The white Scientist Whose Darkest Experiment Was on the Indigenous Children He Took Home

D. Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize for his research on kuru, a fatal brain disease in Papua New Guinea. Over three decades, he brought dozens of boys from the South Pacific to live with him in the United States—an arrangement he framed in philanthropic and anthropological terms.

Years later, Gajdusek pleaded guilty to child abuse. Rachel Aviv follows the complicated afterlives of the boys he brought home, whose stories have never before been fully reported.

Read “The Children a Scientist Took Home” by Rachel Aviv: https://www.newyorker.com/maga....zine/2026/08/24/the-