Gajdusek, D(aniel) Carleton

born Sept. 9, 1923, Yonkers, N.Y., U.S.

U.S. physician and researcher.

He received his M.D. from Harvard University. He provided the first medical description of the central-nervous-system disorder kuru, unique to the Fore people of New Guinea, and concluded that it was spread by their funeral custom of ritually eating the deceased's brains. With Clarence Gibbs, Jr., he proposed that it was caused by an extremely slow-acting virus. Though kuru is now known to be caused by prions, his study had significant implications for research into multiple sclerosis, parkinsonism, and other degenerative neurological conditions. He shared a 1976 Nobel Prize with Baruch S. Blumberg.

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▪ 2009

      American physician and medical researcher

born Sept. 9, 1923, Yonkers, N.Y.

found dead Dec. 12, 2008, Tromsø, Nor.

was corecipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on the causal agents of various degenerative neurological disorders. Gajdusek graduated (1943) from the University of Rochester, N.Y. He received an M.D. (1946) from Harvard University and served (1949–52) as a fellow in pediatrics and infectious diseases at Harvard. In the next three years, he held positions at the Institute of Research of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and the Institut Pasteur, Tehran. It was in 1955, while he was a visiting investigator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, that Gajdusek began the work that culminated in the Nobel Prize. Gajdusek co-discovered and provided the first medical description of a unique central nervous system disorder occurring only among the Fore people of New Guinea and known by them as kuru (“trembling”). Living among the Fore, studying their language and culture, and performing autopsies on kuru victims, Gajdusek came to the conclusion that the disease was transmitted in the ritualistic eating of the brains of the deceased, a Fore funeral custom. Gajdusek became (1958) the head of laboratories for virological and neurological research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After years of further research, much of it conducted with his NIH colleague Clarence Gibbs, Jr., he postulated that the delayed onset of the disease could be attributed to a virus capable of extremely slow action or, perhaps, having the ability to remain dormant for years. Gajdusek's study had significant implications for research into the causes of another degenerative brain disease, called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Subsequent research suggested that these diseases are caused not by viruses but rather by unusual infectious agents called prions. After pleading guilty to having sexually molested a teenaged boy, Gajdusek served one year in prison.

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