Abstract
On a snowy November day in 1964, a team of about 40 doctors and scientists boarded the Royal Canadian Navy’s H.M.C.S. Cape Scott in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They were headed to Easter Island, a triangle-shaped speck in the South Pacific that’s 2,200 km from its nearest inhabited neighbor. Their goal: to study a group of people—their heredity, environment, and common diseases—who lived in this uniquely remote spot before the Chilean government disrupted their isolation with an airstrip on the island’s southwestern corner. As the scientists set out, no one could have predicted that the Canadian expedition’s most valuable finding would come from a bit of bacterium ensconced in a sample of Easter Island’s soil. Georges Nogrady wasn’t looking for cures when he divided Easter Island into 67 parcels and took a soil sample from each. The University of Montreal microbiologist was trying to understand why the islanders weren’t afflicted with
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