Neurológia pre prax 1/2024

Cannibals, slow viruses, Nobel Prize and young lads: the story of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (1923–2008), laureate of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1976) and honorary doctor of Comenius University in Bratislava (1996)

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek would turn 100 years old this year. A first-generation descendant of immigrants (father Slovak, mother Hungarian), Gajdusek was born in New York and studied medicine at prestigious universities, and earned a postgraduate degree as well. After serving in the military, he worked in Australia where he learned about the existence of a strange, fatal neurological disease in New Guinea. Without hesitation, he undertook an expedition there (accompanied by the district medical officer Vincent Zigas) during which he described kuru; he then devoted many years to the study of this disease. He managed to demonstrate its infectious origin by transfer to primates, initially to chimpanzees. The disease’s causative agent was discovered and named prion by Stanley Prusiner, only twenty-five years after Gajdusek’s discovery. Gajdusek and Prusiner were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries associated with prion diseases in the years 1976 and 1997, respectively. Later on, Gajdusek studied an endemic disease manifested by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and parkinsonism with dementia in the southern part of eastern New Guinea. At home, in the United States, he worked at the NINCDS in Bethesda and accepted interns from all over the world. When he was 75 years old, he was accused of molesting three minor boys, originally children he had adopted and brought with him from the Pacific to the United States to obtain proper education; a total of 55 children had been adopted by him. He was sentenced to eighteen months in prison; after his release, he left for Europe where he spent the rest of his life, dying at the age of 85 years in Norway.

Keywords: D.C. Gajdusek, kuru, prion diseases