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The expanded Laboratory of Collaborative and Field Research

Along with David Asher and Richard Benfante, who also attended the End of Kuru conference, I spoke there as a member of the wandering and far-flung community of Carleton Gajdusek's Bethesda Laboratory at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). I worked there, originally talking my way into a clerical job, despite having no particular qualifications, as a ‘social science analyst’ from 1967 to the mid-1970s; I tend to think of my job description throughout, however, as ‘handmaiden’. For years I worked on whatever came to hand, or whatever was thrust into my hands by Carleton. After I left the laboratory to go to graduate school in anthropology, I edited with Carleton the volume called Kuru: Correspondence and Field Notes from the Collection of D. Carleton Gajdusek. Since then I have been working on health and medicine in China as a social anthropologist, teaching and doing research in Chicago, North Carolina and Beijing. 
 
Like many nostalgic historians and travellers who can claim many homes, like Carleton, even, I have a very partial, very personally motivated version of that place and time. Still, because Carleton, kuru, its scientists and the laboratory had such an important role in my own formation as a person, it interests me to ask: ‘What was kuru from the point of view of the laboratory? What kind of a place was the laboratory?’ My answers to these questions have become broader and vaguer over the years but my interest in understanding this past is no less intense than it ever was.