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David M. Perry
@lollardfish.bsky.social

“I realized I’m in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the N.I.H. by a Nobel laureate for thirty years.” Aviv has made a lot of choices in how she frames this story, and I'm not criticizing it (I am thinking about it), but burying this in the middle is one.

Patrick Radden Keefe@praddenkeefe.bsky.social

Read this new one by Rachel Aviv. It is astonishing, one of the best magazine stories I've read in a long time. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

newyorker.comThe Scientist Who Lived with Dozens of Children from the Pacific IslandsCarleton Gajdusek won the Nobel for his work on a disease in Papua New Guinea. But his biggest experiment was on the children he took back to the U.S.

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Bibliobibuli
@fowerli.bsky.social

At this very moment, Disney+ is debating whether to air a drama (Knock Off) starring an accused pedophile. These guys are rarely convicted, but it’s important to me as a parent to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the network doesn’t excuse CSA to protect profits. It’s a pretty low bar honestly.

Kathy
@kayemes.bsky.social

One of the most disturbing things I’ve read in recent memory. An overwhelming amount of horrifying information in one article.

David M. Perry
@lollardfish.bsky.social

Gajdusek adopted and raped children from Papua New Guinea, and it seems like he wrote about it in his journals, and had his staff organize and bind them and store them in his office? If I'm reading this correctly?

Liz Lewis
@lizlewisphd.bsky.social

I took a grad school class with a prof who, evidently, worked with Gajdusek and even co-authored with him. 1) I did not enjoy this prof and the class was one of the worst, most brain-masturbation things I've ever encountered; 2) I'm still struggling to wrap my head around this.

David M. Perry
@lollardfish.bsky.social

On the day of Gajdusek’s release, friends, including the neurologist Oliver Sacks and the physicist Freeman Dyson, met him at the jail, along with four of the children he had brought up. “Whatever he may or may not have been doing, it was clearly not bad for the kids," Dyson said

David M. Perry
@lollardfish.bsky.social

By then, Gajdusek was dead, his journals documenting his physical decline preserved at the National Library of Medicine. “I carried my lifelong pederasty into my medical career and succeeded in both with very few failures,” he wrote, two months before he died.

David M. Perry
@lollardfish.bsky.social

“Without protectors I would never have succeeded.” He had spent the last decade of his life living in Europe and travelling for lectures and conference [after being convicted and spending one year in jail].