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“An Unusual and Fast
Disappearing Opportunity”:
Infectious Disease,
Indigenous Populations,
and New Biomedical
Knowledge in Amazonia,
1960–1970

Rosanna Dent
McGill University

Ricardo Ventura Santos
Fundação Oswaldo Cruz and
Museu Nacional/UFRJ

In the twentieth century, biomedical researchers believed the study of Indigenous
Amazonians could inform global histories of human biological diversity. This
paper examines the similarities and differences of two approaches to this mid-
century biomedical research, comparing the work of virologist and epi-
demiologist Francis Black with human geneticists James V. Neel and Francisco
Salzano. While both groups were interested in Indigenous populations as rep-
resentatives of the past, their perspectives on epidemics diverged. For Black, out-
breaks of infectious diseases were central to his methodological and theoretical
interests; for Neel and Salzano, epidemics could potentially compromise the
epistemological value of their data.

Introduction

1.
In 1966, a team made up of Brazilian and foreign scientists spent a
week carefully recording the body temperature and other clinical signs and

This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (grant 203486/Z/16/Z ), the Brazilian
National Research Council (CNPq) (grants 161671/2011-0 and 473268/2011-6), and a
Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Our deepest thanks to Douglas and
Peter Black, for granting access to the Francis Black’s Papers in New Haven, CT, as well as
the staff of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia for access to James Neel’s Papers.

Perspectives on Science 2017, vol. 25, no. 5
© 2017 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Published
under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license.

doi:10.1162/POSC_a_00255

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symptoms of 110 Tiriyó Indigenous people in their communities along the
Brazil-Suriname border (Black et al. 1969). Led by the Yale University virol-
ogist and immunologist Francis Black, the researchers faced an “epidemic”
with a special proﬁle, distinct from those most common in Indigenous
populations, which usually resulted in widespread illness, the collapse of
subsistence activities, hunger, and as a rule, elevated mortality (Ribeiro
1956; Coimbra 1987; Crosby 2003; Jones 2003, 2004).

Rather, what was happening with the Tiriyó was a planned event, con-
trolled and carefully monitored. It was the result of the application of a
new biomedical technology, the Schwarz live attenuated measles vaccine.
Around the globe, the vaccine was being tested in human populations as part
of diverse initiatives, including one by the World Health Organization
(WHO 1963). But the ﬁeld research led by Black was not only designed
to test the vaccine. As Black would emphasize a few years later, the “vaccine
makes a convenient, ethical model for the study of measles because it elicits
almost all symptomatic aspects of the natural disease, but in less intense
form” (Black et al. 1982, p. 42).

By monitoring the clinical conditions of the Tiriyó, the scientists hoped
to conﬁrm that the vaccine was safe for Native populations of the New
World. Measles vaccine development initiatives of the 1960s were inves-
tigating the production of both inactivated virus vaccine and use of atten-
uated strains. In this context, a major debate emerged regarding whether
Indigenous populations would be immunologically “competent.” Would
they produce antibodies once exposed to the attenuated live virus similarly
to Old World populations with long histories of exposure? Or were their
immune systems insufﬁcient to stop the attenuated strain, leading them to
develop the disease that was supposed to be prevented? Black’s research
team concluded that the Tiriyó had reactions to the vaccine that implied
“no serious impediment to their immunization” (Black et al. 1969, p. 174).
The Tiriyó research was Black’s ﬁrst foray into Amazonia. Over the next
four decades, his ﬁeldwork there would grow into a central focus of his
scientiﬁc career (Black 1994, 1997; Santos 2015). Black’s research would
begin with the data he collected in the context of vaccine ﬁeld trials, as
part of a global program that aimed to reduce measles epidemics. Using
the serological proﬁles of the Tiriyó and others, Black would then turn his
attention to the relationship between demography and epidemiological
realities, theorizing the relationship between key parameters, such as pop-
ulation size, and the persistence or absence of certain kinds of pathogens
(Black 1975; Black et al. 1974). His shift to these broader questions of
what kinds of infectious diseases—viral, parasitic, bacterial—could persist
in human groups with speciﬁc population densities and structures was
explicitly linked to efforts to understand human evolutionary history and

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the rise of agriculture and “civilization” as related to epidemiological real-
ities in the present. Considering diseases like measles that were virulent,
fast-spreading, and short-lived, Black theorized that certain infections
could only have been sustained in human populations following the advent
of agriculture and the resulting agglomeration of populations of large size
and density. It was in this context that, a few years after beginning his stud-
ies in the Amazon, Black would write, “contemporary primitive societies
perpetuate conditions which existed in ancient peoples” (1975, p. 515).

One of the principal biomedical scientists to work in Amazonia in the
second half of the twentieth century, the Yale researcher was part of a
generation that turned to study the biology of Indigenous people. They
conducted research in the most diverse parts of the world, with a view
to developing genetic and epidemiological models applicable to the human
species. The mid-twentieth century scientiﬁc narratives that emerged from
this kind of work positioned Indigenous populations as “portals to the past”
(Radin 2013, p. 487). These approaches gained popularity from the 1960s
on, especially in the ﬁeld of human population genetics. Researchers
conceived of Indigenous populations as privileged subjects, essential to
understand broader processes of human evolution on time scales in the
tens of thousands of years (Santos 2002; Lindee and Santos 2012; Radin
2013, 2017; Kowal et al. 2013; Santos et al. 2014; also see Haraway 1989).
However, scientists’ epistemological privileging of Native groups not
only sought to inform understandings of the past; they were narratives
fundamentally concerned with the future (Radin 2013; Kowal et al.
2013). In the context of the escalating Cold War, Indigenous populations
were assumed to be unexposed to the growing levels of radiation observed
in the West. As such, the study of Indigenous population genetics was
seen as potential sources to inform understandings of “natural” levels of
mutation and genetic change resulting from technological change (Lindee
2001, 2004; Bangham and de Chadarevian 2014; Santos et al. 2014). Ac-
cording to historian of science Joanna Radin, in the context of research
programs such as the International Biological Program (IBP), an important
portion of international biological diversity research in the 1960s to 1970s
was predicated on the idea that Indigenous “…bodies preserved traces of
the deep past, which could have potential value for the survival of humans
into the deep future” (Radin 2012, pp. 89–90). Indigenous populations
were conceived of as “living closer to, and in balance with, nature” (Radin
2012, p. 70), and as such, they could serve as models both for the past and
the future.

Recent scholarship has shown how biomedical researchers in the 1960s
and 1970s justiﬁed the privileged epistemic position of Indigenous popu-
lations as subjects for study by emphasizing speciﬁc geographical, cultural,

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and ecological characteristics and providing salient interpretations of
human temporality. In this paper we build on this work by inquiring into
the potential and problematics that infectious disease posed for scientists’
approaches to Indigenous populations of the Amazon. Disease, whether
endemic or introduced, epidemic or consistently present at a low-grade
level, became an important variable in establishing how useful certain
communities could be for scientiﬁc investigation. Infectious disease had
particular relevance, as scientists understood susceptibility and resistance
to be essential determinants of genetic “ﬁtness” and the probability of indi-
viduals and communities to propagate their genes. Indigenous communities’
status as “Populations of Cognition” hinged on their health proﬁles and the
presence, absence, or prevalence of particular diseases—a key factor that has
yet to receive due attention (Suárez-Diaz et al. 2017). Indigenous groups
functioned as populations of cognition by allowing scientists to conceptu-
alize or model scientiﬁc problems; researchers used Indigenous populations
as representational tools to understand large-scale processes at the level of
the human species. They projected contemporary observations into the past,
ascribing meaning based on various assumptions about the groups they
studied in order to understand past, present, and future. Quantifying and
interpreting the natural history of infectious disease had substantial impli-
cations for the validity of their scientiﬁc claims.

In this paper, we address the complex interaction between the presence
of infectious disease and scientists’ claims about temporality and the rep-
resentative nature of Indigenous subjects. In the ﬁrst of two parts, we pres-
ent an historical contextualization of human biological diversity studies at
the beginning of the 1960s. Disease proﬁles were of great interest to re-
searchers who traveled to Amazonia during this period; predominantly,
they sought the most isolated and pristine (“primitive”) populations possi-
ble as a key to the “deep past” and the “deep future.” Focusing on the col-
laborative work of geneticists James V. Neel of the University of Michigan
and Francisco M. Salzano of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul,
Brazil, we show how this approach required groups perceived as minimally
“contaminated” by surrounding national society. On the one hand, re-
searchers were interested in the interface of genetics and disease, especially
those diseases understood as predating European colonialism. On the other
hand, introduced disease was seen as potentially “polluting” analytical
models. Their studies required “purity,” in the sense of populations that
could be portrayed as being as close as possible to what Neel would call
“the conditions of human evolution,” unchanged by colonialist expansion
and uncontaminated by Old World disease. In the second section, we ana-
lyze Black’s research in Amazonia. In contrast to other researchers, between
1966 and the mid-1970s, Black and his collaborators focused primarily on

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Perspectives on Science

589

introduced diseases.1 While notions of “the primitive” and the concep-
tualization of Indigenous communities as “portals to the past” were impor-
tant guiding axes for Black’s research, his approach took a distinct angle
from many of his colleagues. We argue that Black’s models of human evo-
lutionary history, epidemiology, and demography were also imbricated
with the “deep present,” in the sense that the occurrence of epidemics
related to the expansion of settler colonialism into the Amazon played a
key role in his theoretical constructions.

The Purity of the Deep Past

2.
Beginning in the 1960s, there was a notable expansion of biomedical re-
search on Indigenous populations from the Amazon to Polynesia, the Arctic
to Africa (Santos 2002; Reardon 2005; Anderson 2008; Radin 2013, 2017;
Kowal et al. 2013). At the core of this interest was the perspective that pri-
meval and pristine, Indigenous groups’ biology could illuminate human evo-
lutionary history. In the context of growing concerns about the annihilation
of the human species due to emergent technologies – particularly atomic
ones – and environmental change, Indigenous peoples’ biology offered
“lessons” according to James Neel in his well-known Science article “Lessons
from a ‘Primitive’ People” (Neel 1970; see also Santos et al. 2014). Subtitling
his article, “Do recent data concerning South American Indians have relevance
to problems of highly civilized communities?” the geneticist answered his
own question with a ﬁrm “yes” based on his research in Amazonia.

Within the international scientiﬁc community, Neel was particularly
successful at promoting what he saw as the research potential of Indigenous
communities. Working closely with the World Health Organization, his
1962 ﬁeld collaboration with Brazilian geneticist Francisco M. Salzano
and three other scientists became a model for later larger-scale research ini-
tiatives (de Chadarevian 2015). The two geneticists began developing the
theoretical foundation for their joint research in the late 1950s while Salzano
completed Rockefeller Foundation funded post-doctoral training in Neel’s
laboratory in Ann Arbor. Their ﬁrst foray into the ﬁeld took them to the Xa-
vante of Central Brazil (Neel et al. 1964; Neel 1994; Salzano 2000; Dent
2017). This initial research, conceptualized as a pilot project, grew into a
sustained collaboration that continued until the middle of the 1970s and

1. It is important to emphasize that our goal in this paper is not to cover the full spec-
trum of epidemiologic research on infectious disease in Amazonian Indigenous populations
carried out in the 1960s–1970s. Black, Neel, and Salzano were certainly among the leading
authors on the topic, but there were also a few other researchers working on speciﬁc diseases
in the region (for overviews, see Salzano 1990; Coimbra and Santos 1992; Coimbra 1995).

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New Biomedical Knowledge in Amazonia, 1960–1970

included various other populations, particularly the Yanomami along the
Brazil-Venezuela border (Neel 1994; Salzano and Callegari-Jacques 1988).
Neel and Salzano’s collaboration had implications both at the level of
national science in Brazil as well as in high proﬁle, international research
initiatives. Salzano was one of a number of young Brazilian geneticists to
complete fellowships in the United States in the late 1950s and early
1960s, just as human genetics emerged as a ﬁeld in Brazil (Souza and
Santos 2014). Beyond genetic analyses of the general formation of the
Brazilian population, studies on biological diversity of Indigenous popula-
tions, particularly those located in Amazonia, became one of the pillars of
the newly institutionalized ﬁeld in Brazil (Salzano 1991, 2000; Souza and
Santos 2014; Dent and Santos 2016). The focus on “primitive” people like-
wise became a prominent, widely disseminated approach to the study of
human diversity. The study of Indigenous groups was institutionalized as
a methodology for the study of human evolutionary history in the world-
wide research initiative known as the “Human Adaptability” arm of the
International Biological Program (HA-IBP) (Santos 2002; Lindee and Santos
2012; Little 2012; Radin 2013).

The Amazonian research of Neel, Salzano, and their collaborators resulted
in the publication of dozens of papers, which, with varying levels of impact,
addressed questions linked to the occurrence of disease (for a general vision,
see Neel 1994; Salzano and Callegari-Jacques 1988). Their general approach
to the analysis of infectious disease was already apparent in their earliest
work at the beginning of the 1960s.

As previous scholarship has shown, Neel and Salzano vigorously pro-
moted the notion that the “American Indian” posed particular “genetic
and para-genetic questions” (Neel and Salzano 1964, p. 85; see also Santos
2002; Radin 2013). “Pre-eminent” among “surviving primitive groups,”
they wrote, American Indians “present an unusual and fast disappearing
opportunity to study the selective forces which shaped modern man” (Neel
and Salzano 1964, p. 91). Focusing on the scientiﬁc potential of groups that
were thought to descend from a single founding population that initially
settled the American continent “some 30,000 years ago” (Neel and Salzano
1964, p. 85), the scientists thought they would be able to illuminate the
forces of selection that had been at play for “the majority of human evolution”
which “occurred under conditions far more comparable to those to be ob-
served in the surviving primitive groups of the world than in today’s major
culture-complexes” (Neel and Salzano 1964, p. 91).

From the perspective of the geneticists, the “genetic problems posed
by the descendants of these migrants” included three principal sets of
questions: (1) “what is the degree of genetic divergence which has arisen
between the various tribal subdivisions of the descendants of the one or

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Perspectives on Science

591

more founding stocks?”; (2) “For such of these groups as still persist in an
essentially pre-Columbian state, to what extent can we identify the signif-
icant biological parameters, parameters which we may presume to have
obtained over the majority of human evolution?”; and (3) “What new dis-
ease patterns will emerge as these primitive groups make the transition
from a near-Stone Age to an Atomic Age existence?” (Neel and Salzano
1964, p. 85).

In their early work together, the geneticists focused on the second
question: their primary objective was to illuminate the mechanisms—both
biological and social—underlying the production of genetic variability in
human populations (Neel and Salzano 1967, p. 555). In order to do this,
they proposed the collection of a wide range of biological, anthropological,
and demographic data. This included morphological and descriptive genetic
data; “data on those aspects of the cultural pattern with biological implica-
tions”; “data on population structure, the term including birth and death
rates… age distribution, inbreeding, migration…”; and “data on psycholog-
ical pressures, with particular reference to the relation they bear to survival
and reproduction” (Neel and Salzano 1964, p. 91). The study of disease was a
component, not for its own sake, but for its potential to inform the rela-
tionship between evolutionary pressure and genetic variability. This included
investigations into infectious and parasitic diseases and nutrition status,
which the geneticists saw as selective pressures, but excluded attention to
non-infectious diseases such as cancer or diabetes, unless readily observable
in physical exams. Neel and Salzano described as much, advocating the
collection of, “Data on biological pressures, the term including exposure to
agents of diseases and the manner of acquisition of immunity as well as an
evaluation of elements in the diet which when deﬁcient or in excess are
disease producing” (Neel and Salzano 1964, p. 91).

At the same time that the researchers emphasized disease as a relevant
element, under certain conditions disease histories and prevalence created
difﬁculties for the geneticists’ analytic models. Reporting on their 1962
pilot study of one Xavante village, Neel, Salzano, and colleagues wrote
that “attempts to depict the disease proﬁles of such groups as the Xavante”
were necessary both for their “contribution towards deﬁning the disease
pressures under which primitive man evolved,” and for diverse goals in
human population genetics, including characterization of the role of genetic
polymorphisms in determining disease resistance (Neel et al. 1964, p. 117).
Due to the “biological pressures” exerted by disease, the researchers were
particularly interested in pre-contact infectious diseases—those that had
been endemic prior to the arrival of Europeans—and what these diseases
could elucidate about the (genetic) “manner of acquisition of immunity”
(Neel and Salzano 1964, p. 91).

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However, non-endemic epidemic diseases could potentially destabilize
the factors that made Indigenous populations of such interest by under-
mining the possibility of their population structures “persist[ing] essen-
tially in a pre-Columbian state” (Neel and Salzano 1964, p. 85). The
geneticists freely admitted these limitations in their earliest publications.
Discussing their 1962 pilot study, they wrote that the observed high rates
of antibodies to diseases like measles and pertussis “could be evidence for
serious epidemics among the inhabitants of this village in the recent past.
If so, this casts serious doubt on the validity of our demographic data as a
representation of the primitive state” (Neel et al. 1964, p. 128). In other
words, if the observed groups had a history of recent epidemics of Old
World diseases, this would contaminate the data, undermining the episte-
mological system that posited Indigenous groups in the present as a window
into the past. Yet they persisted in their optimism that the Xavante and
other Indigenous groups could and would inform understandings of human
evolution, citing the need for more and more extensive studies.

From the perspective of the geneticists the occurrence of disease was a
constitutive and unequivocal part of human biological experience, a fun-
damental context for evolutionary processes over millions of years (Neel
1994; Neel and Salzano 1964). In selecting “primitive groups” to study,
the key issue was not the absence of disease; the geneticists recognized this
as an impossibility. Rather they looked for subject populations “persisting
in a relatively ‘unspoiled’ form whose economy was based on hunting,
gathering, and incipient agriculture” (Neel and Salzano 1964, p. 91). In
large part, to be “unspoiled” meant to have avoided interaction with en-
croaching settler society and the devastating concomitant changes in eco-
nomic, demographic, and epidemiological status.

In their 1964 “Prospectus for Genetic Studies of the American Indian,”
Neel and Salzano included a list of “some surviving primitive groups in
the Americas” that could be studied according to their research agenda. They
included those populations they believed to be most “unspoiled.” Less than
believing that Indigenous populations were in fact isolated and pristine, sci-
entists like Neel and Salzano recognized that, with more or less intensity, the
variables that they were recording could have already been inﬂuenced by the
historical, demographic, and socio-political context these groups had been
plunged into through interaction with non-Indigenous people.2 However,

2. It is worthwhile to highlight that the researchers were involved in diverse initiatives,
some of which were sponsored by multilateral agencies like the Pan American Health Orga-
nization and the World Health Organization and sought to inﬂuence initiatives and policies of
health care for Indigenous peoples in the Americas ( WHO 1964; Neel 1968, 1974; Radin
2014). On the involvement of Black with indigenous right issues, see Santos 2015.

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Salzano and Neel’s methodology of Indigenous-population-as-time-portal
drew its authority in part from the absence of introduced disease, which
allowed them to draw links to a pre-Columbian past. Documenting and
promoting the “excellent physical condition” of groups like the Xavante,
Yanomami, and Makiritare (Neel 1970, p. 818) allowed the scientists to make
truth claims about the representative nature of the groups they studied and
the insight their methodology could offer for knowledge of the deep past.3

The Contamination of the Deep Present

3.
Neel and Salzano, whose research program situated disease as a coadjuvant
agent for their primary interest in human genetic change, spent years con-
sidering collaborative ﬁeldwork and months planning the details of their
ﬁrst joint expedition to Amazonia in 1962. In contrast, Francis Black’s ﬁrst
trip to Brazil was abrupt and unexpected. It was prompted by a telegram
he received in 1966 from Jack Woodall, a researcher at the Rockefeller
branch laboratory in Belém, in the state of Pará (Black 1997, p. 37). From
the beginning of his work in the Amazon, Black’s interests were distinctly
ordered from those of the geneticists: infectious diseases were the variables
to be explained, with genetics, among other factors, occupying a potentially
explanatory role.

Woodall had participated in an expedition to the Tiriyó, in the north of
Amazonia, and the analysis of the collected blood samples indicated that,
in general, the population had not been exposed to measles (Black 1997,
p. 37). Having spent time at Yale, Woodall was up to date on Black’s
research on the immunology of measles exposure and responses to measles
vaccination in other areas of the world. In just a few weeks after receiving
the invitation, Black prepared for what would be his ﬁrst trip to Amazonia
with the goal of testing “measles vaccine reactions in a virgin [soil] pop-
ulation” (Black et al. 1969).4

3. As Santos, Lindee, and Souza have argued, Neel’s drive to ﬁnd the most remote, most
“primitive” groups would take him to the Yanomami on the northern side of the Brazil-
Venezuela border (2014). He would describe his research there saying “One of the unsought
distinctions of my studies was to be among the Yanomama during a measles epidemic, very
possibly their ﬁrst ever” (Neel 1989, p. 817; see also Neel et al. 1970). Neel’s observations
would lead him to reject the hypothesis that Indigenous Americans were “innately suscepti-
ble,” blaming the epidemiological proﬁle of the “‘virgin-soil’ village” rather than “individual
biology” (1989, p. 818), a perspective that contrasted to the virologist Black. Neel’s work with
Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil and his close collaboration with anthropol-
ogist Napolean Chagnon would later be subject to intense debate following the publication of
the hotly contested journalistic exposé, Darkness in El Dorado (Borofsky et al. 2005).

4. Black and colleagues emphasized that the research would be the ﬁrst performed with
Indigenous populations of the American continent understood as “virgin soil populations.”
Based on immunological assays that identiﬁed the presence or absence of antibodies, these

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In the 1960s, Black played an important role in the studies that led to
the ﬁrst measles vaccines (Black 1997; Santos 2015). Already at Yale in the
second half of the 1950s, he drew on his training in chemistry and virology
to develop epidemiologic studies of immunological markers in order to
estimate the scope and periodicity of epidemics. From this early portion
of his career, which primarily focused on ﬁeld research in the United States
(Black 1959, 1997), Black increasingly turned his attention to the rest of
the world. In 1963 he participated in a WHO-hosted meeting of measles
vaccine specialists (WHO 1963), and in the context of the development
and tests of the ﬁrst measles vaccines he shifted more deﬁnitively to inter-
national research (Black and Rosen 1962; Black and Gudnadóttir 1966;
Niederman et al. 1967).

In tests of the vaccine, it was common to try to ﬁnd a population that,
at least in recent decades, had not suffered measles epidemics as shown
through the absence of antibody titers against the virus. In the early
1960s, scientists were testing diverse strains of vaccines, some based on
inactivated virus (i.e., dead virus), and others based on live attenuated virus
(i.e., virus that had been repeatedly cultured in speciﬁc media in the lab-
oratory in order to reduce its virulence). After a long series of laboratory
studies, developers needed to test the safety of a vaccine in human subjects
to ensure it provoked the lowest possible clinical reaction while simulta-
neously conferring a high level of immunity.

Beyond simply focusing on baseline clinical and immunological re-
sponses of vaccinated individuals, Black was interested in the relationship
of these baselines to the demographic, epidemiological, and genetic pro-
ﬁles of human populations (Black and Gudnadóttir 1966). As a disease
that conferred life-long immunity, Black reasoned that measles could only
have developed recently in human history, possibly in the last ten thousand
years, when large populations on the order of thousands of people began to
form. This demographic proﬁle accompanied the emergence of agriculture
in a number of regions around the world, in particular the “great valley
civilizations.” Why was the evolution of the virus dependent on the forma-
tion of such large groups of people? The argument was that these conditions
would allow for the continuous circulation of the virus, with new infections
occurring due to the consistently renewing pool of unexposed individuals,
especially children. Thus, Black reasoned, beyond simply being a recent

populations were characterized as having no evidence of measles. The three prior studies
performed on Indigenous people in Panama and with Inuit groups in Alaska and Canada
had involved groups that “had been exposed to measles in the past” (Black et al. 1969,
p. 169). For a critical perspective on the concept of “virgin soil populations” see Jones
2003, 2004.

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addition to human history, there would be populations in the world that
had never had contact with the infection. This would be the case, for exam-
ple, for some communities of Indigenous peoples of the Americas, whose
ancestors would have arrived on the American continent thousands of years
before the infection established itself as a disease of human populations.
Those groups with extremely limited contact with settler society, Black
imagined, could have avoided contamination.

In the vaccine ﬁeld trials, which were focused on “vaccine safety, efﬁcacy
and applicability” (WHO 1963, p. 5), Black saw an opportunity to in-
quire into his theoretical formulations on the natural history of measles.
His ideas were strictly associated with speciﬁc applications, such as the
debates regarding the appropriateness of applying a vaccine developed
with live virus in a human population that had never before been exposed
to this pathogen. In this context of the strict interface of the theoretical
and the practical, Black began to conduct studies that conceptualized
the “live vaccine as a model for measles” (Black et al. 1971).

According to this line of thinking, one of the most important aspects
was to locate populations that, due to their history of isolation, had not
been exposed to epidemics of measles, or if exposed, then only in the dis-
tant past such that individuals no longer showed immunity in the form of
antibodies to the virus. One of the ﬁrst studies by Black on what he called
“populations at special risk” was based on samples from Tahiti, in Polynesia
(Black and Rosen 1962). The scientist also conducted research in Iceland,
testing various different kinds of measles vaccines in ﬁeld trials. It was
not a coincidence that these studies were conducted on islands, in so-called
“insular populations” (Black 1966), since they were perceived to guarantee
these populations’ high level of isolation.

Likewise, the study of Indigenous populations in the Americas was of par-
ticular interest to Black, since scientists generally accepted the hypothesis
that measles had been introduced in the region with the arrival of Europeans
at the end of the ﬁfteenth century (Black et al. 1982). Over centuries of
European expansionism, the majority of American Indigenous populations
had already been exposed. Nonetheless, the most remote regions only recently
subject to colonization as of the 1960s, still had relatively isolated Indige-
nous groups. It was for this reason that Black imagined he could ﬁnd “virgin
soil populations” in the Amazon (Black 1975; Black et al. 1982). From the
perspective of the scientist, certain Indigenous communities could be seen
as “insular populations,” isolated not by oceans, but by vast tropical forests:

Isolation by wide stretches of water has never been typical of the
majority of mankind, and failure of certain diseases to persist in the
islands had not been seen as relevant to the condition of the human

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race in general. In fact, the isolation of primitive mainland groups
from one another may be as profound as the isolation of island
populations… (Black 1975, p. 516)

Even if the initial motivation was to investigate reactions to the measles
vaccine in Indigenous Amazonian populations, Black expanded the spectrum
of his research agenda almost immediately (Black et al. 1982). As develop-
ment projects and the growing occupation of Amazonia by non-Indigenous
Brazilians resulted in Indigenous groups’ violent exposure to the frontier
(Coimbra 1987; Hemming 1987; Carneiro da Cunha 1992; Ramos 1998),
it became increasingly difﬁcult to locate populations unexposed to epidemic
infectious disease, including measles.5 It was in this context that, increasing-
ly, the scientist’s attention turned away from speciﬁc infections and towards
modeling the relationship between demography and the persistence of infec-
tious disease (Black 1975; Black et al. 1974).

Black had already laid the empirical foundation for this broadening of
his research focus in the original study with the Tiriyó (Black et al. 1970).
The approach drew on a theoretical orientation that Black had articulated
in the mid-1960s regarding the role of demographic factors such as pop-
ulation size and density in determining whether infectious disease could be
endemic (Black 1966). Speciﬁcally, after the ﬁrst study in the Amazon,
Black and his team performed immunological tests not only for resistance
to the measles virus, but also, “the prevalence and distribution of anti-
bodies against 38 different viruses,” including inﬂuenza, mumps, rubella,
and poliomyelitis (Black et al. 1970). Even though in principle they were
studying a narrowly circumscribed case, the authors offered the justiﬁca-
tion that their broad approach would inform questions relevant to human
evolution.

Based on the approximately 180 Tiriyó samples collected and ana-
lyzed in 1966, Black and his collaborators did not arrive at theoretical

5. Black et al. (1982) reviewed studies that they had conducted on reactions to measles
vaccines in Amazonia as well as studies conducted by other researchers such as Roberto
Baruzzi, João Paulo Vieira-Filho, and James Neel. They concluded that there were differ-
ences in immunological responses between Indigenous and Caucasian groups: “Consider-
able individual variation in reaction to vaccine virus was observed even within these
[Amazonian] populations, but the average reaction in the Indian involved more fever
and, for the same fever, lower antibody response than the same vaccine in Caucasians”
(1982, p. 42). For Black, the reason for the observed differences were not clear, and could
possibly be related to genetic factors or due to nutritional conditions that impaired immu-
nological responses. In the following years, the scientist would increasingly argue in favor of
genetic determinants of immunological response (Black 1992, 1994) in contrast to Neel
and Salzano’s interpretations (see footnote 3, also Santos 2015).

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Perspectives on Science

597

generalizations regarding human evolutionary history. Rather, they began
a longer process, afﬁrming that:

The present serum collection offered an opportunity to identify some of
the viruses which could perpetuate themselves under these conditions
and, hence, might be implicated as possible ecological elements in
the development of the human species. (Black et al. 1970, p. 430)

By the mid-1970s, the accumulation of a decade of data from diverse
ﬁeld research, primarily in the state of Pará, allowed Black and collabora-
tors to publish a more comprehensive, comparative study titled “Evidence
for Persistence of Infectious Agents in Isolated Human Populations” (Black
et al. 1974; see also Black et al. 1971). In addition to analyzing a vast array
of viruses, the scientists broadened the gamut of infectious agents, includ-
ing tuberculosis, malaria, tetanus, and ﬁlariasis. According to the authors,

The purpose of this study is to determine which of our modern
disease agents are able to persist in small, isolated communities…
They offer a further advantage in the reconstruction of man’s heritage
of disease, in that they are still hunters and gatherers, as were all men
through most of their evolutionary history. (Black et al. 1974)

In essence, the scientists developed the argument that under the demo-
graphic conditions of small, isolated populations, parasitic infections would
persist as would long-term, contagious viral infections. Other kinds of
infection, especially those that spread rapidly and provoked strong immuno-
logical reactions that conferred lifelong immunity would not persist due to
the small pool of potential carriers. Seropositivity (antibody titers) by age
constituted a principal point of analysis, indicating whether or not infec-
tions had occurred recently based on whether they were concentrated in
speciﬁc age groups. If only one part of a population showed seropositivity,
(the eldest, for example), it indicated the absence of continuous transmis-
sion, potentially the result of a period of contagion years or decades earlier.
It was based on this kind of evidence that the scientists argued that the
herpes and hepatitis B viruses were endemic in the Indigenous populations
analyzed, “maintain[ing] a very stable relation with their host populations”
(Black et al. 1974, p. 230). This occurred because these “disease agents
spread very effectively in these closely knit communities” (Black et al.
1974, p. 248). On the other hand, there were infectious agents such as
those that caused measles, rubella, and inﬂuenza, which were characterized
by “unstable relations… appearing only when introduced from the outside”
(Black et al. 1974, p. 230). These diseases had to be introduced from areas
of much greater human density, where the population was large enough to
sustain continuous infection.

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The analytic scope of Black et al.’s 1974 paper went beyond character-
izing the serological proﬁle of a group of Amazonian communities. Detailing
the ﬁndings according to “epidemiologic patterns”, the authors generalized
about the relationship between origins and dispersion patterns of infectious
diseases on a broader scale. This is clear in their comments on smallpox: “the
absence of any evidence of smallpox… may mean that the virus evolved since
the dispersal of these people from the Old World centers…” (Black et al.
1974, p. 246). They also suggested that malaria and tuberculosis were not
endemic to the New World, but rather were introduced with the arrival of
Europeans.

In 1975, approximately a decade after his ﬁrst ﬁeldwork with the Tiriyó,
Black published an article in Science that would come to be one of his best-
known works. Black offered two general conjectures. First, he related the
importance of infectious disease to the evolutionary history of the human
species, writing, “Infectious diseases have exerted some of the strongest
of the pressures that shaped the development of modern man” (Black
1975, p. 515). Black emphasized the notion that Indigenous populations
could serve as “models” in the understanding of processes related to epi-
demiology and human evolutionary history. In “Infectious Diseases in
Primitive Societies” Black presented the data from his Amazonian studies
(Figure 1), complemented by those of other authors, including Neel and

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Figure 1. “Sketch map of northern South America indicating the locations of the
tribes referred to in the article” (Source: Black 1975, p. 516).

Perspectives on Science

599

Salzano, who had published seroepidemiological studies based on Amazonian
samples.6

The 1975 Science article makes clear the extent to which potentially epi-
demic disease was central to Black’s theoretical approach. This contrasts with
the predominant approach of population genetics, as we saw in the last sec-
tion, which as a rule understood epidemics to negatively affect their model
building by causing demographic transformations that impacted genetic
parameters. According to Black, serological analyses of Amerindian samples
could potentially inform the reconstruction of human epidemiological
history:

Unless ancient conditions were fundamentally different from those
of surviving primitive cultures, measles, inﬂuenza, smallpox, and
poliomyelitis could not have been present during the period of
human emergence nor through most of the man’s history. (Black
1975, p. 518)

For Black, Indigenous populations were a window into the natural history
of disease in human populations. His notion of the “deep past” was different
from that of the geneticists in important ways. For the geneticists, the life-
style of hunter-gatherer was of utmost importance, as it was the predominant
life-mode for the vast majority of the human evolutionary trajectory and
therefore maintained a continuity of selective pressures on the gene pool
(see Neel and Salzano 1964; Neel et al. 1964). From Black’s perspective,
a more recent “deep past” was also central, and understood Amazonian
Indigenous groups to represent the “second phase of human development,
with incipient agriculture and relatively settled villages …” (Black 1975,
p. 516). For the virologist, it would have been under these conditions dur-
ing the previous thousands of years that many human infectious diseases
had established themselves. Furthermore, the recent history of contagion
through contact with Old World diseases and members of the dense, pop-
ulous communities that sustained them added important evidence for his
generalizations about the nature of epidemic diseases. As he concluded in
his 1975 text, diverse infections that presented as epidemics in the con-
temporary world “could not perpetuate themselves before the advent of
advanced cultures and did not exert selective pressures on the human genetic
constitution until relatively recently” (Black 1975, p. 518). In Black’s
approach, Indigenous populations were useful because their small size and

6. It is worth noting that the principal non-Amazonian control was data emerging from

Black’s studies of the population of New Haven.

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relative isolation meant that disease distribution and persistence in the
present could inform understandings of the past.

4. Concluding Remarks
In this paper, our comparative analysis highlights the simultaneous conver-
gences and heterogeneities of scientiﬁc thinking about temporality and
disease in mid-twentieth century research with Indigenous people. Both
the geneticists and the virologist-epidemiologist were interested in the rela-
tionship between human genetics, evolutionary theory, and the epidemiology
of infectious disease, but with different emphases. Indigenous populations, as
Populations of Cognition (see Suárez-Díaz et al., this issue), served different
ends. For Neel and Salzano, these populations allowed them to think in cer-
tain ways about how biological and socio-demographic factors inﬂuenced the
production of patterns of human genetic variability, with disease understood
as part of the pool of possible “selective pressures.” For Black, the study of
Indigenous populations allowed him to inquire into the relationship between
the epidemiology of infectious and parasitic disease in relation to demo-
graphics. Based on his observations in these speciﬁc populations he proposed
general models regarding the interrelated nature of human evolutionary his-
tory and the persistence or lack thereof of various groups of pathogens.

Despite differences in underlying interests, both approaches identiﬁed
Native people as “representational tools” or Populations of Cognition for
understanding the past, as well as making sense of the present and pre-
paring for the future. Researchers approached their work in the Amazon
basin with optimism and hesitation, understanding their models to be
dependent on documenting and understanding endemic and epidemic ill-
ness. In the context of vast ecological and socio-economic change that accom-
panied the quickening national societies’ invasion of Indigenous territories,
speciﬁc communities could be regarded as more representative to inform
broader theoretical models proposed by the scientists if their epidemiologic
proﬁles matched particular assumptions about past and present, purity or
contamination.

Community histories of health and illness were essential to both per-
spectives, deﬁning in large part whether and how the scientists could gen-
eralize based on the populations they characterized. The geneticists focused
on the perceived vitality of the groups they visited, drawing their authority
to make claims about the deep past based on what they perceived as the
lack of disease and socio-economic change. The absence of disease, in the
geneticists’ approach, was a surrogate for measuring the stability and time-
less nature of the populations they studied. It was evidence that their tem-
poral assumptions about the deep past were valid; it allowed the groups
they characterized to function as populations of cognition. In contrast,

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Black’s focus on unexposed populations soon gave way to the study of
disease load and population proﬁle as the virologist recognized the wide-
spread exposure to introduced diseases that accompanied western expansion-
ism and encroaching settler colonialism. Black used his study of Indigenous
groups to understand the natural history of disease on evolutionary time-
scales, and to draw inferences about how infectious disease spread and
persisted in a more recent past that included both Native and settler popu-
lations. In his vision, immunologic and genetic factors were related to epi-
demics of infectious disease, including measles, and resulted from permanent
contact with the surrounding national society. Black investigated contem-
porary processes with the hope of developing more general models regarding
the interface of epidemiology and infectious disease for the evolutionary his-
tory of the human species. At the same time that “purity” and “isolation”
were constitutive elements of his analytical models, “interaction” and “con-
tamination,” in large part resulting from the “deep present,” linked his think-
ing to the economic and demographic transformations underway in the
Amazon. Although Black continued to understand his observations on the
relationship between demography and disease in Indigenous communities
to inform epidemiologic models for the past, his later approaches allowed
for the contamination of contact.

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