Galileo's Middle Finger

by Alice Dreger

  For a long while, the Centerwall story had been like a peppercorn stuck in my molar. All the documentary evidence suggested it couldn’t have happened the way Bill Centerwall had told his son, with Neel supposedly wanting to let the epidemic run unchecked. But both Frechione and Turner had Brandon on record remembering his father’s vivid story of Neel’s cold-blooded plan and Bill Centerwall’s lifesaving intervention. So I did what I had to do: I asked the son to try to explain the discrepancy between his story and the rest of the historical record.

  In my digging to find him, I discovered that Brandon himself had been at the center of a little controversy; a student of literature as well as a physician, Brandon Centerwall had apparently written a dangerously persuasive scholarly article suggesting that Humbert Humbert, the pedophile of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, actually was a veiled self-portrait of the author. I hoped surviving a controversy might make Brandon more inclined to speak with me, not less. I felt strange having to question a man’s late father’s story, but it obviously mattered rather a lot. After confirming by e-mail that I had the right Brandon Centerwall, I wrote to ask him to confirm Frechione’s and Turner’s accounts of his retelling of his father’s story.

  No answer.

  I wrote again five days later. Would he talk to me?

  Two days later, Brandon answered, but cryptically, in a short message saying that he would send me a real reply later that day. He added, “I give you full permission to do as you wish with it, including quoting any or all of it, or sharing it with others.”

  Still, his response to my questions came not that day but two days later. His four-page letter began: “To cut to the chase: (1) My recollections are accurate as to what my father told me about the expedition when I was fourteen years old, in 1968. (2) What he told me was entirely false with regard to those aspects of the story which are of concern to you. . . . The purpose of this response is to account for why my father would make up an elaborate story which simply wasn’t true.”

  Brandon hastened to be sure I understood that his father “was a hard-working pediatrician who no doubt saved hundreds, thousands, of children’s lives while he was working in rural India for five years (I was there).” He added that his father had been “a tireless worker, an excellent clinician, and a devoted instructor as a professor of pediatrics. He was cheerful and upbeat in character, and there were few who didn’t get along with him.”

  However, Brandon said, Bill had “a habit of padding his résumé” and of telling his son stories meant to make the father look just the way a son would want his father to look. Brandon explained his father’s psychology further: “[Bill] was hypersensitive to any kind of criticism whatsoever, but especially to criticism directed at perceived inadequacies in his performance,” just the kind of criticism Neel had likely doled out. “He would brood over any such criticism and wreak vengeance upon the critic, but only in his imagination.” This combination of behaviors—of generosity, of résumé padding, of imagining vengeance—covered up “the painful reality . . . that he was a coward.”

  After putting together various puzzle pieces, Brandon had come to realize that the story of his father Bill standing up to Neel was one among many tall tales his father had told him “for reasons of ego.” Brandon recalled in his letter to me that his father had also told him that he knew some Cantonese because he had been in training for intelligence work on the Chinese front during the Second World War. Brandon had since figured out that his father actually knew Chinese because he had had a Chinese girlfriend. “I suppose that when later he was courting my mother, a devoutly conservative Christian, he needed to have a logical explanation as to why he knew Cantonese, an explanation that did not involve him living in sin with a Chinese girlfriend.” Brandon, ever the student of literature, suggested, “Perhaps the simplest, most direct way to an understanding of my father is to be found in James Thurber’s short story, ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,’ a favorite story of my father’s.”

  Brandon was sure his father never meant his story of standing up to an amoral Neel to hurt anybody. Brandon suspected the impulse for the story came from Bill’s perceiving a slight from Neel—probably when Neel would have had to “put him in his place: that he was not Neel’s colleague, that Neel was his boss. . . . Regardless of how tactfully Neel may have phrased it (or not), my father’s inevitable emotional response would have been a sense of deep humiliation accompanied by anger and resentment.” Brandon continued:

  After he returned home, he told me a lengthy, detailed fiction in which Neel had proved to be a villain and he himself was the hero of the occasion. . . . My father was a hero, and an unsung hero at that! At fourteen years of age, I was sufficiently callow to believe it all. I am certain that I am the only one to whom he ever told this fiction. Telling it once was sufficient to vent most of his continuing sense of mortification and anger. I suspect he felt confident that nothing would ever come of his telling me this outrageously false account, and he was very nearly right.

  If Turner and Tierney had not moved to develop a story featuring Neel as a Nazi-like eugenicist, Bill Centerwall’s story would have rested quietly in the memory of his son. Brandon would never have formally supplied his father’s story to Neel’s critics. Brandon might never have realized that the story was but one instance of his father telling tales. But now Brandon had to conclude in his letter to me, “So the story was false in all pertinent aspects. It makes me heartsick to have to write such things about my father. I will stop now.”

  Now, a few months later, sitting in Frechione’s Pittsburgh office, I had to tell Frechione—the man who had tried to help Tierney by recording on tape Brandon Centerwall’s memory—that Brandon had withdrawn the story. As I recall, I did not go into the detail of Brandon’s letter, but simply let Frechione know that Brandon had retracted his belief in his father’s story about the epidemic and that I really didn’t think there was anything left in this matter as a strike against Neel.

  When I’d made my plans to go to Pittsburgh, I’d taken with me Patrick Tierney’s parents’ address, the address where he seemed to be living. Tierney had not been answering my requests for interviews. I hadn’t been sure when I’d entered Pittsburgh whether I should go to the Tierney house and knock on the door to see if maybe he hadn’t gotten my requests. Finally, in talking with Frechione, it became clear that Tierney knew I was trying to reach him and didn’t want to talk to me.

  However, before I left Pittsburgh, Frechione put a bug in my ear about something that gave me a roaring headache on the drive back to East Lansing. He said that, since Darkness in El Dorado, Tierney had been teaming up with Andrew Wakefield—the discredited physician who claimed the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism—apparently on new work about the supposed dangers of contemporary vaccines. What if, I thought to myself as I drove west on I-80 across Ohio, what if people take Tierney as seriously this time around as they did the last time? How many people will he hurt?

  After several consultations with advisors about my ethical obligations, I contacted the administration of the University of Pittsburgh to ask why they continued to allow a university affiliation for a man whose work had been shown by numerous major scholarly associations to be fundamentally inaccurate. What about their responsibility to others, including to the public and to Pitt scholars with good names? After some back-and-forth, I received a message indicating that Patrick Tierney no longer had an active affiliation with the University of Pittsburgh.

  • • •

  IN THE SUMMER of 2009, when I took a short break from this project to visit my family on Long Island, I decided to take the train from New York down to Philadelphia for a day to spend a few hours visiting the archives of the American Philosophical Society to look at Neel’s papers. In advance, I let the APS archivist now in charge of the papers, Charles Greifenstein, know that I’d be coming, as you do when you’re making a visit like this. I told him that on
this visit I just wanted to get a feel for the papers, to know what kinds of sources Susan Lindee and APS archivist Robert Cox had worked with as they had responded to Tierney’s claims about James Neel. When I arrived, Charlie took me down to the stacks, and explained that, given the volume of paper Neel bequeathed to the APS, his materials had not yet been completely cataloged. Nevertheless, Charlie had a good sense of what was where. I asked him to give me a box or two from the 1960s, around the time of the ill-fated expedition.

  We took two boxes back upstairs to the reading room, where like all other prescreened visitors, I’d be closely watched over by multiple cameras and security personnel charged with making sure patrons don’t steal, damage, or insert anything. I started to peruse the papers. One box turned out to contain some marvelous correspondence between Napoleon Chagnon and James Neel, and also between Carlene Chagnon and Neel’s secretary. During Nap’s early fieldwork, Carlene had gone down to Venezuela with him, bringing their young son and daughter along. Carlene ended up being mostly holed up with their babies in a kind of safe house for Americans while Nap trudged off to the field for long periods of time. Carlene had on occasion taken over correspondence with the University of Michigan, keeping track of grant deadlines and such. As I read these onionskin letters, in which Nap and Carlene wrote to the very edges of the page, presumably to save precious postage, I remembered the two of them telling me about that trip while we were standing around in their kitchen. Nap still felt guilty, nearly fifty years later, for bringing Carlene and the children down in what turned out to be seriously trying circumstances.

  I found particularly telling the correspondence between Chagnon and Neel, who was for some of this time off in Japan doing post–atomic bomb research. In the letters, Dr. Neel was trying to give the young anthropologist advice about how to manage in the field, but it was obvious that Chagnon was trying to indicate, as respectfully as possible, that he really didn’t need Neel’s advice. Chagnon had become so quickly and so thoroughly immersed in field life among the Yanomamö that he already knew far more about them than Neel.

  I also found in one of the boxes a letter from James Neel to Mr. Hobert E. Lowrance of the Missionary Aviation Fellowship. The MAF—a team of pilots with small planes—was sometimes hired by Neel and others to get people in and out of the field. The date of the letter caught my attention: April 4, 1968. This letter would have been written not long after Neel had returned from the epidemic.

  “Thank you for the letter of March the 25th,” Neel began. “We too regret that you were not yet again operational in Venezuela during much of our field work. All of our flying which was not courtesy of the Venezuelan Air Force was done with Mr. Boris Kaminski, whom we found to be both reliable and gentlemanly, although, of course, somewhat more costly than if we had been able to fly with MAF.” Neel went on:

  As you may have heard, this particular period of field work was full of unscheduled events. We know from our previous studies how susceptible the Yanomamö were to measles, and had brought with us measles vaccine, which we had thought to administer towards the end of our scientific studies. However, our arrival in the field coincided with the introduction of the disease itself, and we found ourselves in something of a race to get the vaccine in ahead of contact with the real disease.

  Neel ended the one-page letter by working on arrangements for future trips. He told Lowrance: “Since one of our objectives is to obtain certain biological specimens from the Indians as soon after contact as possible, I hope to get two men in there next year. I would hope at the same time that we will again be in a position to vaccinate for measles, as a small contribution to making the transition of the Indian from the Stone Age to the Atomic Age a little bit smoother.”

  Not only had Neel not purposefully harmed the Yanomamö; he had been actively working to protect them from what he knew would inevitably come. This accorded with what Lindee and others had shown. I called Charlie over and showed him this letter, so nice a summary proof of the reality did it make. He was visibly excited by it, and immediately took it to make me a copy on bright blue paper. (High-security archives make copies on colored paper so you can’t “accidentally” walk off with an original.) But while he went off to make the copy, I found myself in pain.

  Here, within an hour of arriving at the APS archive, I had come upon a letter clearly showing that Neel had been bringing in vaccines because he was concerned about the Yanomamö’s vulnerability to measles. The letter seemed to show the epidemic had started just before he got there (something I knew the missionary-anthropologist Thomas Headland had confirmed by independent documentation). It showed that he had done what he could to get ahead of it. It showed he was making plans to get more Yanomamö vaccinated, in order to protect them. I had found this additional piece of clear evidence in an hour. Why the hell hadn’t the New Yorker’s fact-checkers? And how could this sort of letter—on top of what Lindee, Cox, Headland, and all the rest had found—have been so utterly ignored by the AAA as they plowed ahead for years in an attempted prosecution of Neel based on Tierney’s worthless indictment?

  In my interviews with people who had participated in the AAA’s Darkness doings, I hoped to understand this, to get some explanation about why the AAA had so radically differed in its approach from all the other scientific societies that had weighed in. The only explanation I could come up with was that (a) Terence Turner pushed and got others to push; (b) no one wanted to “censor” persons who claimed to be speaking on behalf of vulnerable indigenous peoples, and (c) Chagnon was rough around the edges. In other words, an old white guy known for drinking beer and swearing who had made his name relating stories about vulnerable native peoples getting stoned, getting laid, and getting killed—well, such a guy was understood to have forsaken all his rights to a fair trial at a place like the ultraliberal AAA.

  This whole scene was just so disturbing. Everything I found indicated that the leaders of the AAA had to have known early on that Tierney’s work was riddled with errors. Yet they had proceeded anyway. To justify it all, they had first formed the Peacock Commission—a panel named after the chair, James Peacock, a former president of the AAA—to come up with a plan for responding to Tierney’s allegations. The Peacock Commission issued what amounted to a sealed indictment; no one outside the AAA’s upper echelons was even allowed to see exactly what the Peacock Commission was telling the AAA leadership. AAA rank and file were allowed to know only that the Peacock Report had been used as the justification by the AAA leadership to form the El Dorado Task Force. Naturally I wanted to see this secret Peacock Report, and I was glad when I was given a copy of it by Chagnon’s collaborator, Raymond Hames, a task force member who had been added late under pressure from Chagnon’s supporters and had later resigned. (When Hames resigned, he claimed it was because of a conflict of interest, but he admitted to me in our interview that it was actually because he saw the task force becoming a train wreck where facts were concerned.) When Hames e-mailed me a PDF of his copy of the Peacock Report, I was stunned. It just summarized what Tierney’s book said, and it contained no logical argument for why the AAA should proceed. They had so rushed it that not all members even had had time to approve the final version before it was submitted with their names. This was the justification for the AAA’s El Dorado Task Force and the surrounding free-for-all?

  Yet it got worse. As I dug around, interviewing the members of the task force and uncovering internal documentation, it became obvious that several of the people leading the AAA’s “inquiry” absolutely knew that Tierney’s book was a house of cards. Some did try to do the right thing. The Wisconsin biological anthropologist Trudy Turner (no relation to Terence Turner), who served on the task force, desperately tried to use her position from within to assert the documented truth about the measles outbreak and the vaccines. But she was up against others who simply didn’t want to deal with the facts. When I interviewed her, Trudy Turner told me that Ray Hames’s resignation “left
me in a very difficult position. If I had bailed, who would have been left [to defend the truth]? I felt like I couldn’t. Then they could have written anything they wanted about Neel.”

  Even knowing that this whole show had been run like a junior-high moot court with no adult supervision, I could hardly believe it when, in our phone interview, Peacock Commission and task force member Janet Chernela (whom Chagnon wryly nicknamed “Chernobyl”) told me, “Nobody took Tierney’s book’s claims seriously. I was surprised that James Peacock, who is a very careful and fair person, favored going forward with the task force.” Yet go forth it did, with Chernela’s cooperation on two commissions for two years. Indeed, Chernela had actively participated in facilitating “testimony” from a Yanomamö spokesperson who claimed that Chagnon had offered to pay his subjects to kill each other and had offered to pay per killing. Chernela allowed reproduction of this utterly baseless claim in the Task Force Report, and thus also over the Internet.

  Meanwhile, my interview with the chair of the task force, Jane Hill, made my head positively spin. Hill seemed to want simultaneously to give me the conclusions of an ethics investigation—saying, “The final report did include an evaluation of Chagnon. We dismissed the charges against Neel”—while claiming to me that “we did not make an ethical accusation against [Chagnon]. But not everyone read it that way.” She added, “I think he could have gotten a lot worse from us than he did.” Worse?! Hill told me that the whole thing had been hard on her, and I had the sense she really didn’t want to revisit it. But I felt she never really understood how hard it had been on the Chagnon and Neel families. When I asked her why Chagnon was never formally invited to defend himself, she answered, “A decision was made not to talk to him. I don’t remember the circumstances.”