Darkness in El Dorado

Darkness in El Dorado (subtitled: How Scientists and Journalists Devastated the Amazon) is a book written by author Patrick Tierney in 2000 that accuses geneticist James Neel and anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of exacerbating a measles epidemic among the Yanomamo people of the Amazon Basin and conducting human research without regard for their subjects' well-being.

Chagnon had long been well known within anthropological circles for having identified the Yanomami as the "world's most violent people" and generating a great deal of interest in their culture.

The book was nominated for a National Book Award. Its publication provoked scandal, outrage and public hearings, and has been a source of significant academic controversy. These allegations have also been explored in the recent documentary film Secrets of the Tribe by Brazilian director José Padilha and in a peer-reviewed publication in the journal Human Nature by Alice Dreger, an historian of medicine and science, and an outsider to the debate, who concluded that Tierney's claims were "baseless and sensationalistic charges".