Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
The virologist and anthropologist D. Carleton Gajdusek, who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on infectious brain agents now known as prion diseases, died last week in Norway.
He was found in his Tromso hotel room on Friday morning. Currently the cause of death is unknown, but his biographer, Robert Klitzman, told the New York Times that the Nobel laureate’s death was likely due to congestive heart failure. Gajdusek was 85.
The former NIH researcher and NINDS director is most noted, and won the Nobel, for his work in the fifties and sixties on kuru, a disease that led patients into trembling and madness before death. After an autopsy, the victims were found to have spongy holes in their brains. Gajdusek also worked in isolated communities around the world to investigate the genetics of pseudo-hermaphroditism, Huntington’s disease and other conditions.
Most recently, Gajdusek was charged with molesting several of the young boys that he adopted while on expeditions to the Pacific. He pleaded guilty to one charge, served one year in prison and then spent the remainder of his life living in Europe.
To search for the cause of kuru, Gajdusek studied the Fore tribe of New Guinea, which lived much as they had in the Stone Age. As a sign of respect for the dead, members cooked and ate the bodies of their deceased and then smeared themselves with the brains.
Gajdusek took those diseased brains and injected them into chimpanzees’ brains to see how kuru developed. Because all known illness-causing bacteria, viruses and parasites produce symptoms within a few days or weeks, he and other scientists were surprised when the chimps showed no immediate symptoms. Eventually, two years later, the chimps did develop kuru which led Gajdusek to theorize the disease was caused by a slow-acting virus that did not produce the expected immune system reactions.
Further research in the field by Gajdusek and others eventually revealed that kuru was not unique, but part of a previously unknown group of diseases called spongiform encephalopathies, which are now known to be caused by the refolding of proteins.
The discovery basically “turned on its head” the idea that only DNAs and RNAs are involved for all life, Klitzman told the Scientist.
But, despite winning the Nobel for infectious disease research, Gajdusek felt that “showing that you could take someone born in the Stone Age, bring them to this country… and someone could jump through 5,000 years of human society and cultural advancement in one lifetime”,—his anthropological research—was his most significant achievement, Klitzman said.