1923-

American Virologist and Pediatrician

In 1976 Daniel Carleton Gajdusek shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine with Baruch S. Blumberg (1925- ) for their discoveries concerning "new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases." Gajdusek had suggested the existence of "slow viruses," novel viruses that seemed to remain dormant for long periods of time before attacking the body. The concept of slow viruses emerged from Gajdusek's studies of kuru, a degenerative brain disease found among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea. The slow viruses were eventually implicated as the causative agents of other diseases, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and mad-cow disease.

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. (Bettmann/CORBIS. Reproduced with permission.)

Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York. His father was born in Slovakia and his mother was a first-generation Hungarian American. His aunt, Irene Dobrozcky, an entomologist, who arranged for him to obtain a summer...