Daniel Carleton Gajdusek Autograph

Profession:
(1923-2008) American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on an infectious agent which would later be identified as the cause of kuru, the first known human prion disease.

Year of Birth: 1923

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was an American physician and medical researcher who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976. He was born on October 9, 1923, in Yonkers, New York, and passed away on December 12, 2008, in Tromsø, Norway.

Gajdusek studied at the University of Rochester, where he received his bachelor's degree in 1943. He went on to earn his M.D. from Harvard Medical School in 1946. His early research focused on tropical medicine, studying disease patterns in the Pacific Islands.

In 1958, Gajdusek began studying the Fore people in Papua New Guinea, where he discovered a new disease called kuru. He found that the disease was transmitted through ritual cannibalism practices and was able to identify the infectious agent responsible.

For his groundbreaking work on kuru, Gajdusek was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976. He later went on to study other neurodegenerative diseases, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Despite his scientific achievements, Gajdusek's reputation was tarnished by legal troubles in the 1990s. He was convicted of child molestation and spent over a decade in prison before his death in 2008.

Overall, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek made significant contributions to the field of medicine and our understanding of neurodegenerative diseases, but his legacy is complicated by his personal actions later in life.