Daniel Carleton Gajdusek | |
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| Born | (1923-09-09)September 9, 1923 Yonkers, New York, U.S. |
| Died | December 12, 2008(2008-12-12) (aged 85) Tromsø, Norway |
| Alma mater | University of Rochester Harvard Medical School |
| Known for | Early discovery ofprion disease |
| Awards | E. Mead Johnson Award(1963) Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine(1976) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Medicine |
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (/ˈɡaɪdəʃɛk/GHY-də-shek;[1] September 9, 1923 – December 12, 2008) was an Americanphysician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient (withBaruch S. Blumberg) of theNobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility ofkuru,[2] implying the existence of an infectious agent, which he named an 'unconventional virus'.[3] In 1996, Gajdusek was charged withchild molestation and, after being convicted, spent 12 months in prison before entering a self-imposed exile in Europe, where he died a decade later. Despite Gajdusek openly admitting to molesting boys and his approval ofincest,[4] he still received support from peers advocating for clemency who felt his crimes were lessened by his scientific contributions.
His papers are held at theNational Library of Medicine inBethesda, Maryland[5] and at theAmerican Philosophical Society inPhiladelphia, Pennsylvania.[6]
Gajdusek's father, Karol Gajdusek, was a Slovak fromSmrdáky,Slovakia. His mother Ottilia Dobróczki emigrated from Debrecen, today Hungary. Gajdusek was born inYonkers, New York, and graduated in 1943 from theUniversity of Rochester, where he studied physics, biology, chemistry, and mathematics.
He obtained anM.D. fromHarvard University in 1946 and performed postdoctoral research atColumbia University, theCalifornia Institute of Technology, and Harvard. In 1951, Gajdusek was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned as a researchvirologist at the Walter ReedArmy Medical Service Graduate School.[7] He was discharged from the military in 1954.
In 1954, he worked as a visiting investigator at theWalter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research inMelbourne,Australia. There, he began the work that culminated in theNobel Prize. From 1970 to 1996, Gajdusek was the chief of the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies at NINDS at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).[8] He was elected as a member of theAmerican Philosophical Society in 1978.[9]
Gajdusek's best-known work focused onkuru. This disease was rampant among theSouth Fore people ofNew Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s. He received the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for demonstrating, alongside Michael Alpers and Clarence Gibbs Jr, that Kuru was a transmittable disease.
Gajdusek was introduced to the problem of kuru byVincent Zigas, a district medical officer in the Fore Tribe region of New Guinea. Gajdusek provided the first medical description of this uniqueneurological disorder, which was miscast in the popular press as the "laughing sickness" because some patients displayedrisus sardonicus as a symptom. Gajdusek began investigating the disease in 1957 but could find no likely cause for the epidemic; no conventional infectious agent, no nutritional deficiency, no toxin (Gajdusek and Zigas 1957).
He is often incorrectly credited for establishing the direct link between cannabilism and Kuru disease. In reality, the first investigators to propose the hypothesis were married couple Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse.[10][11][12] In 1968, Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse, together with John D. Mathews, an epidemiologist based at Okapa, published an article in theLancet that consolidated all the anthropological and epidemiological evidence, demonstrating definitively that cannibalism was responsible for the spread of kuru among the Fore.[13]
Gadjusek was initially dismissive of anthropological evidence gathered by Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse in 1963 that suggested not only that Kuru was transmissible, but that cannibalism was the likely mode of transmission. The Glasses felt further evidence was required to support this theory and discussed it with Alpers who relayed the theory to Gadjusek. It was with Alpers' encouragement that the experiment involving the inoculation of affected brain tissue into chimpanzees was conducted and then established in 1965 the transmissibility of the disease.[13] This was done by drilling holes into chimps' heads and placing pureed brain matter into the cerebellum.[14][15] These animals then developed symptoms of kuru.
In the 2000s, Gajdusek was asked when the hypothesis of cannibalism as a vehicle to spread kuru was first envisaged. His response, “even completely drunk would come to the conclusion that a disease endemic among cannibals must be spread through eating corpses”. Contradictingly, during his Nobel Prize lecture he stated that kuru was a "slow virus" spread by “conjunctival, nasal, and skin contamination with highly infectious brain tissue”[16]
Kuru was shown to have remarkable similarity toscrapie, a disease of sheep and goats caused by an unconventional infectious agent. Subsequently, additional human agents belonging to the same group were discovered. They include sporadic, familial, and variantCreutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Gajdusek recognized that diseases like Kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease were caused by a new infectious agent that had not yet been identified.[2] Further research on the scrapie agent byStanley Prusiner and others led to the identification of endogenous proteins calledprions as the cause of these diseases.
In his 1977 paper "Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru", Gajdusek postulated that the cause of kuru, scrapie and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease were caused by what he termed an "unconventional virus". In comparison to normal viruses, unconventional viruses had a longincubation period and did not cause animmune response in the host. Although Gajdusek noted that there were no demonstrablenucleic acids in unconventional viruses, he did not rule out the possibility that unconventional viruses containedRNA at a low level, despite theirradiation resistance.[3]
These infectious agents were later discovered to be misfolded proteins, or prions.
In the course of his research trips in the South Pacific, Gajdusek had brought 56 mostly male children back to live with him in the United States and provided them with the opportunity to receive high school and college education. One of these boys, now a grown man, later accused Gajdusek ofmolesting him as a child.
Gajdusek was charged with child molestation in April 1996, based on incriminating entries in published journals, his personal diary, and statements from a victim. In journals published and distributed by the NIH, Gajdusek wrote about sex between men and boys in New Guinea, Micronesia, and other Polynesian islands, and about his own sexual experiences with boys during his research trips.[17]
Gajdusek pleaded guilty in 1997 and, under aplea bargain, was sentenced to 12 months in jail. After his release in 1998, he was permitted to serve his five-year unsupervisedprobation in Europe. He never returned to the United States and lived inAmsterdam, spending winters inTromsø,Norway,[18] where thepolar night around thewinter solstice helped him to do more work.[1]
Gajdusek's treatment was denounced in October 1996 asanti-elitist and unduly harsh by controversial formerEdinburgh University psychologistChris Brand.[19]
The documentaryThe Genius and the Boys byBosse Lindquist, first shown onBBC Four on June 1, 2009, notes that "seven men testified in confidentiality about Gajdusek having had sex with them when they were boys", that four said "the sex was untroubling", while for three of them "the sex was a shaming, abusive, and a violation". One of these boys, the son of a friend and now an adult, appears in the film. Furthermore, Gajdusek openly admits to molesting boys and his approval ofincest.[4] The film tries to analyse Gajdusek's sexual behaviour, and also to understand his motivations for science, exploration, and life.
Gajdusek died December 12, 2008, inTromsø,Norway, at the age of 85. He was working and visiting colleagues in Tromsø at the time of his death.[20]
Hanya Yanagihara's 2013 novel,The People in the Trees, is based on Gajdusek's life, research, and child molestation conviction.[21] The novel centers on a character named A. Norton Perina, inspired by Gajdusek, who researches the life-extending properties of sacred turtle meat in Micronesia.[22]
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Daniel C. Gajdusek was a prolific science author come diarist, and published over 1,000 original papers, reviews and commentaries in scientific and medical journals.[23] This is an incomplete list of some of the more cited ones.
