natives (our colleague May Jo Marshall has a lot to say
about these studies in the Marshalls and Neel's role in them).
The same group also secretly carried out experiments on human
subjects in the USA. These included injecting people with
radioactive plutonium without their knowledge or permission,in
some cases leading to their death or disfigurement ( Neel himself
appears not to have given any of these experimental injections).
Another member of the same AEC group of human geneticists and
medical experimenters, a Venezuelan, Marcel Roche, was a close
colleague of Neel's and spent some time at his AEC-funded center
for Human Genetics at Ann Arbor. He returned to Venezuela after
the war and did a study of the Yanomami that involved
administering doses of a radioactive isotope of iodine and
analyzing samples of blood for genetic data. Roche and his
project were apparently the connection that led Neel to choose
the Yanomami for his big study of the genetics of "leadership"
and differential rates of reproduction among dominant and
sub-dominant males in a genetically "isolated" human
population.
There is thus a genealogical connection between the the human
experiments carried out by the AEC, and Neel's and Chagnon's
Yanomami project, which was from the outset funded by the AEC.
Tierney presents convincing evidence that Neel and Chagnon, on
their trip to the Yanomami in 1968, greatly exacerbated, and
probably started, the epidemic of measles that killed "hundreds,
perhaps thousands" (Tierney's language-the exact figure will
never be known) of Yanomami. The epidemic appears to have been
caused, or at least worsened and more widely spread, by a
campaign of vaccination carried out by the research team, which
used a virulent vaccine (Edmonson B) that had been
counter-indicated by medical experts for use on isolated
populations with no prior exposure to measles (exactly the
Yanomami situation). Even among populations with prior
contact and consequent partial genetic immunity to measles, the
vaccine was supposed to be used only with supportive injections
of gamma globulin.
It was known to produce effects virtually indistinguishable from
the disease of measles itself. Medical experts, when informed
that Neel and his group used the vaccine in question on the
Yanomami, typically refuse
to believe it at first, then say that it is incredible that they
could have done it, and are at a loss to explain why they would
have chosen such an inappropriate and dangerous vaccine. There is
no record that Neel sought any medical advice before applying the
vaccine. He never informed the appropriate organs of the
Venezuelan government that his group was planning to carry out a
vaccination campaign, as he was legally required to do. Neither
he nor any other member of the expedition, including Chagnon and
the other anthropologists, has ever explained why that vaccine
was used, despite the evidence that it actually caused or at a
minimum greatly exacerbated the fatal epidemic.
Once the measles epidemic took off, closely following the
vaccinations
with Edmonson B, the members of the research team refused to
provide any medical assistance to the sick and dying Yanomami, on
explicit orders from Neel. He insisted to his colleagues that
they were only there to observe and record the epidemic, and that
they must stick strictly to their roles as scientists, not
provide medical help.
All this is bad enough, but the probable truth that emerges, by
implication, from Tierney's documentation is more chilling.
There was, it turns out, a compelling theoretical motive for Neel
to want to observe an epidemic of measles, or comparable
"contact" disease, or at least an outbreak virtually
indistinguishable from the real thing-precisely the effect that
the vaccine he chose was known to cause-and to produce one for
this purpose if necessary. This motive emerges from Teirney's
documentation of Neel's extreme eugenic theories and his
documented statements about what he was hoping to find among the
Yanomami, interpreted against the background of his long
association with the Atomic Energy Commission's secret
experiments on human subjects. Neel believed that
"natural" human
society (as it existed everywhere before the advent of
large-scale a gricultural societies and contemporary states with
their vast populations) consisted of small, genetically isolated
groups, in which, according to his eugenically slanted genetic
theories, dominant genes (specifically, a gene he believed
existed for "leadership" or "innate ability") would have
a
selective advantage, because male carriers of this gene could
gain access to a disproportionate share of the available females,
thus reproducing their own superior genes more frequently than
less "innately able" males. The result, supposedly, would be the
continual upgrading of the human genetic stock. Modern mass
societies, by contrast, consist of vast genetically entropic
"herds" in which, he theorized, recessive genes could not be
eliminated by selective competition and superior leadership genes
would be swamped by mass genetic mediocrity. The political
implication of this fascistic eugenics is clearly that society
should be reorganized into small breeding isolates in which
genetically superior males could emerge into dominance,
eliminating or subordinating the male losers in the competition
for leadership and women, and amassing harems of brood females.
A big problem for this program, however, was the tendency,
generally recognized by virtually all qualified population
geneticists and epidemiologists, for small breeding isolates to
lack genetic resistance
to diseases incubated in other groups, and their consequent
vulnerability to contact epidemics. For Neel, this meant that the
emergence of genetically superior males in small breeding
isolates would tend to be undercut and neutralized by epidemic
diseases to which they would be genetically vulnerable, while the
supposedly genetically entropic mass societies of modern
democratic states, the antitheses of Neel's ideal
alpha-male-dominated groups, would be better adapted for
developing
genetic immunity to such "contact" diseases. It is known that
Neel, virtually alone among contemporary geneticists, rejected
the genetic (and historical) evidence for the vulnerability of
genetically isolated groups to diseases introduced through
contact from other populations. It is possible that he thought
that genetically superior members of such groups might prove to
have differential levels of immunity and thus higher rates of
survival to imported diseases. In such a case, such exogenous
epidemics, despite the enormous losses of general population they
inflict, might actually be shown to increase the relative
proportion of genetically superior individuals to the total
population, and thus be consistent with Neel's eugenic program.
However this may have been, Tierney's well-documented account, in
its entirety, strongly supports the conclusion that the epidemic
was in all probabilty deliberately caused as an experiment
designed to produce scientific support for Neel's eugenic theory.
This remains only an inference in the present state of our
knowledge: there is no "smoking gun" in the form of a written
text or recorded speech by Neel. It is nevertheless the only
explanation that makes sense of a number of otherwise
inexplicable facts, including Neel's known interest in observing
an epidemic in a small isolated group for which detailed records
of genetic and genealogical relations were available, his
otherwise inexplicable selection of a virulent vaccine known to
produce effects virtually identical with the disease itself, his
behavior once the epidemic had started (insisting on allowing it
to run its course unhindered by medical assistance while
meticulously documenting its progress and the genealogical
relations of those who perished and those who survived) and his
own obdurate silence, until his death in February, as to why he
carried out the vaccination program in the first place, and
above all with the lethally dangerous vaccine.
The same conclusion is reinforced by considering the objectives
of the anthropological research carried out by Chagnon under
Neel's initial direction and continued support. Chagnon's work
has been consistently directed toward portraying Yanomami society
as exactly the kind of originary human society envisioned by
Neel, with dominant males (the most frequent killers) having the
most wives or sexual partners and offspring. If this pristine,
eugenically optimal society could be shown to survive a contact
epidemic with its structure of dominant male polygynists
essentially intact, regardless of quantitatively serious
population
losses, Neel might plausibly be able to argue that his eugenic
social vision was vindicated. If the epidemic was indeed produced
as an experiment, either wholly or in part, the genetic studies
on the correlation of blood group samples and genealogies
carried out by Chagnon and some of his students thus formed
integral parts of this massive, and massively fatal, human
experiment.
As another reader of Tierney's ms commented, Mr. Tierney's
analysis is a case study of the dangers in science of the
uncontrolled ego, of lack of respect for life, and of greed and
self-indulgence. It is a further extraordinary revelation of
malicious and perverted work conducted under the aegis of the
Atomic Energy Commission.
Tierney's revelations begin, but do not end, with the 1968
epidemic. There are many more episodes and sub-plots, almost
equally awful, to his narrative of the antics of anthropologists
among the Yanomami. Enough has been said by this time, however,
for you to see that the Association is going to have to make
some collective response to this book, both to the facts it
documents and the probable conclusions it implies.There will be a
storm in the media, and another in the general scholarly
community, and
no doubt several within anthropology itself. We must be ready.
Tierney
devotes much of the book to a critique of Napoleon Chagnon's
work (and actions). He makes clear Chagnon has faithfully
striven, in his ethnographic and theoretical accounts of the
Yanomami, to represent them
as conforming to Neel's ideas about the Hobbesian savagery of
"natural" human societies , and how this constitutes the natural
selective context for the rise to social dominance and
reproductive advantage of males with the gene for
"leadership"
or "innate ability" (thus Chagnon's emphasis on Yanomami
"fierceness" and propensity for chronic warfare, and the supposed
statistical tendency for men who kill more enemies to have more
female sexual/reproductive partners). He documents how all these
aspects of Chagnon's account of the Yanomami are based on false,
non-existent or
misinterpreted data. In other words, Chagnon's main claims about
Yanomami society, the ones that have been so much heralded by
sociobiologists and other partisans of his work, namely that men
who kill more reproduce more and have more female partners, and
that such men become the dominant leaders of their communities,
are simply not true. Thirdly and most troublingly, he reports
that Chagnon has not stopped with cooking and re-cooking his data
on conflict but has actually attempted to manufacture the
phenomenon itself, actually fomenting conflicts between
Yanomami communities, not once but repeatedly.
In his film work with Asch, for example, Chagnon induced Yanomami
to enact fights and aggressive behavior for Asch's camera,
sometimes building whole artificial villages as "sets" for the
purpose, which were presented as spontaneous slices of Yanomami
life unaffected by the presence of the anthropologists. Some of
these unavowedly artificial scenarios, however, actually turned
into real conflicts, partly as a result of Chagnon's policy of
giving vast amounts of presents to the villages that agreed to
put on the docu-drama, which distorted their relations with their
neighbors in ways that encouraged outbreaks of raiding. In sum,
most of the Yanomami conflicts that Chagnon documents, that are
the basis of his interpretation of Yanomami society as a
neo-Hobbesian system of endemic warfare, were caused directly or
indirectly by himself: a fact he invariably neglects to report.
This is not just a matter of bad ethnography or unreflexive
theorizing: Yanomami were maimed and killed in these conflicts,
and whole communities were disrupted to the point of fission and
flight.(Brian Ferguson has also documented some of this story,
but Tierney adds much new evidence). As a general point, it is
clear that Chagnon's whole Yanomami oeuvre is more radically
continuous with Neel's eugenic theories, and his unethical
approach to experimentation on human subjects, than appears
simply from a reading of Chagnon's works by themselves.
Chagnon is not the only anthropologist mentioned in Tierney's
narrative. Some of his students, like Hames and Good, are also
dealt with (not so unfavorably). The F French anthropologist,
Jaques Lizot, also gets a chapter. He has had nothing to do with
Neel or Chagnon (in fact has been a trenchant and cogent critic
of their work), but he has an Achilles heel of his own in the
form of a harem of Yanomami boys that he keeps, and showers with
presents in exchange for sexual favors (he has also been known to
resort to young girls when boys were unavailable). On the sexual
front, there are also passing references to Chagnon himself
demanding that villagers bring him girls for sex.
There is still more, in the form of collusion by Neel and
Chagnon with sinister Venezuelan politicians attempting to gain
control of Yanomami lands for illegal gold mining concessions,
with the anthropologists providing "cover" for the illegal mine
developer as a "naturalist" collaborating with the
anthropological researchers, in exchange for the politician's
guaranteeing continuing access to the Indians for the
anthropologists.
This nightmarish story -a real anthropological heart of darkness
beyond the imagining of even a Josef Conrad
(though not,
perhaps, a Josef Mengele)--will be seen (rightly in our view) by
the public, as well as
most anthropologists, as putting the whole discipline on trial.
As another
reader of the galleys put it, This book should shake anthropology
to its very foundations. It should cause the field to understand
how the corrupt and depraved protagonists could have spread
their poison for so long while they were accorded great respect
throughout the Western World and generations of undergraduates
received their lies as the introductory substance of
anthropology. This should never be allowed to happen again.
We venture to predict that this reaction is fairly representative
of the response that will follow the publication of Tierney's
book and the New Yorker excerpt. Coming as they will less than
two months before the San Francisco meetings, these publication
events virtually guarantee that the Yanomami scandal will be at
its height at the Meetings. This should give
an optimal opportunity for the Association to mobilize the
membership and the institutional structure to deal with it. The
writers, both emeritus
members of the Committee for Human Rights, have arranged with
Barbara Johnston, the present chair of the CfHR, that the open
Forum put on by the Committee this year be devoted to the
Yanomami case. This seemed the best way to provide a venue for a
public airing of the scandal, given that the program is of
course already closed. With Johnston's consent, we have invited
Patrick Tierney to come to the Meetings and be present at the
Forum. He has accepted. He has also agreed to have a copy of the
book ms sent to Johnston, for the use of the CfHR. We have also
tentatively
agreed with Barbara that the CfHR should draft a press release,
which the
President (either or both of you) could (if you and the Executive
Board approve) circulate to the media. There are obviously human
rights aspects of this case that make the CfHR appropriate, but
the Ethics Committee, the Society for Latin American
Anthropology, and the Association for Latina and Latino
Anthropology should also be notified and involved, separately
or jointly. These obviously do not exhaust the possibilities--- a
lot of
thought and planning remains to be done. Our point is simply that
the time to start is now.
Rosemary Gianno, Ph.D. Associate Professor of
Sociology/Anthropology
Rhodes Hall Keene State College Keene NH 03435-3400 USA
rgianno@keene.edu Phone: (603)
358-2510 Fax: (603) 358-2184
George Aaron Broadwell, g.broadwell@albany.edu
Anthropology; Linguistics and Cognitive Science,
University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY 12222 | 518-442-4711
Web page: http://www.albany.edu/anthro/fac/broadwell.htm
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