Word: neel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Amazon. Tierney, author of an earlier book on human sacrifices among the Inca, spent 11 years researching the Yanomami's exposure to the outside world. In his most hotly contested charge, he claims that during a research project funded by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the late James Neel, a human geneticist at the University of Michigan, used a measles vaccine on the Yanomami that helped spread an epidemic, killing "hundreds, perhaps thousands" in a population of roughly...
...found Tierney's research credible but warned that "the impending scandal...in its scale, ramifications, and sheer criminality and corruption is unparalleled in the history of anthropology." In a controversial extrapolation, they suggested a motive for spreading the measles epidemic: if deliberately ignited, it may have been to prove Neel's "fascistic eugenics" theories--that dominant males could survive epidemics and pass on their genes...
Chagnon, a member of Neel's 1968 expedition, said last week he had yet to see galleys either of the book or of an excerpt scheduled to be published next week in the New Yorker magazine. The New Yorker did offer to interview him, but he declined. In a widely circulated e-mail, he charged that an American Anthropological Association open forum next month would be "a feeding frenzy in which I am the bait." In a statement posted on a website of the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he remains professor emeritus, he accuses Tierney, Turner...
Late last week the defense of Neel and Chagnon gained momentum when University of Pennsylvania science historian Susan Lindee reviewed Neel's papers from the expedition and found nothing improper about the scientist's procedures. In an e-mail to colleagues, Lindee acknowledged that "if we wish to adopt an X-Files theory of history, we could propose that he planted these records, including the much scribbled on and often almost illegible field notes, in order to mislead future historians." But, she notes, papers from Venezuelan authorities and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control specifically refute some of Tierney...