Every weekday morning, Luwi Ikabala sets up a sewing machine beside piles of sweet potatoes and firewood at the main market in Goroka, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Luwi uses a yellow cooking-oil cannister for a chair. On a good day, he makes enough money from hemming sleeves and mending torn clothes to buy a bag of rice. As he waits for customers, he reads novels, copying passages that he likes into his journal. His favorite author is Fyodor Dostoyevsky. He has kept a journal for the past forty years, giving the entries headings such as “Air of freedom,” “As I recall her—‘the past,’ ” “About Weakness,” and “Who am I?”
Luwi often feels like the “poorest man that ever lived on this planet earth,” “a perfect example of a failure.” He approaches strangers on the street and asks about their problems, until he sees an opening to “touch them emotionally.” He offers advice and then they sometimes give him a little money. One journal entry, headed “Supposed to be somebody,” described an encounter with an old friend who’d seen him aimlessly walking the streets of Goroka. The friend didn’t understand why Luwi wasn’t doing more with his life. But “keeping up with my diary writing,” he wrote, made him “at least feel like I am someone—not too big—but someone in my own way.”
Luwi, who is fifty-seven years old, took up journal writing at the urging of the Nobel Prize-winning pediatrician and virologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, whom he described as “Father of America.” Gajdusek lived in Papua New Guinea while researching kuru, a fatal brain disease that existed only in the country’s eastern highlands. Until the nineteen-thirties, the people there remained unknown to the outside world. Luwi and his friends used to crowd around Gajdusek’s typewriter, their hands on his shoulders and thighs, as he documented their lives: the insects they ate, their moods, the way they sang to birds. Gajdusek wrote six hundred thousand pages of journals, beginning when he was thirteen and ending weeks before he died, in 2008, at the age of eighty-five. Luwi keeps a copy of the journal in which Gajdusek recorded his birth. “When I was born, Carleton was there to bring me out into the world,” Luwi told me.
At times, Luwi feels the urge to write his story “slowly creeping towards my fingertips.” After reading “My Secret History,” a novel by Paul Theroux, which he’d found in a thrift shop, Luwi got chills. “How I wish to write a story similar to this,” he wrote. He wanted to “put all that is in mind into form.” Standing over his sewing machine at the market, where I visited him in May, he told me, “My story would start with childhood in a very, very remote area, where an unusual scientist, a man from far, far away, came to live just next to my house.” But, as soon as he sits down to write, he finds himself falling asleep.
As Gajdusek entered villages in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the late fifties and early sixties, people called out in a high pitch, “White man is coming!” “People, come, come!” The children were jubilant, he wrote in his journal, but women stayed inside, peering out of their huts. Gajdusek ran a lab at the National Institutes of Health focussed on child development and diseases in what he called the “few remaining societies wherein civilization and the major religions of mankind have not yet set their pattern of imprint upon the social fabric in which the child is reared.” He gave lollipops to the children and collected blood and urine samples from them. He also administered antibiotics and bandaged wounds. “Although the people are still current warriors and cannibals, they are well ‘under control’ and very cooperative,” he wrote to Joseph Smadel, the associate director of the N.I.H.
One per cent of the Fore people, a community of some fourteen thousand in the eastern highlands, were dying each year of kuru; its name, in the Fore language, means “trembling” or “fear.” “It is so astonishing an illness that clinical description can only be read with skepticism,” Gajdusek told Smadel. The Fore said that the disease was caused by secret attacks from sorcerers. The victims would shiver, laugh excessively, and jerk their limbs; then they would lose the ability to stand or swallow. Most of them would die within a year. Ronald and Catherine Berndt, the first anthropologists in the Fore region, wondered whether the disease could be a psychosomatic reaction to contact with white people. Australian colonial officers had brought new tools, like steel knives and axes, as well as prohibitions—against armed warfare and cannibalism—to some villages. “Social or cultural events,” Ronald Berndt wrote, “may have far-reaching effects on the human organism itself, even to the extent of interfering so drastically with it that it ceases to function.”
Gajdusek spent part of every year in the highlands—he described it as Shangri-La, the place where he reached the “heights of human happiness”—and learned the Fore language. Luwi’s father and uncle helped build him a house about thirty feet from Luwi’s family’s hut, in Waieti, a hamlet on a mountainside, more than five thousand feet high, with clouds pooling in the valleys below. Gajdusek’s house had braided-bamboo walls and a domed roof, made of thatched cogon grass. On the wall, he taped a picture of John Enders—who’d won the Nobel Prize in 1954, for his work on polio—and a print of Titian’s portrait of Ranuccio Farnese, the Pope’s grandson, who looks too young for his lavish new cloak. “A chief’s son from my people’s past,” he explained to anyone who came inside.
Gajdusek took care of kuru patients as they died, then persuaded their family members to let him perform autopsies, rewarding them with axes, blankets, and salt. “I did it at 2 a.m., during a howling storm, in a native hut, by lantern light, and sectioned the brain without a brain knife,” he wrote Smadel, after one autopsy. He performed some dissections on the same table where he ate his meals. “Some people said, ‘We’re not supposed to dig up graves—what is he doing?’ ” Luwi recalled. “And others were saying, ‘Oh, he came to look at the disease, let him look at it.’ ” Luwi’s cousin Rebecca Tarubi, whose father had assisted Gajdusek with autopsies, told me, “People would ask, ‘Where are the brains?’ And we would say, ‘Carleton put them in a little bowl and took them to America.’ ” Luwi’s uncle Koiye used to take brain tissue and internal organs to a colonial aid post with an airstrip. Then the body parts were frozen with liquid nitrogen and shipped to the N.I.H., in Bethesda, Maryland.
Luwi and the other children followed Gajdusek wherever he went, and he often photographed them. “One of us would carry his film, another the camera case, and a third the tripod, and then we’d set it up,” Luwi said. “I had never seen my face before”—there were no mirrors or reflective metals in his village—“and when Carleton showed us his shots we would all be giggling at the type of faces we were carrying around. It was, ‘Oh, I have this kind of forehead, I have these kinds of big eyes.’ ” In one series of photographs, Luwi stands on one foot and sticks out his tongue; another boy wags his butt; a third boy cups his hands around his eyes as if he, too, is holding a camera. The children, who went barefoot and shirtless, tried on Gajdusek’s shoes and socks and examined the texture of his skin. “Me masta now,” one child told Gajdusek while dressed in his T-shirt and shorts.
The first time Luwi used a pencil and paper was at the encouragement of Gajdusek, who always brought writing supplies, along with marbles and tennis balls, when he came to Waieti and to other hamlets nearby. He collected hundreds of drawings by children in the eastern highlands who were holding a pencil for the first time in their lives. Having never been exposed to pictures, the children invented their own visual vocabulary. They did not initially compose human figures. Instead, they drew geometric patterns, almost as if “ ‘weaving’ or ‘braiding’ their way across the paper,” Gajdusek wrote. (The drawings are saved at the National Library of Medicine, along with hundreds of thousands of pages of correspondence, journals, and photographs.)
Gajdusek wrote in his journal almost every day, sometimes trailing off as he fell asleep, transcribing thoughts as they turned to dreams. In his house in Waieti, he kept books by Jean Piaget, John Locke, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, David Hume, and Henry James. The “constant fingering through the stack of books and magazines I brought here,” he noticed, “has produced an aura about the word and writing which is so intense as to be bewitching.” The children began demanding lessons in numbers and the alphabet. They sat on the floor of Gajdusek’s house, using cargo boxes as desks. “Thus I come to study the ‘primitive’ and ruin it with my own sophistication!,” Gajdusek wrote in his journal. “Damn it!” When presented with blank pages, the children started drawing rows of even marks that mimicked the appearance of letters. In one drawing, a child covered a page with a sketch of a large book with lines of wavy strokes. Below it, four stick figures, arms raised, held the book aloft, like a sacred offering.
Luwi was about four years old when his mother began complaining of headaches and joint pain. “When sitting up, she trembles and is unsteady,” Gajdusek wrote in his journal, in 1972. “She claims that there is a roar like ‘water’ in her ears.” She became so weak that Luwi’s father hung a rope from a beam in their hut, directly over her bed, to help her pull herself up. Once, Luwi asked her to get him water, and she hit him with a stick, for bothering her. “That’s the only act I remember from the woman who gave me life,” he told me.
His grandmother had already died of kuru, a disease that mostly afflicted women and children. “They said we have to be fearful, because kuru sorcerers were moving around the community,” Luwi said. The sorcerers, it was thought, targeted their victims by stealing bits of their hair, clothes, nails, or feces, and wrapping them in a bundle with leaves. Then they said a spell, beat the bundle with a stick, and left it in muddy ground. As it rotted, the intended victim was supposed to simultaneously deteriorate until death.
[MORE]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/the-scientist-who-lived-with-dozens-of-children-from-the-south-pacific
As Gajdusek entered villages in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the late fifties and early sixties, people called out in a high pitch, “White man is coming!” “People, come, come!” The children were jubilant, he wrote in his journal, but women stayed inside, peering out of their huts. Gajdusek ran a lab at the National Institutes of Health focussed on child development and diseases in what he called the “few remaining societies wherein civilization and the major religions of mankind have not yet set their pattern of imprint upon the social fabric in which the child is reared.” He gave lollipops to the children and collected blood and urine samples from them. He also administered antibiotics and bandaged wounds. “Although the people are still current warriors and cannibals, they are well ‘under control’ and very cooperative,” he wrote to Joseph Smadel, the associate director of the N.I.H.
One per cent of the Fore people, a community of some fourteen thousand in the eastern highlands, were dying each year of kuru; its name, in the Fore language, means “trembling” or “fear.” “It is so astonishing an illness that clinical description can only be read with skepticism,” Gajdusek told Smadel. The Fore said that the disease was caused by secret attacks from sorcerers. The victims would shiver, laugh excessively, and jerk their limbs; then they would lose the ability to stand or swallow. Most of them would die within a year. Ronald and Catherine Berndt, the first anthropologists in the Fore region, wondered whether the disease could be a psychosomatic reaction to contact with white people. Australian colonial officers had brought new tools, like steel knives and axes, as well as prohibitions—against armed warfare and cannibalism—to some villages. “Social or cultural events,” Ronald Berndt wrote, “may have far-reaching effects on the human organism itself, even to the extent of interfering so drastically with it that it ceases to function.”
Gajdusek spent part of every year in the highlands—he described it as Shangri-La, the place where he reached the “heights of human happiness”—and learned the Fore language. Luwi’s father and uncle helped build him a house about thirty feet from Luwi’s family’s hut, in Waieti, a hamlet on a mountainside, more than five thousand feet high, with clouds pooling in the valleys below. Gajdusek’s house had braided-bamboo walls and a domed roof, made of thatched cogon grass. On the wall, he taped a picture of John Enders—who’d won the Nobel Prize in 1954, for his work on polio—and a print of Titian’s portrait of Ranuccio Farnese, the Pope’s grandson, who looks too young for his lavish new cloak. “A chief’s son from my people’s past,” he explained to anyone who came inside.
Gajdusek took care of kuru patients as they died, then persuaded their family members to let him perform autopsies, rewarding them with axes, blankets, and salt. “I did it at 2 a.m., during a howling storm, in a native hut, by lantern light, and sectioned the brain without a brain knife,” he wrote Smadel, after one autopsy. He performed some dissections on the same table where he ate his meals. “Some people said, ‘We’re not supposed to dig up graves—what is he doing?’ ” Luwi recalled. “And others were saying, ‘Oh, he came to look at the disease, let him look at it.’ ” Luwi’s cousin Rebecca Tarubi, whose father had assisted Gajdusek with autopsies, told me, “People would ask, ‘Where are the brains?’ And we would say, ‘Carleton put them in a little bowl and took them to America.’ ” Luwi’s uncle Koiye used to take brain tissue and internal organs to a colonial aid post with an airstrip. Then the body parts were frozen with liquid nitrogen and shipped to the N.I.H., in Bethesda, Maryland.
Luwi and the other children followed Gajdusek wherever he went, and he often photographed them. “One of us would carry his film, another the camera case, and a third the tripod, and then we’d set it up,” Luwi said. “I had never seen my face before”—there were no mirrors or reflective metals in his village—“and when Carleton showed us his shots we would all be giggling at the type of faces we were carrying around. It was, ‘Oh, I have this kind of forehead, I have these kinds of big eyes.’ ” In one series of photographs, Luwi stands on one foot and sticks out his tongue; another boy wags his butt; a third boy cups his hands around his eyes as if he, too, is holding a camera. The children, who went barefoot and shirtless, tried on Gajdusek’s shoes and socks and examined the texture of his skin. “Me masta now,” one child told Gajdusek while dressed in his T-shirt and shorts.
The first time Luwi used a pencil and paper was at the encouragement of Gajdusek, who always brought writing supplies, along with marbles and tennis balls, when he came to Waieti and to other hamlets nearby. He collected hundreds of drawings by children in the eastern highlands who were holding a pencil for the first time in their lives. Having never been exposed to pictures, the children invented their own visual vocabulary. They did not initially compose human figures. Instead, they drew geometric patterns, almost as if “ ‘weaving’ or ‘braiding’ their way across the paper,” Gajdusek wrote. (The drawings are saved at the National Library of Medicine, along with hundreds of thousands of pages of correspondence, journals, and photographs.)
Gajdusek wrote in his journal almost every day, sometimes trailing off as he fell asleep, transcribing thoughts as they turned to dreams. In his house in Waieti, he kept books by Jean Piaget, John Locke, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, David Hume, and Henry James. The “constant fingering through the stack of books and magazines I brought here,” he noticed, “has produced an aura about the word and writing which is so intense as to be bewitching.” The children began demanding lessons in numbers and the alphabet. They sat on the floor of Gajdusek’s house, using cargo boxes as desks. “Thus I come to study the ‘primitive’ and ruin it with my own sophistication!,” Gajdusek wrote in his journal. “Damn it!” When presented with blank pages, the children started drawing rows of even marks that mimicked the appearance of letters. In one drawing, a child covered a page with a sketch of a large book with lines of wavy strokes. Below it, four stick figures, arms raised, held the book aloft, like a sacred offering.
Luwi was about four years old when his mother began complaining of headaches and joint pain. “When sitting up, she trembles and is unsteady,” Gajdusek wrote in his journal, in 1972. “She claims that there is a roar like ‘water’ in her ears.” She became so weak that Luwi’s father hung a rope from a beam in their hut, directly over her bed, to help her pull herself up. Once, Luwi asked her to get him water, and she hit him with a stick, for bothering her. “That’s the only act I remember from the woman who gave me life,” he told me.
His grandmother had already died of kuru, a disease that mostly afflicted women and children. “They said we have to be fearful, because kuru sorcerers were moving around the community,” Luwi said. The sorcerers, it was thought, targeted their victims by stealing bits of their hair, clothes, nails, or feces, and wrapping them in a bundle with leaves. Then they said a spell, beat the bundle with a stick, and left it in muddy ground. As it rotted, the intended victim was supposed to simultaneously deteriorate until death.
[MORE]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/08/24/the-scientist-who-lived-with-dozens-of-children-from-the-south-pacific
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