Nobelists & the NIH Protected a Pedo

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Transcript:

Another heavy topic today, folks, so here’s a content warning: today I’m going to be talking about a man who ran an international child sex trafficking operation supported by some of the most prominent scientists in the world. No, not that one. Another one. One you might not have actually heard about.

Or maybe you have…let me start by saying that I completely missed this story even though it has been a matter of public record for thirty years, but in my defense, that means I was a child when it first happened. But it has periodically risen back into the public consciousness, and finally last week it reached me thanks to this beautifully written essay in the New Yorker: “The Scientist Who Lived with Dozens of Children from the Pacific Islands

Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel for his work on a disease in Papua New Guinea. But his biggest experiment was on the children he took back to the U.S.

By Rachel Aviv”

If you’re like me and you tend to gloss over photo captions in your eagerness to dive into the story, the image by the headline is NOT the scientist in question. That’s Luwi Ikabala, one of the children Gajdusek abducted, groomed, abused, and abandoned. This is what Gajdusek looked like. I think the story is titled the way it is, and led with a photo of Luwi instead of Gajdusek the way it is, for a few reasons: one, because Aviv is primarily telling Luwi’s story from his perspective and trying to do that story justice, and also because she builds up to the ultimate reveal that Gajdusek was an open and unrepentant pedophile.

I found this story thanks to a BlueSky poster named David M. Perry, who reposted a link to it with his own thoughts about the lede being buried. After reading it, I agree with his thoughts and so I’ll echo them here: Aviv made choices that resulted in a very well-written piece that was gripping to read, but those choices also resulted in a lot of people missing the fact that Gajdusek was a pedophile and he was propped up by his colleagues across scientific disciplines, and that’s a shame because more people should know about what these people did.

And so, I’m here to do my part: I encourage you to read Aviv’s excellent piece, and at the same time I’m going to use this relatively short video to highlight the monsters who perpetrated this tragedy. And much like with the extremely similar case of Jeffrey Epstein and his ass-kissing hangers on like Lawrence Krauss and Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky, you may find yourself thinking less of some old favorites after you hear what they did.

Carleton Gajdusek is best known for his work on kuru, a disease that was rampant amongst the Fore people of Papua New Guinea when he started studying it in the 1950s and ’60s. “Kuru” was derived from the Fore word for “trembling,” because patients would experience loss of control over muscle movements. The spasms would get worse, the patient would lose the ability to regulate their emotions and eventually their ability to get up and move around, and inevitably they would die within two years of becoming bedbound.

The Fore people thought that kuru was the result of sorcerers who would target a victim, steal their hair, curse it and bury it in mud, and then watch as the victim would deteriorate at the same rate as the token.

In the 1960s, anthropologists Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse visited Papua New Guinea and developed a hypothesis about kuru. Noting that it overwhelmingly affected women and children but not adult men, they asked what behaviors the former do that the latter do not. The answer, they thought, was funerary cannibalism–the practice of consuming the flesh of dead loved ones as a way to connect with them and heal from grieving. Men didn’t do it as they thought it sapped their powers.

Enter Carleton Gajdusek, a medical researcher working for the National Institutes of Health who thought that the cannibalism hypothesis was ridiculous. He moved to Papua New Guinea to live among the Fore, where he recruited locals to help perform autopsies and send tissue samples back to the US for study. Eventually, this research proved the cannibalism hypothesis correct, leading Gajdusek to eventually get the Nobel Prize.

But in addition to tissue samples, Gajdusek also decided to send children. Back to the US. To live with him. From the 1960s through the 1990s, with the full permission of the Department of Health and Human Services and the knowledge of his colleagues who acted as formal witnesses, Gajdusek transferred guardianship of at least 36 children from their relatives in Papua New Guinea to himself.

According to Gajdusek’s own meticulous journals as well as those of some of his victims, it is completely undeniable that he raped many, if not all, of these children:

“In his journal,” writes Aviv, Gajdusek sometimes described sleeping in the same bed naked, with his children, specifically the younger boys. Luwi said that Gajdusek commented on the growth of his penis and testicles and encouraged him to masturbate. Luwi couldn't categorize what Gajdusek was doing. "I just kept shut," he told me. "I could pretend that I was home, in the bush." His earliest memories of Gajdusek in Waieti also involved sexualized lessons. "He would take us to a safe place where we would feel free, and then ask us, 'What's the name of this thing?' " Luwi said. "He would ask about certain plants, the hands, the feet, the genitals.

He would grab our balls and say, 'What do you call this?'"”

“In his journals and in letters to colleagues, Gajdusek was self-righteous, arguing that what he'd done was "no more serious than lying on the grass or picking a dandelion," and he cited the Anga initiation rites as justification.”

This refers to a ceremony that was stopped by the time Gajdusek visited, in which adult men would molest boys to mark their entry to adulthood. Despite the ceremony being in the past, Gajdusek took it as a license.

He was so unrepentant that not only did he detail his actions in his journals, but he dropped his journals off in his lab so his own staff could transcribe and bind them. 

Here’s where I get into the scientists and institutions that allowed this to happen and for Gajdusek to face no consequences for decades:

Anthropologist Judith Farquhar, who appears to still work at University of Chicago, “warned Gajdusek years earlier that it would be better to privately print his more personal journals, rather than to rely on the N.I.H. to fund the process and to use its staff to transcribe and bind them. "Discussions that may look veiled to you look pretty transparent to me," Farquhar wrote. When I asked what had concerned her, she said, "Well, of course, it was the threat of suspicions of sexual misconduct." She said that as Gajdusek had aged, he'd kept confessing his sexual interests "to the point that all of us were completely bored by it.””

Wow, Judith, great look. You saw a pedophile admit to sexually abusing boys and you said “Gosh I’d better warn the pedophile to be a little quieter about it. Also all his talk about how much he loves raping children really kills the dinner party conversation.”

Contrast her reaction to that of fellow lab mate Mark Godec, who immediately noticed that Gajdusek was constantly surrounded by ten year old boys and correctly identified that as fucking weird. He grabbed Gajudsek’s journals and leafed through them, marking every page where he’s being an obvious pedophile. Then he took the journals to Senator Nancy Kassebaum, the chair of the Committee on Labor and Human Resources. "I realized I'm in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the N.I.H. by a Nobel laureate for thirty years," he said.

Godec’s actions led to the FBI opening an investigation into Gajudsek, but they had trouble because his colleagues circled the wagons and refused to help.

One agent told Aviv, “They didn’t see anything wrong with what Gajdusek was doing. They thought the man was a saint.” David Asher, a scientist who had worked in Gajdusek’s lab for twenty-five years, told Adelman, “Whatever Gajdusek has done, he has done it openly and with the full knowledge and consent of the management of N.I.N.D.S.”—the section within the N.I.H. focussed on neurological conditions.

The FBI was eventually able  to interview one of the boys who Gajdusek abducted when he was 14 years old, bringing him to the US before he could even say goodbye to his parents. Like the others, the boy was sexually abused, and so the FBI recorded a conversation in which he asked Gajdusek if he should lie to authorities and tell them he’d never molested him. “Yes, absolutely,” said Gajdusek.

When his victim asks why he abused him, Gajdusek replies “Look, if you go on and talk to people about that, you’re gonna get us in so much trouble that you’re gonna close the life down for the kids at college, close my accounts down. I’ll have to go out of the country. Catch on?”

“Don’t you understand that what you did to me, you know, possibly has to do with a lot of why I’m so disturbed while I’m here in America?”

“I played around with my uncle as a kid,” Gajdusek said. “I played around with my brother.” He said that kids in Micronesia and Papua New Guinea did the same thing.

“I don’t know where you learned that from,” Michael said. “You’re the first one who did it to me.” He recalled how Gajdusek “did oral sex” on him “many times in different places.” He asked, “Didn’t you realize that I didn’t want to do it?”

“No, that I didn’t,” Gajdusek said.

“I was scared. You were hurting me.”

“Oh, I didn’t know,” Gajdusek said. “I apologize, and I’m very sorry.” He said that he wished Michael had told him earlier. “The story is . . . that I am . . . a person who has a very difficult, great private life. I’m trying to find how to identify, and I tried to . . . transpose it like a priest or a nun to—”

And the conversation goes on, and it’s devastating to hear this now-grown young man holding his abuser to account.

The result of his efforts? A guilty plea, with a deal of serving just 12 months in jail, which he said he loved because he got tons of work done, followed by permission to serve five years of probation in Europe. The NIH allowed him to resign rather than fire him, so immediately after his release, he flew to Paris to work from his new office set up by the Institut de Neurobiologie Alfred Fessard, who also published the journal he kept while he was in jail.

Ready to be disgusted by some more prominent scientists? Here we go: 

“George Klein, a professor at the Karolinska Institute, in Stockholm, who was part of the Nobel Assembly for thirty-six years, validated Gajdusek’s opinions, telling him that he wondered if “the Western world can ‘catch up with you.’ ” He wrote, “I share your indignation about the typically Jewish-Christian-Moslem hypocrisy on sexual matters.””

Robert Gallo, one of the guys who discovered HIV, “helped arrange an office for him at the Institute of Human Virology, at the University of Maryland, and invited him to join the editorial board of its journal.”

“Gustav Nossal, the president of the Australian Academy of Science, had assured him that he was working to secure an appointment for him at the Australian National University.”

“E. Fuller Torrey, one of the country’s best-known schizophrenia researchers, assisted with smaller matters, like checking to see if Gajdusek was permitted a twenty-pound copy of the Cambridge Shakespeare in his cell.”

“On the day of Gajdusek’s release, friends, including the neurologist Oliver Sacks and the physicist Freeman Dyson, met him at the jail, along with four of the children he had brought up. “Whatever he may or may not have been doing, it was clearly not bad for the kids,” Dyson said in an interview for a 2014 book titled “Great Minds.” Dyson said that he had three heroes: Richard Feynman, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gajdusek. “When he came out of jail, the first thing he said was ‘They broke Oscar Wilde, but they did not break me,’ ” Dyson said. “So he is definitely a hero.””

Yes, that’s THE Oliver Sacks: author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and the neurologist famously played by Robin Williams in the film Awakenings. Fun fact, the author of this New Yorker article on Gajdusek, Rachel Aviv, also got her hands on Sacks’ journals and private letters and learned that he admitted that he made up a ton of shit in his books and case studies. And then he welcomed a pedophile home after his 12-month vacation in jail.

And yes, that’s THE Freeman Dyson, the theoretical physicist who has leant his name to Dyson spheres, Dyson trees, Dyson numbers, and Gordon Freeman, the protagonist of the Half-Life games. He also didn’t believe climate change was a big deal, and then he took a pedophile’s victims to meet the pedophile when he left jail for being a pedophile.

Fuck Oliver Sacks and Freeman Dyson.

You may say, hey, they’re dead, who cares? Why “cancel” the pedo-protectors now? Well, for a start, Sacks and Dyson are dead but several of the other people I mentioned are still alive and working.

And I’m sorry to say this, but this is the second recent prominent example of a powerful man trafficking children to sexually abuse them. How many more are still doing this shit right now? How many people are being protected by their institutions and colleagues because they have money or power or prestige?

It’s important that these people know that their legacies will be garbage. Great, you made some discovery–we’ll keep that discovery and use it to make the world better while remembering you as a disgusting piece of shit, if we remember you at all. Gajdusek proved the transmissibility of kuru, and researchers will rely on that work to help people with other similar diseases. But he didn’t help the people of Papua New Guinea at all: cannibalism had been outlawed before he even got there, and the only reason he found any patients suffering from kuru was because of how slow the disease progresses. Kuru would have disappeared with or without him, but what he did do was leave in place the Fore people’s belief that diseases and misfortune are caused by sorcerers, and so the boys he threw back to their villages after abusing them became targets of their neighbors who viciously attacked them and burned down their homes for being different after their American education and rearing.

That’s Gajdusek’s true legacy: a disgusting, abusive man who destroyed countless lives because of his own sick sexual desires.

Like I say, I highly recommend that you read Aviv’s excellent essay to get a better idea of the complicated lives led by Gajdusek’s victims, but if you don’t have the access or the time, I hope you at least take away the fact that the people and institutions that helped prop him up must never be able to shake their connection to the pedophile they protected.

Nobelists & the NIH Protected a Pedo (YouTube)