Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923-2008), American virologist and Nobel laureate who demonstrated that kuru, a fatal brain disease among aboriginal people in New Guinea, was caused by an infectious agent. This discovery has relevance to a group of diseases known as neurodegenerative diseases, in which nerve tissue is destroyed, now collectively known as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). For this work, Gajdusek was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine, which he shared with American virologist Baruch Samuel Blumberg.

Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York. He graduated from high school in 1940 at the age of 16 and earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Rochester in 1943. He completed his medical education at Harvard University, receiving his medical degree in 1946. Between 1946 and 1948 he took clinical training in pediatrics at Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and from 1948 to 1949 he studied physical chemistry with American chemist Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). From 1949 to 1952 he continued postgraduate studies in virology in the laboratory of American microbiologist John Enders at Harvard University. In 1952 and 1953 Gajdusek served in the United States Army at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington, D.C. During the next two years he conducted research at the Pasteur Institute in Tehran, Iran. Later in 1955, he studied virology with Australian immunologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet at the Hall Institute in Melbourne, Australia. In 1958 Gajdusek joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, where he remained until 1997, when he was convicted and jailed for one year for child molestation. In 1998 he left the United States to live in Paris, France; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Tromso, Norway.

In 1955, while studying virology at the Hall Institute, Gajdusek learned of an unusual progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disease among the aborigine Fore people of New Guinea and traveled there to investigate the disease. Although he at first assumed that the disease, which the Fore called kuru, was genetic in origin, Gajdusek found instead that it was caused by a substance transmitted through a ritual that involved eating the brains of deceased relatives (see Cannibalism). Autopsy examination of the brains of people who had died from kuru showed nerve damage, but Gajdusek was unable to determine the cause. A researcher studying neurodegenerative diseases in animals suggested that kuru was similar to scrapie, a neurodegenerative disease of sheep. Gajdusek showed that kuru was indeed similar to scrapie, as well as to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a neurodegenerative disorder of humans. Gajdusek attributed these diseases to infectious agents, which he called slow-acting viruses. Scientists now believe that these agents are infectious protein particles, known as prions. Prions have since been implicated in bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a disease of cows commonly known as mad cow disease.