Gajdusek, D(aniel) Carleton (1923– )

US virologist and paediatrician who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for his work on new mechanisms for the origin and transmission of infectious diseases. He identified and described ‘slow virus’ (now believed to be prion) infections in humans. This was based on his studies of kuru, a disease of neural degeneration found in people in New Guinea.

The affected people practised a form of ritual cannibalism, in which the women and children consumed the brains of the dead. Analyses of brain tissue failed to reveal any signs of infective organisms, but when Gajdusek injected extracts from the brains of kuru victims into the brains of chimpanzees, the animals began to display signs of the disease after about a year. This led Gajdusek to propose that kuru was caused by an infectious agent that has a very long incubation period. Further work by his team showed that Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease is caused by similar agents.

Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York, and educated at the universities of Rochester and Harvard, and the California Institute of Technology. As a virologist interested in epidemiology, he travelled to New Guinea in the 1950s and made extensive studies of kuru. From 1958 he has worked at the National Institute of Neurology and Communicative Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Maryland. In 1997 he was sentenced by a Maryland court to 18 months' imprisonment for sexually abusing a 15-year-old boy.