Results for Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
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Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

American virologist (1923–)

Gajdusek was born at Yonkers in New York and educated at the University of Rochester and at Harvard, where he obtained his MD in 1946. He specialized in pediatrics, working at Harvard, the Pasteur Institute in Teheran, and the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Melbourne, before joining the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1958. Since 1970 he has been with the National Institute of Neurological Diseases.

In 1963 he made an intriguing discovery that could well have profound consequences for the control of a number of serious but little-understood diseases. In the 1950s he began studying the Fore people of New Guinea, a supposedly cannibalistic tribe who suffered from a very localized neurological complaint they called ‘kuru’. With the aid of the district medical officer, who first drew his attention to the disease, Gajdusek spent much of the next ten years among the Fore looking for the cause of kuru. He suspected the disease was transmitted by the Fore custom of ritually eating parts of the brain of their deceased relatives so he collected samples from the brains of several kuru victims.

Failing to detect any obvious signs of an organism in the brain tissue he injected filtered extracts into the brains of chimpanzees and waited. After about 12 months the disease at last appeared. This was the first of what were known as ‘slow virus infections’ to be observed in humans. By 1968 Gajdusek and his colleagues had shown that kuru was not unique and that the rare neurological complaint Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a presenile dementia, is transmitted after a comparable delay.

For his work on kuru Gajdusek shared the 1976 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine with Baruch Blumberg. The prize itself he used to set up a trust for the education of the Fore people. Gajdusek, who is unmarried, has also adopted 16 boys while on his expeditions to the Pacific, and is bringing them up in America.

 
 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

(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.

For more information on Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, visit Britannica.com.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Gajdusek, Daniel Carleton
(gīd'əshĕk') , 1923–, American virologist, b. Yonkers, N.Y., M.D. Harvard, 1945. He worked in the United States, Iran, and Australia studying infectious diseases, particularly kuru, a viral brain disease spread among the Fore people of New Guinea by cannibalism. In 1958 he joined the National Institutes of Health, where he conducted research until his retirement in 1997. In 1976, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Baruch S. Blumberg.
 
Medical Dictionary: Gaj·du·sek
('də-shĕk'), D(aniel) Carleton Born 1923.

American virologist. He shared a 1976 Nobel Prize for research on the origin and spread of infectious diseases.

 
Wikipedia: Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (born September 9 1923 in Yonkers, New York, USA) is an American physician and medical researcher of Slovakian-Hungarian descent, who was the co-recipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on kuru, the first prion disease ever described. His later life was marred by a criminal conviction for child molestation.

Biography

Work on kuru

He received the award in recognition of his study of a remarkable disease, kuru (Fore word for "trembling"). This disease was rampant among the South Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s. Gajdusek correctly connected the prevalence of the disease with the practice of funerary cannibalism, practiced by the South Fore. With elimination of this practice, Kuru disappeared among the South Fore within a generation.

Vincent Zigas, a district medical officer in the Fore Tribe region of New Guinea first introduced Gajdusek to Kuru. Gajdusek provided the first medical description of this unique neurological disorder, which was also known as the "laughing sickness". He lived among the Fore, studied their language and culture and performed autopsies on kuru victims. Gajdusek correctly concluded that the disease was transmitted in the ritualistic eating of the brains of deceased relatives, which was practiced by the Fore. Though Gajdusek was not able to identify the infective agent that spreads kuru, further research led to the identification of rogue proteins called prions as the cause of kuru.

Career

Gajdusek's father was from Slovakia and his mother from Debrecen, Hungary, who emigrated to the U.S. and settled down in Yonkers, where their son was born. Gajdusek graduated in 1943 from the University of Rochester (New York), where he studies Physics, Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics. He obtained an M.D. from Harvard University in 1946. He performed postdoctoral research at Columbia, Caltech and Harvard before being drafted to complete military service at the Walter Reed Army Medical Service Graduate School as a research virologist. He held a position at the Institut Pasteur in Tehran from 1952 to 1953, where he was excited by the challenges "offered by urgent opportunistic investigations of epidemiological problems in exotic and isolated populations". In 1954 he went to work as a visiting investigator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne. It was here he began the work that culminated in the Nobel prize.

He became head of laboratories for virological and neurological research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1958 and was inducted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1974 in the discipline of microbial biology.

Child molestation conviction

In the course of his research trips in the South Pacific, Gajdusek had brought children back to live with him in the United States, to better their education. He was later accused by one of these, now an adult man, of sexually molesting him as a child.

Gajdusek was charged with child molestation in April 1996, based on incriminating entries in his laboratory entries, statements from a victim and his own admission. He pleaded guilty in 1997 and, under a plea bargain, was sentenced to 19 months in jail. After his release in 1998, he was permitted to serve his 5-year probation in Europe. Gajdusek's treatment had been denounced from October 1996 as anti-elitist and unduly harsh by Edinburgh University psychologist Chris Brand, who was subsequently fired for bringing the university into disrepute.

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Persondata
NAME Gajdusek, Daniel Carleton
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION Nobel Prize-winning medical researcher
DATE OF BIRTH September 9 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Yonkers, New York, U.S.
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH

 
 

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Scientist. A Dictionary of Scientists. Copyright © Market House Books Ltd 1993, 1999, 2003. All rights reserved.  Read more
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Medical Dictionary. The American Heritage® Stedman's Medical Dictionary Copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Company Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Daniel Carleton Gajdusek" Read more

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