Shirley Inglis Lindenbaum is an Australian anthropologist notable for her medical anthropology work on kuru in Papua New Guinea, HIV/AIDS in the United States of America, and cholera in Bangladesh.
With her colleague and then-husband Robert Glasse, she did two years of fieldwork in the highlands of Papua New Guinea using a research grant from Henry Bennett of the Rockefeller Foundation.
[3] Lindenbaum and Glasse discovered that Fore kinship was not based strictly on biology, but rather it was determined by bonding with neighboring individuals.
[3] During this time, Lindenbaum and Glasse also discovered that the Fore people partook in a ritual called mortuary cannibalism, where kin honored the dead by feasting on their cooked bodies.
It is now presumed that a spontaneous case of Creutzfeldt Jacob Disease (like kuru, a prion-related disorder) occurred at that time.
Moreover, the research team noted that women and children were primarily impacted by kuru, which correlated with mortuary cannibalism practices.