Islanders Adapt

P-Ng Study On How

To New Ways

Australia is to contribute $221,000 over the next four years to a study of human adapt

ability organised by the Inter

national Council of Scientific Unions through its International

Biological Programme. Part of

the study will be made in

Madang, P-NG.

The chairman of the Australian Human Adaptability Committee, Pro fessor J. R. Walsh, said recently that Australian scientists, in seeking some of the answers to human adaptability, would study natives of Papua-New Guinea, Australian Aborigines and migrants in Australia.

Professor Walsh is Professor of Human Genetics at the University of New South Wales, He said senior scientific bodies of about 40 countries, including the Aus tralian Academy of Science, were concerned in the study.

Of all places in the world, Papua- New Guinea seemed to offer unique opportunities for studying adapt ability.

From Karkar Island

“Its people are emerging rapidly from groups of isolates who have inter-married within a very short radius of their own clan or place of residence,” he said.

“Now they are moving around much more freely into government positions, into army and police work, banks, insurance offices and post offices.

“Where they have in the past lived in relative isolation, they will become very shortly as free and mobile a group of people as you could find anywhere.

“This will require adaptation— genetic adaptation, for example. At the moment you can see differences in genetics, in the blood groupings, for instance, between villages only three or four miles apart. This is because they have grown up there and have adapted themselves to that particular environment.

“They are going to be able to teach the world a great deal of the physical and biological processes of emergence.

“They are going to allow us to study them as they go. We hope, through this, to be able to offer them

something in the future that will make their process of emergence easier.”

Professor Walsh said the initial site for the study in Papua-New Guinea would be in a section of Madang Hospital. The people involved in the study would come from Karkar Island, about 50 miles north-west of Madang. Fields covered in the study would include physiology, genetics, nutrition, medical assessment and the ability of people to work.

The study at Madang would be a continuation of a number of years’ work in P-NG by teams of the Aus tralian Medical Research Advisory Committee, led by Sir Macfarlane Burnet.

“Recently the P-NG House of Assembly passed an ordinance to which the Governor-General has now given his assent to create an institute of human biology in the territory,”

Professor Walsh said.

“The institute’s work will be largely oriented on the welfare of the indigenous people of P-NG and to help get this institute off the ground we have decided to centre there our activities for the next four years in the International Biological Pro gramme’s study of human adapt ability.”