Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
9.9.1923-12.12.2008

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (“Carleton”) (Fig. 1), one of the last giants of 20th century science, died peacefully in Tromso, Norway on 12 December, 2008. He was born on 9 September, 1923 in Yonkers, New York, USA, into a mixed Slovak and Hungarian family. He was a brilliant and precocious child who quickly became interested in science, an interest furthered by his entomologist aunt with whom he often visited the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in Yonkers. “We cut open galls to find insects responsible for the tumors, and collected strange hard gummy masses on twigs which hatched indoors to fill the curtains with tiny praying mantises, and discovered wasps with long ovipositors laying their eggs into larvae of wood-boring beetles.” As a teenager, under Dr. John Arthur, he discovered a new chemical compound of the halogenated aryloxyacetic acid group, that was later patented by the Boyce Thompson Institute as a weed-killer.

His discoveries were many and outstanding. Despite a flow of scientific journals and papers, the majority of researchers make only one or two significant discoveries: Carleton made many. He started with Marcel Baltazard of the Pasteur Institute in Teheran on rabies, arboviruses and plague in Iran and Turkey. He was the first to point out Pneumocystis carinii as an important human pathogen (long before it became a ‘signal’ of AIDS) [4] and studied hantaviruses [13] long before they became a significant research topic. The first US hantavirus (Prospect Hill strain) was isolated from rodents around his house [14]. He was on track to point out measles as a cause of SSPE [1] and he even organized a symposium on the subject. He first showed that HIV inoculated into chimpanzee brain caused an encephalopathy [6] and he was the first to show that Aβ is a component of amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s disease [10].

But his major field was transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), recently re-named prion diseases (Fig. 2). In the 1950s, he went to Australia to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, to join the laboratory of Nobel Laureate Sir Macfarlane Burnett, where he became aware of the strange disease in Papua New Guinea, kuru [2,5,8,11]. Despite the strong opposition of Burnett [2], Gajdusek went to PNG and, along with Vin Zigas, started a life-long journey that eventually brought him a Nobel prize in 1968. He transmitted...


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