The Collectors of Lost Souls details the recognition and integration into biomedical science of kuru, a degenerative neurological disease experienced uniquely by the Fore, a New Guinea highland tribe, from the end of the Second World War to the end of the century. Attributed by the Fore to sorcery, kuru would be recognized as akin to scrapie in sheep, BSE (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) in cattle, and CJD (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) in humans, all caused by prions, infectious protein fragments. In the case of the Fore, the primary means of transmission would be cannibalism.

The book encompasses three distinct explorations. One is a narrative of interactions among investigators of the Fore and of kuru, both with one another and with those they study. Central here is D. Carleton Gajdusek (d. 2008), a maverick American virologist and a Nobel Prize-winner (1976) for his kuru work. Concerned narrowly with research ethics and medical ethics, this narrative also addresses broader issues of power, fairness and obligation. Second is an actor-network analysis of transactions and translations – the translation of blood and brains into scientific objects (and equally of white scientists into resource-providing patrons). Third is an account of scientific discoveries: recognition of kuru as infectious, of cannibalism as its route of transmission, of its links to BSE and CJD, and of its unique agent and pathology, with the latter being significantly the work of another Nobelist, Stanley Prusiner (1997). The book draws heavily on personal archives – letters and journals – and on interviews with kuru scientists and Fore persons who had been closely involved with them.

The book is a moral tale without a moral. Gajdusek – not kuru, the Fore, or biomedical science – is its centre of gravity. A key motif is encounter with the primitive and objectifiable other. Highland New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s is the apotheosis of otherness, with cannibalism exemplifying both danger and difference. Gajdusek is the exemplary encounterer, but the title of Chapter 3, ‘A contemptuous tenderness’, suggests the ambiguity of the relationship. Gajdusek is the quintessential 1950s existentialist. He reads (often in the field) Camus, Kafka, Kierkegaard, Joyce, Nietzsche, Proust and so on; ignores conventional schedules and career paths; prefers field to laboratory; follows his curiosity; seeks his bliss. All the while, he is becoming powerbroker first-class, big man in the world of institutionalized science. In the mid-1950s, Gajdusek had been at the edge of Macfarlane Burnet's Melbourne research empire, where kuru was beginning to be noticed, but, tied to the munificent NIH, he – and not Burnet or the Australian colonial authorities – would become the mandatory point of passage in accessing the brains and blood of the Fore. That access was never merely a matter of medical or colonial authority, nor of economics. Gajdusek first met the Fore while studying comparative child development, but relations rapidly went beyond those of researcher and subject. His attraction – to persons, place and ways of being – would manifest in an identity that would complement but not displace that of a research magnate. His monopoly over kuru blood and brains, never absolute, was equally power to protect the Fore from others whose interests were more instrumental. But Gajdusek had also to court other scientists, with gifts of those scientific ‘things’, and in other ways. He did so with remarkable success. The Australian research establishment remained aloof, even if many of its members did not. Though Anderson avoids the term ‘charisma’, the book highlights the power of personality that is so often the crucial constituent of networks.

The book's grand moral question is how best to assess these transactions and translations. Context – postwar scientific expansionism, and Cold War, late colonial consolidation – is important, as is the setting of post-cargo-cult New Guinea, and the tenuousness of Fore society. Many Fore want what the outside world can offer; the doctor–researchers are now the cargo bringers to be courted, yet they are interested in trading for goods in ways that continuously redefine roles, relationships and rights. Who can do what with the bodies of whom?

The problem arises on both sides of the researcher–subject dyad. Anderson stresses symmetry. Both researchers and Fore feed on the dead; extraction of brains is not so different from their ingestion by Fore women and children, who eat bodies of relatives as an honorific act. On both sides troublesome questions of title to bodies may arise. Negotiation and gift-giving among the Fore parallel those among the researchers. The Fore collect (enlist) the souls of their investigators even as the latter harvest their bodies. Neither ‘thief’ nor ‘buyer’ captures the transformativeness of the transactions.

And yet questions of power and exploitation hang on. Kuru is mainly a disease of women and girls; Gajdusek's most profound and preferred engagement with the Fore and with their neighbours, the Kukukuku, would be with youths, whom he recruited as assistants (docta bois), and, in some cases, brought to America for schooling. In 1996 he would be charged with child abuse, effectively ending his career. Intimate engagement with persons and cultures had been for Gajdusek both the source of scientific success and an ethical guarantor. Yet if, at some point, ‘a feeling for the organism’ – Evelyn Fox Keller's descriptive phrase for the feminist science of Barbara McClintock – crossed over to ‘feeling the organism’, where the proper balance point of connection should lie was not clear. To some, this episode might symbolize the larger colonial manipulation; yet among the Kukukuku, the group from which some of the boys had come and in which Gajdusek felt most at home, a friendly grope of the genitals was a greeting, if also an invitation.

Anderson's book is eloquent, illustrated with many photos of the Fore and their studiers. It might have benefited from more maps, from fuller accounts of Gajdusek's scientific career and of the actual practice of Fore sorcery, but these are quibbles. Who should read Collectors? Many. Transactions and translations; issues of obligation and engagement; of power, respect and autonomy arise regularly and in many contexts, not only in development settings. Undergraduate students will be struck by the dependence of the high-tech of contemporary science on fragile personal relationships. Apprentice historians can learn much from Anderson's narration of a story where the voices are many and the issues grave. Especially in relation to Gajdusek, I find his stance exemplary. He is chronicler, not biographer; he avoids the temptation to interpret, speak for, reduce to, explain away; he accords Gajdusek both the majesty of his achievement and the dignity of his tragedy. Neither is unproblematic, of course. Strikingly, while Gajdusek is thanked for helping to get ‘the story and the science right’ (p. 233) and identified as an interviewee, there are, at least by my scan, no endnotes citing Gajdusek interviews. Probably for the best.