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Erin Brennan

What are the major questions concerning the Darkness in El Dorado controversy? - 63 views

The American Anthropological Association is called on to take action on the allegations made by Patrick Tierney, an investigative journalist, about the genetic and medical experiments conducted by ...

Questions

Brendan Raleigh

Coronil et al., Perspectives on Darkness in El Dorado - 1 views

  • The first strand of the book, which occupies less than one-tenth of Tierney's text but has received the most public attention, argues that Neel and Chagnon collected blood samples for the Atomic Energy Commission to compare mutation rates in populations contaminated by radiation with those in one uncontaminated by it and at the same time carried out an experiment on immunity formation among an isolated population involving a measles vaccination program. According to Tierney, although a safer and cheaper vaccine was already available, Neel chose the Edmonston B vaccine because it produced antibodies that would allow for comparison of European and Yanomami immune systems and prove the latter's ability to generate levels of antibiodies similar to those of populations previously exposed to the disease. Tierney's most controversial and damaging charge is that these activities may have led to a deadly outbreak of measles. While medical experts agree that no vaccine could have caused an epidemic, it is still not clear why this outdated vaccine was chosen or what measures were taken to care for those affected by its known reaction.
  • For Tierney, however, seemingly any biomedical research is unethical; all studies for Tierney are "experiments" (however observational their methods), and all "experiments" that do not directly benefit the community involved in the study are "criminal" (p. 43). Thus James Neel, a recently deceased distinguished human geneticist as well as physician, who carried out an extensive series of biomedical studies of the Yanomami, is criminalized.
  • ere is where Neel parted company with classical eugenics. He never advocated selective breeding practices. He merely pointed out the selective consequences of Yanomami polygyny (Neel 1980 ) and noted with irony the extreme unlikelihood that populations in the industrialized world would adopt Yanomami marriage practices. His prescriptions for the gene pool (Neel 1994 ) all involved manipulating the environment rather than genetics. These included efforts to control population growth, "euphenics" or the reshaping of environments to "ameliorate the expression of our varied genotypes" (Neel 1994 :353), keeping mutation rates as low as possible through control of exposure to environmental mutagens, and providing counseling to prospective parents to decrease the transmission of genetic diseases. None of these ideas bear any resemblance to classic eugenic schemes.
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  • Elsewhere Tierney's misrepresentations cannot be dismissed as this kind of error. For instance, he associates unethical experiments in the University of Rochester Medical School with Neel, who was "company commander" and "ran much of the hospital" (p. 301). But rather than running the hospital, the page cited by Tierney from Neel's autobiography ( 1994 :22) says that he drilled the students in military exercises required by their army service. This is a particularly useful example of Tierney's misuse of citations, since it is so easily checked.
Stephanie Hegarty

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&ved=0CEAQFjAC&url=http%3... - 2 views

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    a devastating measles epidemic broke out "coincident with," to use Neel's phrasing, his arrival in the field in 1968. Neel indicated he had brought two thousand doses of measles vaccine and had planned to hand these over to mis- sionaries in the region. But faced with the epidemic, Neel and his team vaccinated many Yanomami as well. Here is how Neel described his actions: "Much of our carefully designed protocol for that expedition was quickly scrapped as we dashed from village to village, organizing the missionaries, ourselves doing our share of immunizations but also treatment when we reached villages to which measles had preceded us. We always carried a gross, almost ridiculous excess of antibi- otics - now we needed everything we had, and radioed for more" (1994:162). To what degree this description accurately reflects Neel's actions during the epidemic is one of the critical questions in the controversy. Tierney accused Neel of wors- ening the measles epidemic through his actions; others have suggested Neel could have done more than he did to save Yanomami lives during the epidemic.
Stephanie Hegarty

Response to Allegations against James V. Neel in Darkness in El Dorado, by Patrick Tierney - 3 views

  • The most serious charge accuses Neel of deliberately initiating a 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomami by using a hazardous and contraindicated vaccine to test theories about human evolution, “leadership genes,” and infectious diseases.
  • Various other allegations against Neel in Tierney’s book include the following:1.That he failed to provide medical care to the Yanomami during the measles epidemic.2.That the Yanomami population-genetics studies directed by Neel were performed as controls for comparison with work on mutation detection among the survivors of the atomic bombing in Japan.3.That Neel performed unethical experiments on the Yanomami, involving radioactive iodine injections.4.That he sought to demonstrate the existence of a “leadership gene” among the Yanomami headmen.5.That Neel was somehow involved in administering plutonium injections into patients in the Rochester hospital where he was a medical house officer in the 1940s.6.That he discounted the risks of atomic radiation.7.That Neel denounced modern American society and advocated improving the human race by principles of coercive eugenics.
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    "The most serious charge accuses Neel of deliberately initiating a 1968 measles epidemic among the Yanomami by using a hazardous and contraindicated vaccine to test theories about human evolution, "leadership genes," and infectious diseases."
Erin Brennan

The Fierce anthropologists - 0 views

  • Chagnon, aged 63, is one of the most distinguished anthropologists alive.
  • But he has also made plenty of enemies. Some are professional. Chagnon’s explanation of Yanomamö violence was deeply controversial, both. among people who understand it as a general theory of human nature (which it is meant to be), and among those who see it only as a particular explanation of Yanomamö culture. The Yanomamo are not, in fact, exceptionally violent by the standards of aboriginal people.
  • Chagnon’s enemies believe the Yanomamö sometimes fought because he had paid them to act for his cameras.
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  • It was at this stage that a journalist named Patrick Tierney, who had earlier written a book claiming that human sacrifice survived among some Indian Andean tribes, spent a year there. Darkness in El Dorado, the book on Tierney’s adventures among the gold miners which was to have been published by Viking in 1995, never appeared. Instead, last year WW Norton announced it was publishing his book, which had now become a tale of ‘How scientists and journalists devastated the Amazon’,
  • Chagnon had enjoyed good relations with the Roman Catholic Salesian missionaries who control access to most of the region. Indeed, the relationship was so good, he told me, that he was asked by one priest to arrange the murder of another missionary who had gone off the rails and taken up with a Yanomamö concubine far up the river (he declined). But the relationship started to unravel as the Yanomamö grew more famous.
  • Some of his enemies are personal. He is by all accounts a boisterous man (he calls the two professors who have attacked him ‘absolute zeros’). Moving among the Yanomamö, Chagnon had the sort of personality — or discovered it in himself— that could thrive and impose itself on a brutal and treacherous political environment. For the first months of his fieldwork, while he was learning the language, the Yanomamö systematically lied to him. He needed to collect genealogies in order to trace the histories of the people he moved among, yet among the Yanomamö there is a taboo against using people’s names, and especially’ the names of the dead.
  • Neel and Chagnon ‘greatly exacerbated’ and probably started the epidemic of measles that killed so many Yanomamö. They caused or at least worsened the epidemic by their use of a virulent vaccine (Edmonston B) that was quite wrong for use on a population like this with no prior exposure to measles.
  • The most Tierney would concede at a press conference is that ‘the question of transmissibility [whether the vaccine could have caused the epidemic] is still up in the air’, at which point Dr Yvonne Maldonado, the expert on infectious diseases and childhood immunisation on the panel, finally lost her cool: ‘You’re not a physician, not an epidemiologist and not even a scientist as far as I can tell... There is absolutely no evidence for transmissibility.’ By now she was almost shouting at the man two feet away from her. ‘There is no evidence! The vaccine did not cause an epidemic. It did not cause deaths.’
  • No one doubts that the situation of the Yanomamo and of the other indigenous peoples of South America is truly dreadful.
  • When I pressed Professor Sponsel on the question of whether he should have checked these damaging allegations that a colleague had been responsible for hundreds of deaths before passing them on. he grew quite heated. ‘I’m not a medical doctor. My role, ethically, was to alert the AAA because of my concern with human rights. After that, the only role I had was to respond to questions when people asked me in a civil, polite manner. Terry Turner and I wrote that memo to the two top people in the organisation and sent copies to four other people in the committee on ethics. Whoever leaked it is the one who should be sanctioned or censured.
James Granderson

El Dorado Interim Report/Request for Information - 1 views

  • El Dorado Task Force
  • activities that may have resulted in personal gain to scientists, anthropologists and journalists while contributing harm to the Yanomami
  • activities by anthropologists, scientists and journalists that may have contributed to malnutrition, disease and disorganization
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  • evolution of various codes of ethics and ethical guidelines existing during the time a particular set of actions occurred
  • That damaging representations of the Yanomami were published and repeated even after such representations were criticized as likely to cause them harm
  • That a program of vaccination of Yanomami undertaken by James Neel in 1968 caused an epidemic of measles
  • That practices of anthropologists in the field were unethical, ignoring legal constraints and ethics codes and tending, either through oversight or purposefully, to exacerbate violence, spread disease, and violate the dignity of individual Yanomami through, for instance, inappropriate sexual relations
  • our response to the allegations will not always be to determine whether they are true or false, since in many cases this is simply undeterminable.
  • That anthropologists, especially Americans, and others generally ignored threats to the Yanomami and gave the highest priority to continuing established programs of research of no immediate benefit to the Yanomami
  • That anthropologists and others working with the Yanomami have not adequately addressed malnutrition, disease, and disorganization among them
  • That experiments involving the injection of radioactive iodine were carried out among the Yanomami without attention to the principles of informed consent then in effect
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    Interim report that details specific allegations made against Neel and anthropologists in "Darkness in El Dorado." 
Stephanie Hegarty

The Yanomami Scandal - 0 views

  • His accusations against Chagnon also implicate him in the epidemic, arguing that he administered a counter-indicated vaccine on Neel's instructions; but Tierney's major charges are different and various. He claims that Chagnon interfered massively with the lives of the Yanomami in all sorts of ways.
  • The charges that James Neel induced a measles epidemic among the Yanomami or at least treated them like guinea pigs to be studies while the epidemic ran its course have been disputed by medical experts and others who know about Neel’s research. If these charges are without merit, as now seems probable, then the only accusations remaining against Neel depend on innuendo and guilt by association. In the final chapter of his book Tierney retells the disgraceful story of how American doctors experimented on unwitting subjects in the USA whom they referred to in their files as "human products."
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    "The New Yorker have created a furor, Patrick Tierney, an investigative journalist, has accused both Neel and Chagnon of committing serious abuses against the Yanomami. He charges Neel with instigation of, or at the very least doing little or nothing to deal with, the serious measles epidemic among the Yanomami that resulted in thousands of deaths. "
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