Sir

June Goodfield is partly right in her defence of Shirley (Glasse) Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse's priority in identifying Fore cannibalism as the aetiological agent in the epidemic spread of kuru1. The facts are, however, more complicated.

Before February 1966, when Gajdusek, Gibbs and Alpers reported2 that kuru is transmissible, speculation about an aetiological agent could be no more than that — speculation. An epidemiologist at the US Nional Institutes of Health, Leonard Kurland, raised the possibility in a letter to Joseph Smadel, then the institutes' associate director, in 1957 (ref. 3). Gajdusek, who was in New Guinea, as it was then called, reviewed the issue, not for the first time or the last, and rejected the possibility, as he wrote to Smadel, because he could “see no sign of infection or post-infectious phenomena”4.

Ann and J. L. Fischer, two American anthropologists, proposed in spring 1961 that “the Fore habit of eating corpses suggests a way in which a viral agent might be passed”5. Alpers told me he found such speculation commonplace in bars in Goroka following his arrival in New Guinea in October 1961.

Thus the Glasses' priority is justified not by chronology but by their important role, which Alpers emphasized to me, in collecting detailed evidence of cannibal feasts which could be matched with the subsequent appearance of the disease in participants — evidence first presented in 1963 (ref. 6).

Both Alpers and Lindenbaum told me that Fore women typically ate every part of the bodies they cannibalized, even the faeces and the bones — the practice was, after all, an alternative burial of family members. Lindenbaum does not attach the word “ritual” to the practice; she calls it gourmet cannibalism. Fore women told her they ate the dead because they were “delicious”.

Direct inoculation through the mucous membrane was certainly one probable route of infection, as Gajdusek and Gibbs continue to maintain, but with mountains of cannibal cattle dead of bovine spongiform encephalopathy and sheep of scrapie, it is quibbling at this late date to deny oral transmission of spongiform encephalopathy.

Richard Rhodes 609 Summer Hill Road, Madison, Connecticut 06443, USA e-mail: rhodesr@mail.yale.edu