Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923-2008)

Genius is sometimes difficult, often complicated, and always fascinating, and is nowhere better illustrated than in the life of Carleton Gajdusek, who died of heart failure on December 12, 2008, at the age of 86.


Born in Yonkers, New York, in 1923, he was two years older than his only sibling, Robin Gajdusek, the children of an immigrant Slovak father and Hungarian mother. Their father was an earthy entrepreneur and their mother a cultivated aristocrat, and from an early age it was evident that both boys had exceptional talents and boundless enthusiasm, which in due course led to distinguished careers in English literature for Robin and neuroscience for Carleton.


His contributions to the scientific literature spanned many fields, most notably in immunology, infectious diseases, and neurology, including studies of measles, herpesviruses, influenza, rabies, Pneumocystis carinii, acute hemorrhagic fevers, lymphocytic choriomeningitis, hantaviruses, arthropod-borne viruses, the amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-Parkinson’s dementia complex in Guam and West Iran, Alzheimer’s disease, and of course the group of diseases for which he is best known – transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE). His successful studies of the experimental transmission of these latter diseases began with kuru in the Highlands of New Guinea, and was followed in turn by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease, and fatal familial insomnia, and it was for his demonstration of the infectious nature of what had been considered as iatrogenic neurodegenerations that he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics and Medicine in 1976.


The irony of his professional career is that he was far more interested in the scientific basis of human development and cultural diversity than in the better-funded field of neurological disease. This aspect of his thinking was beautifully presented in an early paper entitled “The composition of musics for man, or decoding from primitive cultures the scores for human behavior” (1964), and many years later (2006) in a series of lectures at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. He brought scores of boys and girls from New Guinea and the Western Pacific to his home in Maryland, not (in his own words) from any altruistic instinct but rather for the affection he felt for them, and the intellectual and emotional challenge of watching youngsters from...


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