[Michael] Alpers, now the Professor of International Health at Curtin University in Western Australia... tells me the story of what he found as a young doctor visiting the New Guinea highlands more than 50 years ago... It was in the field, in early 1962, Alpers first met American scientist Carleton Gajdusek, who had by then been studying kuru for several years... Unusually, the paper identified the victims Kigea and Eiru -- as well as Daisey and Georgette -- by name... Two weeks later, the paper appeared in the journal Nature. It identified kuru as a new category of infectious disease...