D. CARLETON GAJDUSEK

D. Carleton Gajdusek (b. 1923 in Yonkers, New York) was corecipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 with Baruch S. Blumberg “for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases.” Gajdusek studied always-fatal subacute diseases of the nervous system including the disease called kuru in communities of stone-age culture in New Guinea. He showed that kuru was transmissible and caused by a new type of infectious agent spread through cannibalism of their dead relatives. He further showed that this agent was closely related to that causing scrapie in sheep and that a rare worldwide pre-senile dementia, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, was caused by the same atypical, unconventional “virus,” and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (“mad cow disease”) is caused also by one of this group of agents…