‘We agreed that they could conduct an autopsy on my brother’

I was only a child when Dr Carleton Gajdusek, Michael Alpers and Shirley Lindenbaum conducted research on kuru in the South Fore. They patrolled around the villages and saw how many of our people were dying of kuru and the number of orphans in our villages. My late brother, Mr Animo Kaguya, was the only member of our family involved in the early research on kuru; he assisted in carrying equipment, transporting specimens and locating kuru patients. He was living happily with his family when he started to show signs of kuru in 2002; later, Michael came and examined him and confirmed that he did indeed have kuru. Jerome Whitfield and his colleagues from the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research approached our family and we agreed that they could conduct an