Apparently this book is out of print, which is too bad.

At first glance, it’s a science-fictional first-contact novel. Anthropologists working for the Survey Service are checking out a developing culture on a distant planet. As with Star Trek’s Prime Directive, they are bound to noninterference with developing cultures, so they can look, but not touch, and definitely not help in any way.

But a particularly progressive ruler is dying, and one anthropologist convinces his colleagues that simply curing her cancer couldn’t possibly make enough of a difference to affect the culture. They do it, and the anthropologist is dismissed and becomes the primary teaching example of why interfering is bad.

Only they have no idea just how bad, and when a new team, sent hundreds of years later, does find out, the book shifts its focus from the field investigators to the bureaucrats who run their agency. Job One in a bureaucracy is to make sure you stick around, and if that means you have to get rid of some inconvenient facts (and people), well, so be it….