by Ellen Ruppel Shell

About the author: Ellen Ruppel Shell is a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly and codirector of the Knight Center for Science and Medical Journalism at Boston University.

In Kosrae, an island in Micronesia, new arrivals are a curiosity, and it seemed that half the island had come to greet me and Steven Auerbacb, a Manhattan- based medical epidemiologist and an officer in the U.S. Public Health Service who had worked in Micronesia in the early 1990s, when we visited last year. Dazed from our 8,000-mile journey, we groped our way down the pockmarked coastal road, driving past groves of trees bent nearly double under loads of bananas, papayas, and breadfruit. We were on our way to a funeral feast.

We arrived to find the feast in full swing. Young...