Stanley’s Dream: The Medical Expedition to Easter Island by Jacalyn Duffin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stanley’s Dream: The Medical Expedition to Easter Island by Jacalyn Duffin Warwick Anderson Jacalyn Duffin. Stanley’s Dream: The Medical Expedition to Easter Island. Carleton Library Series, no. 247. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2019. 576 pp. Ill. $39.95 (978-0-7735-5710-9). Not surprisingly, I see the specter of D. Carleton Gajdusek stalking the Canadian-led medical expedition to Rapa Nui or Easter Island in 1964–65. The scrappy, quarrelsome research team displayed the same fascination with so-called primitive groups, the same naiveté about supposed isolation, the same blundering in local politics, the same assumption of its rights and duties to investigate Indigenous people as it saw fit. Whether in Gajdusek’s contemporary studies of kuru in New Guinea or in Stanley Skoryna’s research on Rapa Nui, described so well in Stanley’s Dream, personal acrimony and recrimination abounded. Both Gajdusek and Skoryna boasted links to the new International Biological Programme (IBP), although their connections often proved tenuous, more aspirational than consequential. The major difference between the New Guinea and Rapa Nui expeditions is that Gajdusek was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his discovery of the first “slow virus,” later found to be a prion, a wholly new mechanism of human disease causation, whereas Skoryna was awarded nothing at all. Despite Jacalyn Duffin’s admirable efforts to find some positive outcome of the expedition to Rapa Nui, we are left with the impression of a disorderly, bickering rabble, unprepared for the investigation, ignorant of Pacific history, stumbling around on an alluring island, unsure of what they were doing there. If Gajdusek’s expedition was ultimately a case study in tragedy—for both him personally [End Page 269] and the Fore people—then Skoryna’s trip to Rapa Nui provides us instead with a rollicking farce. Perhaps unintentionally, Duffin delivers a highly readable postcolonial critique of the assumptions of sovereignty and claims to competence of the modern scientific expedition. The first third of Stanley’s Dream is a compelling (mis)adventure story; the middle section brings to mind both Lord of the Flies and Fawlty Towers, an inventive amalgam; while the final third assemblies a meticulous, if ultimately unconvincing, inventory of the expedition’s “achievements.” Inspired by the postwar Pacific exploits of Thor Heyerdahl, McGill gastroenterologist Skoryna proposed a medical jaunt to Rapa Nui in 1964, hoping to document the health and biological status of the Polynesian inhabitants before an international airport was opened. He imagined an isolated population, inbred and primitive, about to be exposed to the ravages of civilization, the pathologies of progress. Little did he know that the islanders already were thoroughly mixed in ancestry and more cosmopolitan than many of his fellow Quebecois. Nor was he aware of extensive Chilean medical research on the islanders. Skoryna quickly convened a ragtag bunch of investigators, mostly from Canada, including microbiologists, physiologists, ecologists, and a trainee sociologist. A biological anthropologist and a nutritionist agreed to come along but soon dropped out. The two Chilean participants found themselves in conflict with the North Americans, and they too fled. Remarkably, Skoryna managed to acquire funding for the expedition from the WHO and the Canadian government. Duffin places this research project within the context of emerging concerns about human adaptability in a changing biosphere, which found expression around the world in expanding ecological inquiries, often organized after 1964 through the IBP. She claims that Skoryna, who had studied medicine in Vienna, was immersed in studies of general biology and fascinated by F. Macfarlane Burnet’s speculations on disease ecology. (Another parallel since Burnet happened to be Gajdusek’s disaffected mentor.) Apparently, Hungarian-Canadian micro-biologist Georges L. Nógrády, another expedition leader, also was enthralled by ecosystems thinking and issues of planetary sustainability, hoping to learn something on Rapa Nui about how humans might adapt genetically and sociologically to environmental degradation and increasing interconnection. But the research team as a whole had little or no experience investigating human adaptability and displayed indifference to the burgeoning literature on the topic. It was never clear how these patchy opportunistic studies would elucidate any of the issues that engaged human ecologists more...