For several years now, Warwick Anderson has been my guide to thinking about the "unequal and disordered" reciprocities that lie at the very foundation of biomedical research, colonial and otherwise. The phrase "collected" me when I read some of Anderson's earlier work on kuru (2000: 715), and it proves a perfect key to the brilliantly rendered, often jarring, dynamics of taking and giving that await readers in The Collectors of Lost Souls. In this provocative book, Anderson refuses the temptation to simply cry "thief" where biomedical extraction is concerned. Instead, he walks readers through what has to be one of the more complex narrative threads in twentieth-century biomedical history, which might properly be called the story of a colonial twentieth century and of a postcolonial twentieth century. In fact, we use such temporal markers at our own peril here, as the story of kuru research enacts a kind of looping temporality (Murphy 2010); it is a story that constantly cannibalizes and renews itself. In Anderson's hands-_and one could imagine what it might look like in a different pair of hands- the story of kuru is complicated both because of the (post) colonial twentieth century it presents to us, and because of the way it thwarts any temptation to take a high-handed ethical stance on matters of biomedical takings. The risk Anderson takes here works in large part because of his writerly virtuosity,
