In the eastern highlands of New Guinea, sudden bursts of maniacal laughter shrilled through the walls of many a circular, windowless grass hut, echoing through the surrounding jungle. Sometimes, instead of the roaring laughter, there might be a fit of giggling. When a tribesman looked into such a hut, he saw no cause for merriment. The laugher was lying ill, exhausted by his guffaws, his face now an expressionless mask. He had no idea that he had laughed, let alone why. New Guinea's Fore (pronounced foray) tribe was afflicted by a deadly foe. It was kuru, the laughing death, a creeping horror hitherto unknown to medicine.
Gruesome Ritual. The Fore people, estimated to number 10,000 and only now emerging from the Stone Age, live in a 240-square-mile area 90 miles west of the famed World War II battlefield of Lae (their existence was unknown until 1932). Kuru was first noted in 1951. The disease has not only decimated the Fore, but has become an obsession in their sorcery beliefs. When a kuru victim dies, the kinsfolk pick out a sorcerer suspected of responsibility for the death, do away with him in a gruesome ritual murder called tukavu, in which they pulverize his muscles with stones and bite out his jugular.
Only in the last five years has the Australian administration brought the Fore under regular supervision (it rates them "semi-controlled," meaning that they usually resist the temptation to plunge a spear into a patrol officer's back). A year ago the government sent Dr. Vincent Zigas, Estonian-born district medical officer, into the Fore country to investigate kuru. Appalled to find that the disease is invariably fatal, Zigas hurriedly shipped blood and brain specimens from victims to Melbourne's famed Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, hoping that the laboratories would find a virus cause for the disease. They found none. Next a pathologist, anthropologist, dietitian, psychiatrist and psychologist hit the mountain trails. They eliminated emotional factors as causes of kuru, found no clue to a physical cause.
One Body, One Ax. Last March, a peripatetic U.S. virologist and pediatrician (with a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis) appeared in New Guinea. Crew-cut Dr. Carleton Gajdusek, 35, of Yonkers, N.Y., heard about kuru and plunged into its problems. Tramping through rain-soaked forests to Fore hamlets, he rounded up patients for the neat, bamboo-walled native hospital at nearby Okapa Patrol Post. To do autopsies, he had to haggle with victims' relatives for the bodies. The currency: axes and tobacco. (Dr. Gajdusek got some bodies at the bargain price of only one ax.)
At Okapa, Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas ran the risk of getting kuru themselves (if it should prove infectious); lacking surgical gloves, they did autopsies barehanded. They performed them on a dining-room table in the patrol officer's quarters, often eating a meal at one end while discussing the kuru-damaged brains lying at the other. They shipped specimens to Melbourne and to the U.S. National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Md. From 154 patients and their kin, they got a detailed picture of kuru's course, though no clue to its cause.