Work
Darkness in El Dorado
Overview
Darkness in El Dorado: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon is a polemical book written by author Patrick Tierney in 2000, in which the author accuses geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon (the author of the 1968 book Yanomamö: The Fierce People) of conducting human research without regard for their subjects' well-being while conducting long-term ethnographic field work among the indigenous Yanomamo, in the Amazon basin between Venezuela and Brazil. He also wrote that the researchers had exacerbated a measles epidemic among the Native Americans, and that Jacques Lizot and Kenneth Good committed acts of sexual impropriety with Yanomamo.
While the book was positively reviewed and well received at first, later investigations by multiple independent organizations found Tierney's main allegations to be false and libelous.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Related ideas
Place in the tradition
Part of Medical ethics.