Gajdusek

Even a 1997 prison sentence for child molestation did not prompt the NAS to oust physician Daniel Gajdusek from its ranks.

Gajdusek deduced that the disease was transmitted during these rituals — but how?

In 1976, Gajdusek received the Nobel Prize for discovering a new family of human diseases.

In the late 1950s, American scientist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek — “grandiose, driven, a visionary”— trekked to remote villages to find and study kuru cases.

Lacking an infectious agent, Gajdusek proposed that each might be caused by a “slow virus.”