226 Hum Nat (2011) 22:225–246 had on the record exactly (and only) what they wanted. I use only their approved versions. For all the sources I have herein marked “personal communication,” I have obtained permission for use from the communications’ authors. I come to the work I present here by way of two vocations, one as a historian of science, and the other as a human rights activist. (My rights work has focused mainly on people born with norm-challenging bodies.) Because I care deeply about both science and human rights activism, and because I have been both a critic of some science and also a target of some activist criticism, I have been working on a book aimed at understanding how to protect science and activism—including from each other—in the era of the Internet. When I circulated word of my book project in 2008, many scientists in evolutionary anthropology and psychology told me I had to look into what had happened to Napoleon Chagnon and to the reputation of the late James V. Neel with regard to the Darkness in El Dorado controversy. As I began researching that history, it quickly became clear that several fine scholars and a number of major scientific organizations had already meticulously exposed the falsehoods about Chagnon and Neel put forth by Patrick Tierney, the author of Darkness in El Dorado (2001) and a related New Yorker article of 2000. Most importantly these scholars had repeatedly shown that, in his work, Tierney had painted what amounted to a fictitious picture of a measles epidemic among the South American Yanomamö people in 1968. (I recommend especially Turner and Nelson 2004, but see also, for example, Alberts 2000; American Society of Human Genetics 2002; Baur et al. 2001; Cantor 2000; Cox 2001; Hagen et al. 2001; Headland 2001; Paul and Beatty 2000; Society for Visual Anthropology 2000; Tooby 2000.) In his 2000 accounts of the 1968 epidemic (including his New Yorker article and book manuscript), Tierney had portrayed the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon and the late geneticist-physician James V. Neel, Sr., as virtually amoral eugenicists bent on conducting inhumane and deadly field experiments on a phenomenally vulnerable population. Tierney suggested that Neel—with Chagnon’s collaboration—had introduced a potentially fatal contraindicated measles vaccine to the Yanomamö, probably inducing the 1968 epidemic, allowing him to test his eugenic theories. Moreover, Tierney suggested that Neel and Chagnon intentionally withheld medical treatments that might have saved lives. The Neel and Chagnon of Tierney’s visions were nothing less than monsters in the guise of modern scientists—monsters responsible for the death of hundreds if not thousands of Yanomamö men, women, and children. The truth was quite the opposite. From prior field research, before the 1968 epidemic, Neel had determined that the Yanomamö were alarmingly vulnerable to measles, and so he had personally arranged to bring vaccines on the 1968 expedition. Neel had not taken the matter lightly; he had consulted experts regarding the best vaccine to use, obtained instruction about safe administration, and personally arranged the financing to make the vaccination campaign possible (see Lindee in Hagen et al. 2001:61–63; Turner and Nelson 2004). When the party arrived for what was supposed to be a typical expedition combined with a vaccination campaign, measles had already broken out (Headland 2001). Under- standing the scope of the danger, Neel, Chagnon, and the others raced to try to contain the epidemic and get ahead of it with the vaccines. The medical supplies