Obituary: Carleton Gajdusek

Nobel prizewinner who first described the prion disease kuruCarleton Gajdusek, who has died aged 85, had the rare distinction of being a Nobel prizewinner and a convicted child molester. As a medical researcher he studied kuru, an incurable disease that affects the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea, and showed that it had a long incubation period, but progresses rapidly when it starts, and is unlike any previously understood infection. It does not provoke an immune response and cannot be destroyed by heat, radiation or formaldehyde. He called the causative agent a "slow virus" and showed that kuru was related to Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans and scrapie in sheep; we now call the organism a prion and know that it is a non-living entity that can reproduce itself.Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York, to east European immigrants. He studied biophysics at Rochester University, graduating in 1943, and medicine at Harvard, qualifying in 1946. He then did research at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) under Linus Pauling and Max Delbruch, and research at Harvard under John Enders. All three scientists later became Nobel laureates. Continue reading...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Neuroscience Biochemistry and molecular biology Medical research People in science US news World news Source Type: news