IGNOBLE NOBELMAN

Even so, if the jury convicts, a flood of character witnesses is bound to come forward at sentencing. Most compelling by far will be warm testimony in support of the defendant, now 73, from others of his more than three dozen adopted children, most of them sons.

Some of these boys — or rather, men, now — so admire the benefactor who brought them to America from remote Pacific islands that they named their own children after him or sent their kin to be raised in his home near Washington, D.C., and educated in the United States. Their devotion should make a powerful impression on the court.

Whatever happens at the trial, however, an extraordinary window into the mind of Carleton Gajdusek is already available. Over the course of a long career, Gajdusek wrote thousands of pages of journals. Some of his travel diaries were published in small editions by his longtime employer, the National Institutes of Health, and placed in the National Library of Medicine, where the public can read them. Along with another three journals at the Library of Congress, these amount to some 20 volumes, spanning 22 years.

Together, they are evidence of a remarkable life, of large talents deployed to ambitious ends — some noble, some self-serving, some illicit — in settings as exotic as any under the sun. They are also the story of a quintessential modern man, an intellectual choosing for himself an unconventional course, outside the framework of religion and in determined opposition to traditional morality.

 

The Diaries of Carleton Gajdusek

The publicly available journals are a record of prodigious work. They cover the years 1954-76, picking up the thread of Gajdusek’s career when he was 31 and breaking off when he was 53. By the time they begin, their author was already marked for stardom. The elder son of Slovakian immigrants in Yonkers, N.Y., he had early shown brilliance and a passion for science. An entomologist aunt encouraged him, and he earned a degree at the University of Rochester in 1943, then studied pediatrics at Harvard, with postdoctoral stints as a pediatrician with the occupation forces in Germany and as a researcher in virology at the California Institute of Technology under Linus Pauling and Max Delbruck.

During the Korean War, he worked for the Navy, which had sent him to medical school, and he played a leading role in research on a disease then ravaging both troops and civilians in the war zone, hemorrhagic fever. A few years later, his supervisor would recommend him for a job at the National Institutes of Health, calling him “one of the unique individuals in medicine who combines the intelligence of a near-genius with the adventurous spirit of a privateer.”

Gajdusek got the job and remained associated with NIH for the rest of his career. By the time the journals end, he was chief of the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies at NIH — the position he held until he was placed on leave this April, after his arrest.

The journal years, then, saw Gajdusek establish his scientific reputation. His most famous work had to do with disorders of the central nervous system — starting in the late 1950s with kuru, the strange New Guinean disease that led to the discovery of a new class of infectious agent, the slow virus, for which he won his Nobel prize. But even as he was becoming an internationally recognized authority on ailments like Alzheimer’s and Creutzfeldt-Jakob, a quite different professional purpose motivated the annual travels recounted in the journals.

Indeed, the main subject of the diaries is Gajdusek’s study of primitive peoples. In the Amazon and the Sahara, on Melanesian atolls and in the mountains of Afghanistan, and again and again in the highlands of New Guinea, he visited long-isolated tribes and came to believe that he could derive from them critical insights into human development. Using a blend of medicine and anthropology that he called ethnopediatrics, Gajdusek sought to illuminate man’s “programming,” as distinct from his physical makeup. The goal was no less than to “break the code of input” of information into the nervous system of the infant and child. “In a few remaining societies wherein civilization and the major religions of mankind have not yet set their pattern of imprint upon the social fabric in which the child is reared,” he wrote in 1966,

we still have situations and practices which expose the infant and the young child to markedly different languages of touch, smell, kiss, voice, and embrace; nursing, feeding, and swaddling; gesture, story, dance, myth, music, and song; to differing grammars of speech, kinship, and designation; and different patterns of manners, morals, and etiquette which each direct the developing nervous system uniquely along paths which will be denied to our future observation and possible realm of experience. Herein are passing experiments in human potentiality which we cannot recreate for ethical, moral, and legal reasons, nor can we ever hope to reproduce their equivalent in the lab.

Gajdusek was determined to document the experience of the tribes he visited before their cultures eroded in contact with the outside world. This required systematic work. Often, he would interview every child or every person in a village, securing from each a blood sample, a medical history, a family tree, a photograph, and fingerprints. But he was equally convinced that wide- ranging, unedited observation would ultimately prove to be a precious source of understanding. With his movie camera and tape recorder — and above all in his field journal — he captured pell-mell the sights and interactions of his days. His attention roamed, omnivorous, over any and all features of the host cultures, but it returned most persistently to children.

 

The Doctor and the Boys

We have been swimming on a lonely stretch of coast, along which [are] strewn the wrecks of U.S. World War II landing barges, with the spectacular coast of Humboldt Bay before us, and with the offshore islands and mountain of Australian New Guinea adding drama to our private beach. We swam from 3:00 to 6:30 p.m. — more horseplay than swimming — and I found, to my pleasure, that I was living closely to the lives of these boys. As a fat, aging and inept man, past my youth and my prime, I can still find no difficulties with my Pied Piper tunes, the sincerest notes in my repertoire! All else is but exercise for these tunes, and all work is but practice for the pipes. (1959)

To say that children are the chief concern of a pediatrician may seem merely to state the obvious. But in the case of Carleton Gajdusek, the interest in children that determined his choice of specialty was central to his personal life, to his very being.

Children and adolescents, most of them boys, fill these pages. They are the writer’s patients and the objects of his anthropological observation. They are his helpers, working as guides, interpreters, informants about language and mores, medical assistants, and “cargo boys,” carrying his medicines and cameras, his typewriter, objects for barter, food, and miscellaneous equipment on his treks through the bush. They surround him as soon as he enters a village and sprawl about him as he types his journal at night. And time and again, he calls them his “friends.” Many of them figure repeatedly over the years, sensitively evoked and mentioned by name — Anua and Wanevi, Jesus Raglmar, Koiye and Caesario and especially Mbagintao, first of the boys whom Gajdusek adopted and took to America, who chose for himself the Western name Ivan.

One strand of these friendships is Gajdusek’s concern for “his” boys’ futures. As their own cultures come under pressure from civilization, their best hope, he concludes, lies in education. Although he teaches some of the boys to read and write, he often expresses frustration that he hasn’t the means to do more for them. And he worries about their falling prey to drunkenness, “a common pattern of despair” in New Guinea.

Another striking feature of these relationships is their emotional intensity. A few quotations illustrate this. In Iran in 1954, Gajdusek learned of the death of one of his patients back home. “And, that Charlie Reddington is dead — that this lad, in whom I always saw more ability than he possessed, that he has left his complex problems eternally unsolved — is a fact that lives with me hourly,” he writes:

Others of my patients with whom I lived and whose lives are forever deeply entwined in my own, have passed on . . . and all live on in me as I approach each new baby, each sick child. For these children I feel a grief — yet it is akin to joy in my memory of them. . . . There is a dignity and a proud finality to these short lives. In my grief, I feel glad that Charlie has solved his life in this way! That he asked his mother to tell me about his plight when his downhill spiral began to steepen its slope is for me the greatest girl I could wish to receive from anyone. Thank you Charlie!

In 1962, Gajdusek was reunited with one of his first cargo boys, by this time grown. “With his wife pregnant, [Wanevi] is extremely tactful not to ‘butt in’ on the younger boys now usurping the role he previously held with me,” he writes. “However, he shows up regularly,

makes sure that he gives me all the support he can, and is as true and considerate and tactful a friend as I could possibly find. Reading Proust and all the concern for manners and method, I can find nothing more careful or cautious, sensitive or considerate than this careful “not too much nor too little” appearance of Wanevi, his cautious pride not to be considered “one of the youngsters” yet his intense desire to remain intimate and to catch me alone whenever possible for quiet talks. He keeps his eye on things from a distance and shows up when I most need his help. . . . How wonderful it has been to have had Wanevi as a boy, as a youth, and now as a mature man as my friend!

And in 1976, he reflected on Ivan Mbagintao’s difficulties adjusting to the United States. “I now see how blind love can make one, for Ivan’s linguistic and abstractive inadequacies are glaringly apparent to an outside observer,” he writes sadly. “It is only those who are very near to him

who see his sterling virtues of devotion, keen perception and amazing non- verbal insights which he possesses. It is surely expecting too much to have others go out of theft way to exploit these difficult-to-exploit abilities. . . . Just what to expect of Ivan and for how long . . . must he have indulgence and outside support, I do not know. Considering how many of our own need the same, including many of our ‘best,’ I have no Puritanism . . . in this matter and am prepared to cautiously support him for my lifetime.

But to acknowledge Gajdusek’s rare power to attract and communicate with children, as well as his capacity for affection and altruistic concern for his young friends, is not to tell the whole story. There is something else here as well. There is a hungering, almost obsessive quality to his interest in children that comes through again and again.

Many times, the diarist singles out as the high point of an expedition an encounter with a boy; or he expresses frustration at having had too little contact with children. In Tehran in 1954, he writes that it is “incidental moments” that justify “my giving this portion of my life to work here” — moments like “the disappointed clinging of Anargol Duryakhu, the 13-year-old at Balkh, on learning that I was soon to depart” or “my utter helpless despair at the smile of the four year old lad with ascites, palpable edema and an intrabdominal mass at Jurm.” The latter was an “epiphany” that ” stirred the roots of my spirit.”

Flying over the Middle East in 1960, Gajdusek stared down on the patios and villages he was leaving and “looked wide-eyed and longing for the children within these round walls, their laughter and lewdness, their shyness and coyness, their open-eyed friendship and curiosity, which I have known so well. ” To be “surrounded by children,” he wrote on Tongariki Island in 1965, was the “greatest reward” of his first 40 years.

Most revealing of all is the entry for June 25, 1959. Contemplating the impending marriage of his friend Lois, he mentions why he himself could not have married her, though she “would certainly thus far have been” his choice. He could not fulfill her needs as a husband, he writes. He has “a roving eye and roving affection” and is uneasy in situations of “socially imposed duty, restriction or obligation.” And then this: “What is more important, the Andys, Toms, Wanevis, saucy Aleris, Ilyushas, Konstantines, Peotrs, Sinas, Remis, Akes, and Jorkers still steal all my attention and emotions and motivate my work to the extent that without them the work would suffer . . . I would not be ‘me'” (ellipsis in the original).

This, then, is an interest of another order from the most dedicated doctor’s love for his patients or the most generous mentor’s care for his proteges. This interest is such as to constitute a barrier to marriage, which raises the question whether it has a sexual dimension. The all but explicit answer of the journals is yes.

Many times the diarist states that the true purpose of his “most singularly motivated life” cannot be made plain. It is a “sad reflection of so-called ‘civilized’ society” that he must keep private the “thoughts and dilemmas of this motivation,” he writes in 1960. Sixteen years later, noting the dangers of frankness in a journal that will be read by family, friends, colleagues, and strangers, he calls his diary “the most sincere of all my utterances,” but adds: “The major omissions and deletions that I consciously accomplish as I write, make any pretense of total sincerity a farce . . . I am not a Genet, or a Gide, or a Williams’ (ellipsis in the original). Just a month before, reading the Memoirs of Tennessee Williams, Gajdusek had called them ” largely a confession of his homosexual life,” adding that Williams “does great service to Gay Liberation from their publication.” Jean Genet and Andre Gide were also openly homosexual writers whose journals Gajdusek had praised.

He is not a Genet or a Gide or a Williams, publicly bearing witness to homosexuality — or pedophilia. But Gajdusek does make explicit the romantic tone of many liaisons, as well as his abundant opportunity for sexual encounters with boys.

Sometimes he writes of a boy in the inflections of a lover: “I look at Piaro and he stares back at me, and we know more of each other than do I and the many of my friends of decades at home. Piaro and I have known each other for but three days” (New Guinea, 1959).

“I leave Angao as darkness sets. . . . There has been much more sensuous and sensual in these two weeks than this innocent flirtation, but nothing as aesthetically perfect as his beauty, nor as emotionally satisfying as our subtle communion for the day. I long to see him again, yet hesitate to go out of my way to do so, resigning myself, in this instance, to memory” (New Guinea, 1959).

“With Luis all day, and although he is quiet and says little, we live close to each other, each one realizing our closeness in the past and embarrassed at the distance that the years have produced between us and knowing that we cannot turn back the clock, we find no need to speak of a relationship already confirmed and never perishable, if not prolongable” (Guam, 1970).

As for opportunity, the legendary hospitality of the South Seas is depicted here in all its enchantment, as nights of music and dancing on the beach break up into casual pairings in the darkness. And more than once, Gajdusek refers to his highland entourage of cargo boys and young hangerson as a ” harem,” complete with the attendant “seductions and demands.” These pale, though, beside what were to Gajdusek the utterly alluring customs of the Kukukuku.

 

‘My Beloved Kuks’

Of all the tribes described in the journals, this “strange and wonderful people” of the New Guinea highlands is the one he writes of with keenest fascination. Distinctive in every particular, not least their sexual mores, the Kukukuku secure a place in his heart as “my beloved Kuks.”

The oddities begin with the Kuks’ small stature and unusual pattern of growth. They retain childish features far into puberty, then seem suddenly to leap into middle age. Their costume is distinctive, too: thick layers of grass aprons (notoriously lice-infested) and capes made of bark, to cover their backs and sides. Being “fastidious adorners of themselves and rather vain,” they prize braided headbands, boar’s-tusk ornaments worn through their pierced noses, and necklaces of shells, dried grubs, or bright yellow sections of vine.

In personality, they are individualistic, haughty, quick to take offense, curious, acquisitive, unreliable, and disrespectful of authority. The Kuks don’t like to work and unabashedly refuse to help or play host, yet are first in line when it comes time to be paid. Gajdusek writes of their “colorful arrogance and ‘sport-like’ uniqueness akin to the orchid . . . but parasitic, too” (ellipsis in the original). Not surprisingly, perhaps, quarrels and ” touchy situations are the rule rather than the exception in Kukukuku society.” Sometimes called the Apaches of New Guinea, the Kuks surround their villages with stockades. And they suffer a high rate of suicide.

But there is another side to their personality, related to their unusual sexual development. Although marriage is near-universal, young boys are rigidly isolated from females, and pre-pubertal boys (some as young as five years old) are highly flirtatious, fawning, effeminate, and forward. They have an especially elaborate repertoire of meaningful glances, stares, rapid eye movements, and evasions.

And their sexual activity has a distinctive goal. As Gajdusek has come to understand Kukukuku customs by 1965 (when they already show signs of breaking down), there is among the boys

a real dread of discarding semen, and somewhere in their initiation and early sex-segregated education they must have been instructed that the rubbing of their genitalia and bodies with semen and the ingesting of it is valuable for strength, virility, or some such thing. . . . Fellatio, mutual masturbation and genital to genital contact but not sodomy are the forms of liaison the boys are trained in, and in all cases they seek semen and treat it as the goal of their sex play rather than the orgasm or the play itself

Gajdusek first visited remote Kukukuku country in 1957, when few Westerners had ventured there. On that visit, the doctor and his large entourage were greeted with what would emerge as the characteristic form of Kuk hospitality: “insistent and repeated offers of fellatio,” the Kuk men “designating a host of willing and ribald youngsters for the role.” That Gajdusek was among those who partook is implied in passages like one from 1962, where he notes that Kuk boys’ “coy modesty and frightened shyness disappears immediately when they are alone and unobserved by a third party, replaced by prompt and overt genital handling and fellatio.”

Gajdusek returned to this “enrapturing” region every year for at least the next ten years. He likened the emotion it awakened in him to what one might feel on “returning home . . . to a treasured estate.” “For me,” he wrote in 1965, “this repeated return to these study villages of Agakamatasa and Moraei — Simbari and Muniri included — are the high points of my New Guinea experience and so rewarding, so pleasingly new each time, yet familiar and old, and so completely mine for these eight years that I wonder why such reward.”

Indeed, he loved it so much that he took a piece of it home. Ivan Mbagintao, who went to live with Gajdusek in Maryland in 1963, was a Simbari Kukukuku.

 

‘Armchair Philosopher of Man’

Reporting to colleagues in Bethesda on his work in New Guinea, Gajdusek explained the priority he placed on his quasi-anthropological researches: The Stone Age cultures he was exploring would soon vanish forever, and with them data of singular value for scientists and “armchair philosophers of man.” Gajdusek himself was such a philosopher.

Sometimes his reading is the spur to reflection. It is impossible to peruse these diaries without feeling awe at their author’s intellectual range and responsiveness to literature. He reads Lorca in Spanish and Baudelaire in French and, dissatisfied with a translation, vows to get hold of the Russian edition of the New Guinea diaries of a Russian who sojourned there in the 1880s. He reads Sophocles in the highlands (“How wonderful the Greeks!”) and Virginia WooIf in Tehran. He reads Faulkner, Forster, Nabokov, Conrad, Sartre, Camus, Sherwood Anderson, an anthology of Chinese classics, and the journals of John Quincy Adams. In the Libyan desert he finishes the Epic of Gilgamesh and finds he has run out of books. In the future, he resolves, he will take with him on every expedition at least one “massive, ‘impossible'” work that will bear rereading, like “the Bible, Proust, Dante, Goethe’s Faust or War and Peace.”

Just as often, his meditations are prompted by the events of the day: bitter thoughts on race relations, for example, by the fruitless search for a drink of water, much less a hotel room, for his black cargo boys in the town of Port Moresby in 1957. Inevitably, the grand themes of his intellectual life as portrayed in the journals find echoes in both his reading and his work.

These themes are religion and sex, the civilized and the primitive, sublimation and liberation. Gajdusek ponders them in relation both to his own history and personality and to the world around him. His thoughts take the form of asides, or passages of a paragraph or two, or, rarely, digressions of several pages. The complexity of his views is encapsulated in the juxtaposition of two of his favorite writers: Dostoevsky and Nietzsche.

The subject of religion is continually forced into the foreground by the fact that many of the Westerners present in the haunts of primitive man are missionaries. Sometimes they are Gajdusek’s guides or briefers in a new region; sometimes he is a guest in their homes. His attitude toward them evolves in the course of the journals. An impatient, occasionally derisive tone mostly disappears in the early 1960s. After that, while he may express incomprehension or dislike of a given missionary, he seldom indulges in snide remarks about their “pathetic juvenilism” or the “unctuous wails” of their hymns.

Much more consistently, he records his regard for “these amazing dedicated people.” And beyond admiring their commitment, Gajdusek actually approves of the work they are doing. The missions, he writes in 1970, “bring in more material wealth, more medicine, education and surely more understanding and love than do any of the secular groups.” Most important, they provide a worldview to replace the native faith in magic that quickly breaks down in contact with modernity. Although himself not a Christian, he sees the Christianization of primitive peoples as both inevitable and preferable to their adopting a secular creed like communism. Religious faith, being ” logically no different” from native superstition, is well suited to fill the place of the old cosmology. He comes to regard conversion as part of primitive man’s necessary renunciation of his past. By 1976, he sees any village without a mission as disadvantaged, left behind in the race to join the modern world.

This utilitarian view of the natives’ conversion makes sense in the context of Gajdusek’s personal philosophy, which he variously calls “pagan, heathen,” and “existentialist.” He expounds on the arbitrariness of all faiths, including faith in science and faith in reason. This is a difficult idea to accept, he writes, especially for “enlightened man,” who “shuns the realization that arbitrary faiths of an irrational and unchosen sort should underlie his existence.” This tension between man’s urge to faith and the reality of arbitrariness is built into “the human condition.” Equally intrinsic and inevitable, he believes, is tension between the individual and society.

If all values are arbitrary, he himself lives by a creed of individualism, ” intensity” (almost a mantra with him), and honesty, despising all socially required hypocrisy. It is a creed with its roots in his childhood, as suggested by this passage from 1972:

“Knowledge comes but wisdom lingers,” from our Public School No. 5 assembly hall walls comes to mind. In my fiftieth year to heaven, may I begin to find wisdom. The Greco-Roman Pantheon provides me with all the deities to whom I need pray. I have never come to grips with Judaic-Christian-Moslem morality and cosmology. It places too much emphasis on the word, has too little comparative outlook on love, sex and family, and links Grace too closely with meekness, abrogation and humility, rather than on awe and wonder.

Repeatedly, Gajdusek traces his outlook to his mother. She taught him “love and tenderness”; her “romanticism” and “unreasonable concern for the spirit and soul” fed his questing nature and his passion for adventure. In 1963, expressing gratitude for her willingness to befriend Mbagintao, he likens her to her entomologist sister, “now bound for Kabul, Afghanistan!” adding, “A queer, proud, hopelessly egotistical and . . . truly ‘existentialist’ family of rogues! All values exist as we define them, all reality is dependent upon us, not we upon it!”

Even growing up, he scorned convention. He did not visit his father’s grave, he recollects, so as not to “defile” his memory with “socialized mourning practices.” Birthday and holiday observances he rejected as “lacking in true sincerity and contrary to my developing ideas of fierce individuality.” Instead, he prized individual achievement. His mother read to him from the classics, and ever after, tales of “heroism, moral grandeur and excellence” would make his eyes well with tears, as hers did, and his spine tingle. This is the soil in which grew his disposition to exalt the gifted individual: ” The artist or the genius in any endeavor,” he wrote in 1960, “even in love or sensuality, can be pardoned many a sin and failure in my world.” He came to see strong feeling as virtually a form of achievement. The drive “to live, to love, to sleep, to stir, to think, to dream, to ponder and to muse INTENSELY” was central to his personality.

Even this bare sketch of the diarist’s views should suggest his kinship with Friedrich Nietzsche, who similarly honored the Greeks and glorified the superior, creative, autonomous individual unconstrained by social convention. Gajdusek recognizes a kindred spirit as he reads and rereads The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals in New Guinea in 1965. He discusses these books with more excitement than any other.

Although he comments on these works’ “portentous” German nationalism and intermittent lack of rigor, he transcribes passages showing “Nietzsche at his best.” He is thrilled to find expressed here his own belief in the arbitrariness of scholars’ “blind faith in ‘truth'” and exclaims, “In early adolescence I was Nietzschean without knowing it!” The journal entry on The Genealogy of Morals ends: “This is what adolescents should be reared on . . . not biblical drivel! . . . I would only fully trust the religious man who had been bred on as much of Nietzsche as the Bible” (first ellipsis in the original).

One religious man who meets Gajdusek’s test (though Nietzsche acknowledged indebtedness to him, not the other way around) is Dostoevsky. The diarist does not elaborate on his supreme affinity for the great Russian novelist, the only person whose picture he carries in his wallet; he simply asserts it, upon reading the short story “The Dream of a Queer Fellow” in 1961, noting, ” In him I can accept deep religiousness.”

If Gajdusek does not explain his reasons for accepting Christian faith in this instance, he does reveal why he rejects religion generally, and the starkest obstacle is his “pagan” understanding of sex.

This is one branch of human experience where the author of the journals is no relativist. He grieves that the New Guineans’ conversion will denature their “proud, strange sexuality.” He rebels at the missionaries’ finding “sin” so abundant in the area of sex: “From a gourmet in a land of plenty,” they will turn the native into “a starving mendicant.” His anthropologist’s objectivity — though equal to describing customs of the most hair-raising brutality in cooly neutral terms — several times deserts him when the subject is sex, and he turns into a passionate polemicist.

Nor does Gajdusek, armchair philosopher, contemplate man’s sexual nature in its entirety. He takes little interest in marriage, for example, or in girls. Although his ostensible subject in several long discourses is the sexuality of “children” and “adolescents,” in fact it is boys alone who concern him. His highly personal, fervently advocated program is the homosexual liberation of boys, youths, and the adult men who choose to make them their partners.

Thus, in describing the practices of prepubertal children and adolescents, Gajdusek construes sex as belonging to the realm of play. Sex is a “playful game of fun and humor.” In a kind of outburst in 1961 prompted by a scene of easy eroticism at a teenagers’ nightclub in the Western Caroline Islands, he pours out a plea for early sexual activity unfettered by any taboo: “I would, at this moment, have every youth sleep with his sister, get seduced by his older brother and male teacher, practice with his male and female cousins, aunts, uncles and teacher and maid — anything! — only to know sex as fun and frivolity, as rhythm and passionate play — from the very onset of puberty. Yes, all this I have long approved of . . .”

Most extraordinary is a two-and-a-half-page “tirade” in 1960, again arguing furiously for the sexual liberation of children and adolescent males. It begins as a defense of his “savage” friends’ morality. Childhood in eastern New Guinea, he writes,

is a period of condoned sex play, requiring only tactful secrecy. Heterosexuality is fully understood by small children and the accepted indulgence of pre-pubertal children of both sexes, but marriageable girls are more keenly protected in most Highland cultures than in our own. Thus, homosexuality among boys and men, although a subject of levity and shamed and censured publicly, is apparently universal and of no more concern to the individual than his excretory functions.

The chief difference between the New Guineans and their Jewish, Christian, and Moslem counterparts, he contends, is that the latter are forced to pay lip service to a code they do not observe. This fills him with indignation. ” How far have we slipped since the ancients?” he cries.

How much more stupid self-deception must our society practice? I am incensed, for I now know that my young patients of five to ten years, my adolescent patients, and the children I have known throughout the civilized world, are not different in drive and often in action than my youthful friends of Melanesia. I resent the burden of guilt, dishonesty, and insincerity under which they must grow in current day society. It is a degrading and crippling intellectual, physical, moral shame, a treason to human dignity, that they must deny their sex life, hide it, and rephrase it for themselves and others, into representations false to all mankind.

In light of this startling vehemence, Gajdusek’s ethnopediatric researches take on new meaning. Far from being a simple cataloguer of diversity in the area of sexual culture, he has something very serious to prove.

Earlier in the same passage, writing of “non-traumatic” childhood sexuality among Melanesians, he comments: “It is most important to document their extensive so-called ‘perverse’ childhood sexuality, without any apparent crippling effects to their adult procreative role or masculine or feminine status.” By 1965, his study of the Kukukuku has convinced him that homosexual relations between their young boys and men not only are non-traumatic for the children, but are actually beneficial, good for the boys and good for their communities: Kuk men “enjoy” the sexual availability of the youngsters; delinquency is nonexistent; and “a colorful ceremonial life” is available for the boys to join in and for the women “to behold at a distance.” He continues:

The sensually precocious, sensuous and flirtatious youngsters seem to make quite loving fathers and attentive husbands, and it seems to enforce an observation that I have made over the years in the pediatric clinic and in life: i.e. youngsters sexually active in the homosexual sphere in our culture tend to become rapidly heterosexually active in late adolescence and to adjust very well to their later heterosexual role. This thesis of which I am now rather sure, is so at odds with all the acceptable legends of sex in our own culture that I have hesitated to iterate it, but ample clinical evidence supports it, and the question to ask is not what harm the early sexual experience does to later adjustment of youngsters, but whereas [sic] the great majority find it only valuable experience for life — as with young chimps and macaques. Here among the Kuks I am slowly aware that the fathers are very solicitous fathers . . .

If there is a note almost of triumph in this climactic passage, it must nevertheless be qualified. For emphatic as the diarist’s advocacy of his particular brand of sexual freedom is, he cannot lay to rest his fears about the cost.

Thus, another “thesis” that Gajdusek investigates is that sexual freedom is incompatible with intellectual and artistic achievement. That 1961 paean to incest, for example, ends this way:

Yes, all this I have long approved of, yet, I am fully aware that in such a permissive, unfrustrated, un-fettered setting, not academic proficiency, scientific curiosity, aesthetic activity, creative drive, nor sustained intellectual endeavor are provoked. The ascetic, prohibitory, monastic and inhibiting atmosphere alone seems to be required to creative intellectual application and endeavor. Oh, if this may not be true! Yet, I fear it is, in spite of the whimsical wishful thinking of ‘progressive’ educators.

Such educators, he writes two years later, will rear ravishing Polynesians, not Shakespeares. Moreover, he fears that even the heights of passion cannot be attained in a “permissive atmosphere.” The very intensity he craves is incompatible with too-easy gratification. After a day in Fiji in 1963 that was “beyond the wildest fancies of adolescent day-dreaming,” he finds he longs for “the quiet frustrations of libraries and laboratories” and for “the sharpening of desire and the intensifying of perception and acuity of sensation” available only “in a world of sublimated form and function.”

This ambivalence is present from the first journal to the last. It is never resolved. If anything, the diarist’s appreciation for the life governed by inherited faith and discipline grows with time. At 31, he can dismiss a friend’s warning about the anarchic and decivilizing implications of nihilism with a perfectly confident “I do not fear this.” At 53, he strikes a different chord. He calls it “a defect” in himself to feel surprise that an intelligent man can be a fundamentalist Christian. And he adds, “In the long run, it is as unreasoning and stupid for rational empiricists, for modern scientists and agnostics to believe that all people . . . can live in peace and harmony, without a guideline of some faith or formalized moral and religious code. To trust to ‘reason’ and ‘reasonableness’ in human affairs could be the doom of mankind.”

Gajdusek the intellectual does not finally choose between the path of sensual freedom and the path of purposeful discipline, instead making it his life’s work to document “man’s multiple possible natures.” Nor does Gajdusek the man choose between sensuality and sublimation. Instead, he weaves them both — and the tension between them — into the very fabric of his life.

He lives literally in two worlds, dividing his time between the “libraries and laboratories” at NIH and the cherished landscapes of Melanesia. His is a life of continual partings and new beginnings. He likes his relationships vivid and brief and speculates that their intensity is due to their “wind- like fleetingness.” Much as he prizes these unions, they leave behind an awareness of “inconstancy,” as he retreats from the boys into his work or senses the jealousies created each time a younger set of favorites displaces the old. Over the years, he writes many times about his need to escape excessive involvement with others and especially “to avoid the old human relationships that would scrutinize, censure, judge, and attempt to interfere with the new.”

This tension is an uncomfortable one, and the diarist is not convinced by his own “rationalizations” — a word he uses several times at many years’ remove in the context of justifying his inconstancy. He calls “monstrous” his ability suddenly to “freeze” a loving relationship. In the last journal, he writes that everyone close to him finally learns that he “uses” people. He surrounds himself with co-workers who are also friends. “But,” he goes on, ” as the group of children and adults around me begin to deprive me of my privacy and my solitude, my blood pressure mounts, irritability gets almost pathological, and I would long since have had episodes of cardiac decompensation or a CVA if I did not ‘escape.'” This “has always been a major problem.”

In a man whose conscious mind loathes hypocrisy, this sense of being drawn in irreconcilable directions has an undermining effect, which he seems to accept as irreducible. In Kukukuku country in 1970, he contrasts his scholarly existence in America with the earthy spectacle before him in New Guinea, where one sees “life and human values and relations unmarred by technology, science, and civilized complexity as it really is. To be part of this is rewarding . . . ,” he writes, “to escape it and come back to it in small but intense doses is like cheating, and I know that, on both sides of my life, I can be accused of fraud and unfair involvement. However, for all its rewards and disappointments, it is the course I have elected” (ellipsis in the original).

There is another dark thought that crops up in the early journals, one that seems out of character in a man so vital: He expects to have a short life. On his 34th birthday, he notes that he never thought he would live past 30. Six years later, he contemplates “a lonely and isolated decade ahead — should I live into it.” Halfway between, in 1960, he has a premonition of trouble: ” How do I warrant all this privilege — to live with children of all the globe, intensely and closely everywhere — and to drink as a God the ambrosia of this world? Such a privileged three and a half decades must presage a most dismal future.”

 

The Dismal Present

Now, so many years later, trouble is at hand. What the diaries show about the man who wrote them decades ago cannot prove or disprove the present charges against him. Clearly, however, they bolster the credibility of those charges.

It seems inescapably plain that the author of the journals was a homosexual pedophile. Travel allowed him to evade the social barriers to gratifying his forbidden taste, just as nihilism freed his conscience. The hope of proving that love such as his is, in fact, not harmful to those whom society calls its victims but actually beneficial was a central motivation of his work.

It should be noted, too, that the journals corroborate the story of Gajdusek’s accusers in at least two particulars. One is the sex act in question. Gajdusek is accused of fondling and performing fellatio, not of sodomy; the journals suggest he was interested in the former activities but rarely mention the latter. And the older youth told the Washington Post that during an argument, Gajdusek slapped him. At least three times, over many years, the diarist records striking his boys.

During the decades of the journals, Gajdusek constructed a life of moral ambiguity. A Western man living as a guest in primitive villages, a scientist merely observing what is, he had grounds for adapting to local customs and suspending judgment. These ambiguities he transplanted to Maryland, as he built his family of adopted Melanesians and Micronesians.

In the end, though, the crimes he stands accused of are not ambiguous. Adults’ sexual exploitation of children in their care is abhorrent, whether the adults be priests or scout masters or adoptive fathers. There is no moral standard by which it is otherwise. Even the brazen advocates of pedophilia, with their talk of “ASCs” (adults who are sexual with children) and their enthusiasm for the mentoring benefits of “Greek love,” do not sanction an adult’s forcing himself on a young dependent, as Gajdusek is accused of doing. At the time of the alleged incidents, Gajdusek was in his 60s and 70s, and the boys — no Stone Age Kukukukus, but natives of Micronesian islands Christianized in the last century — were 10,000 miles from home.

If Gajdusek is guilty, his story must hold special bitterness for those who believe that individuals of intelligence and goodwill can and should devise their own morality by the light of their own reason, that they will know how to set proper limits for themselves and channel their energies to worthy ends, while doing their neighbor no harm.

By Claudia Winkler