Norton also continued to inquire about Tallent, but no one could or would admit to having encountered him. And for as much forest as was cleared on Ivu’ivu, there was more than enough so that Tallent in theory might have survived their aggressive explorations.
74 Norton is here referring to two of modern science’s more notorious and less fortunate human research projects. Willowbrook State School was a home for around six thousand mentally retarded children on Staten Island. Between 1963 and 1966, children were infected with hepatitis A so researchers could better study the effects of the disease. Naturally, when this became public knowledge there was a great public upset and the experiment had to be abandoned. Tuskegee, the better known of the cases, was an ambitious four-decades-long (1932–1972) project in which poor black sharecroppers in Alabama infected with syphilis were studied but were not offered penicillin, even long after that drug became the standard treatment for the condition.
Contemporary legislation and guidelines (not to mention bioethics as we know them) governing human experimentation are a direct result of the Tuskegee scandal. Although the NIH had established the Office of Protection for Research Subjects in 1966, it was not until eight years later that the review board that Norton mentions was established and was given real oversight and power.
In 1975 the commissioners paid a visit to Norton’s lab to observe for themselves the dreamers’ treatment. It is still unknown why they decided to focus on this very small population of subjects when far worse abuses were being committed against subjects in other labs, but one can only imagine that they were encouraged to do so by one of Norton’s numerous enemies. Although the visit is often depicted as a “raid,” I can tell you authoritatively that it was nothing of the sort. After a few of these site visits, however, the commissioners decided that the dreamers would be more comfortable living in a more social environment, and in October 1975 they were moved to the Thornhedge Retirement Community in Frederick, Maryland.
Not surprisingly, the transplant was not a success. Even though the dreamers were by this stage fairly noncognizant of their surroundings, they were at times still sensate enough to be alarmed and frightened by their new environment and missed one another’s company (at NIH they had all lived together in one large room). These radical and cruel changes — to their surroundings, their diet, and their caretakers — disoriented them greatly, and their decline worsened. In February 1976, Norton petitioned the commission to reverse its ruling on the grounds of the dreamers’ clear and obvious mental anguish and distress.
During that appeal, the news of the dreamers’ existence — which had until that point remained, remarkably, relatively quiet — somehow broke in the mainstream press. Three months later, in June 1976, the dreamers were the subjects of an attempted abduction by a radical native Hawaiian sovereignty rights group that called itself HAWIKA (Hawaiians Avenging White Imperialism, Killing in Anger). The group, which promised to “fight [against what exactly was never specified] on behalf of all native Micro- and Melanesian peoples,” managed to, in its words, “liberate” both Mua and Ika’ana before its members were apprehended by the home’s security guards as they were in the process of trying to hoist Vanu’s wheelchair into their van. It was later discovered that one of HAWIKA’s members, a man named Paiea McNamee, had been working undercover at Thornhedge as an orderly for the previous two months. McNamee and his three accomplices were sentenced to prison, and the dreamers were restored to their rooms at the facility.
Upon learning of my long professional and personal relationship with Norton, people invariably have many questions, and one of the first things they always ask about is the dreamers: are they alive still, and what became of them? The answer to the first question is yes: all of them are still living. Eve is 299 years old (this is working from the assumption that she was no younger than 250 when she left the island; it’s certainly possible that she could be even older than this). Ika’ana is 225. Vanu is 180. Mua is 153. (And remember, these ages are calculated by the U’ivuan calendar. By the Western calendar, all of them are older still.)
Unfortunately, and as Norton notes in his narrative, their physical decline was both rapid and severe. All of them are exceedingly physically weak, and all lack many basic motor skills. They are capable of walking but reluctant to do so. Ika’ana is almost completely blind. They rarely speak, and rarely respond when spoken to. Their reflexes have degraded as well, and they are slow to respond to most stimuli. The one thing they do still take pleasure in is food: after gaining rapid amounts of weight on an institutional diet, they were in 1985 begun on a new nutritional regimen that more closely echoed their traditional fare. Although they failed to lose much weight — an unreasonable expectation, given how sedentary they now are — they did appear to relish the tastes of mango and what they must have perceived as hunono (actually, earthworms procured from an animal supply company). The great tragedy of the dreamers’ state, however, is that we will never know for certain how much of their physical disintegration was due to extreme age and how much was due to their changed environment. One must assume, however, that the environmental factor is the most important one here, as all of them began to display similar diminishments at the same time despite the extreme differences in their ages. (I should add that I am, alas, excepting Eve from all of the above-mentioned pleasures and abilities, however limited; two years ago, her caretakers noticed that her pupils were remaining fixed even in response to the brightest lights, and further tests have proved her to be effectively brain-dead. Her lung function, however, remains that of a woman a fraction of her estimated age.)
After the HAWIKA incident, Norton fought very hard to have the dreamers returned to his care. But although the commission rejected his appeal, the dreamers were moved the following year to a secure facility. The place, whose name I cannot divulge for obvious reasons, is actually the gerontology unit of a well-known maximum-security federal prison, and there the dreamers have been reunited and live in their own self-contained wing. Although the facility is too far from Bethesda for Norton to make regular visits, it is close to a respected medical research hospital, and Norton was able to advise a group of gerontologists and neurologists there who make frequent trips to study and observe the dreamers.
The second question I am always asked is whether I think Norton is responsible for the dreamers’ fate. This was for many years a more complicated matter for me. By the time I met the dreamers, in 1972, they already bore much more of a resemblance to the creatures they are today than to the ones Norton encountered in 1950. So I cannot say that I mourn the people they once were. On the other hand, the differences I saw in them between 1975, when the commission removed them, and 1977, when I was next allowed to visit, were quite appalling. When I first met them, they still possessed a little life, a little energy: one might stroke Eve’s hand, and she might respond with a purr, and one could imagine that it was a sound of contentment and that the lolling of her head against her wheelchair’s pillow was a gentle swoon of pleasure. In 1977 she would do nothing at all. Her head would be tipped back, her forehead strapped to the cushion to keep it from dropping forward, and she would be completely silent. Her hand was as cold as stone. One had the feeling one was touching something made of clay and hair, not something human at all.