My involvement with kuru began towards the end of 1963 while I was a Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). During the autumn of that year I was contacted by Dr Michael Alpers, who was on his way to Boston from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland with a carload of New Guinean artefacts to be delivered to the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts on behalf of Dr Carleton Gajdusek. We had been students together at Adelaide University and St Mark's College in the 1950s and our friendship was thus rekindled.Sometime after this I was approached by representatives of NIH to investigate the Parkinsonism-dementia (PD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) neurological complex prevalent on Guam, where it was the main cause of death among the Chamorro people. At that time, the cause of this devastating neurological complex was subject to a great deal of conjecture. These discussions led to visits to Bethesda, where I met Carleton and Joe Gibbs. This was at the exciting time when the first chimpanzees developed symptoms of kuru. Lifetime friendships were thus established with Carleton and Joe and with Jake Brody, as well as with Dr Asao Hirano in New York, who was the first to describe the neuropathology of the Guam disorders.As I was committed to the University of Western Australia, being on leave from an academic post in the medical school and feeling that I had a mission to set up neuropathology in my home country, I was not able to pursue the very attractive Guam opportunity and returned to Perth in 1965.However, earlier in that year, while deeply involved in a very busy schedule at Harvard Medical School working with my mentor in muscle diseases Dr Raymond D. Adams, Chief of Neurology at MGH, I was approached by an enthusiastic French-Canadian neurologist André-Roche Lecours. He told me about two kuru brains that had been cut in serial section at the Warren Museum of Harvard Medical School under the watchful eye of the distinguished developmental neuroscientist Dr Paul Yakovlev. Roche had concluded that I had the expertise to study and report on the two brains in association with him.At this time I had a large number of research projects going as well as being Chief Resident in Neuropathology under Dr Pierson Richardson at MGH, so I had no time at all for such painstaking work. Nevertheless, Roche prevailed and we both gave up our Sunday mornings for