A leading expert on infectious diseases has earned global recognition for his work studying the fatal brain disease kuru, also known as the "laughing death".
Curtin University Emetrius Professor Michael Alpers' pioneering research has led to him being named the 2020 recipient of The Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science Medal for his exceptional contribution to science.
Kuru, a rare condition that produces face and body contortions, tremors and an uncontrollable laugh, was endemic to the Fore, a small cultural group in remote Papua New Guinea who practiced a form of cannibalism in which they ate the brains of dead people as part of a funeral ritual. It led to the progressive loss of all motor functions and eventually death.
Professor Alpers said he was honoured to receive the medal. It is the culmination of a career that he began as a medical student in Adelaide in the 1950s when he first read about kuru in a newspaper.
"I was interested in neurological diseases and wanted to do something different," he said.
"In 1961, I relocated to the eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea to study the effects of the disease first-hand. The people had only recently encountered the modern world so it was a really strange situation.
"The villagers had no idea what I would be like and I had no idea what they would be like except that they had just emerged from using stone tools.
I relocated to PNG to study the effects of the disease first-hand. The people had only recently encountered the modern world so it was a really strange situation.
- Professor Michael Alpers
"We quickly recognised our common humanity. I learned everyone's names, the names of places, all the foods, ate with people; we had a great time and became friends. That was very important to me personally and for the conduct of the research."
Professor Alpers discovered that kuru was transmitted through diseased brain tissue. He was able to show it was spread through the mortuary practice of the Fore community.
"For religious and cultural reasons, they consumed the bodies of loved ones upon their death in order to free the spirit of the dead so they could reach the land of their ancestors," he said.
"The disease was confined to women and children as it was the women who ate the bodies."
The outlawing of the sacred practice ended kuru's transmission but the long incubation period meant the last sufferer did not die until 2009.
Professor Alpers' work paved the way for a new field of human medicine, including the discovery of infectious proteins known as prions.
This was key in understanding mad cow disease, caused by a prion, transmitted when calves were fed the scrapings of cow carcasses made into meat and bone meal.
In humans this resulted in Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD, caused by eating food made with infected meat.
From 1977-2000 Professor Alpers was director of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research, where he worked on tropical diseases and in developing and testing malaria and pneumonia vaccines.
He remains in touch with the Fore people to this day. "For me it was a wonderful privilege to experience their world," he said. "The whole village is still very attached to us and our family to them, so it is an ongoing thing."
