Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

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A Research Project About :
Dr. Daniel Carleton
Gajdusek
Name
:noureldeen Mahmoud Ashraf Fathy Mohamed
Group Number
:19ls2a
Course Name
: history
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Table of contents :
page
Doctor's name ...................................................................................................................... 4
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek .................................................................................................... 4
Biography ............................................................................................................................ 4
Contribution to medicine...................................................................................................... 9
Kuru research....................................................................................................................... 9
"Unconventional viruses '' .................................................................................................. 10
These infectious agents were later discovered to be misfolded proteins, or prions. ............ 10
Conclusion : ....................................................................................................................... 11
Reference ........................................................................................................................... 11
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Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was an 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 kuru.
An American virologist who worked in the United States, Iran and Australia to study
infectious diseases, particularly Coro disease, which is a viral brain disease that was
spread among early New Guinea residents through cannibalism.
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1.Doctor's name
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
2.Biography
Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York, to east European immigrants.
He studied biophysics at Rochester University, graduating in 1943, and medicine at
Harvard, qualifying in 1946.
He then did research at Caltech (the California Institute of Technology) under Linus
Pauling and Max Delbruck, and research at Harvard under John Enders.
All three scientists later became Nobel laureates.
In the 1950s, doing his army service, Gajdusek helped show that the haemorrhagic fever
killing US soldiers in South Korea was spread by migrating birds.
In 1954, the US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) sent him to a camp in Bolivia for
native American Okinawans transported there by the US navy after the second world war.
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There were so many deaths it was rumored to be an extermination camp; but he showed
that the deaths were by natural causes and fighting. The CDC offered him a job.
"You're a screwball", said his boss, "but you're my kind of screwball."
Gajdusek declined the offer and went to work with another Nobel-laureate-to-be, the
immunologist Sir Macfarlane Burnet, in Melbourne.
In 1957 Burnet sent him to Port Moresby, New Guinea, to set up part of a multinational
study on child development, behavior and disease, where he heard about a mystery illness
called kuru affecting a tribe of the eastern highlands.
A neuroscientist explains:
the need for ‘empathetic citizens’ - podcast
The Fore, always willing to adopt new customs, had copied a neighbouring tribe, the Anga,
some years earlier and taken up cannibalism.
They abandoned it when missionaries told them that eating people is wrong. Their kuru
was more recent and becoming more prevalent.
Gajdusek began mapping its incidence, noting that nobody recovered. Dozens of blood
samples revealed nothing untoward.
By April 1957 he had 28 cases and 13 deaths. By June he had 200 deaths; most were
women and children.
Kuru sufferers shrieked, stumbled, jerked and twitched, were belligerent and prone to
mirth. Gajdusek wanted to know if the disease was genetic, infectious, environmental or
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psychosomatic. He sent brains to be analysed in Australia and at the US National Institutes
of Health (NIH).
He investigated what the Fore ate, drank or touched. He tried ad hoc treatments: vitamins,
steroids, antibiotics. Nothing worked.
Meanwhile, the Americans noted that the brains were similar to those of CJD patients.
Burnet proposed sending out a multidisciplinary team. Gajdusek replied that he was that
team. Around this time he visited the Anga. They did not have kuru but did have an
interesting form of welcome: the youths persistently offered to fellate him and regarded it as
great fun.
After nine months, Gajdusek returned to NIH. There, an American scientist, William
Hadlow, wrote saying how similar the brains looked to brains of sheep infected with
scrapie.
Gajdusek inoculated chimps with extracts of Fore brains, knowing it would be a long time
incubating, and went back to the hospital he had founded for the Fore.
He visited other tribes with paedophiliac traditions, and in 1963 brought to the US the first
of his 56 adopted sons, a 12-year-old Anga boy, who landed barefoot in Washington with a
bone through his nose.
He put them all through high school, and many through university or medical school. In
1965, two years after they had been inoculated, the chimps started to become ill.
Gajdusek consulted a British expert on sheep scrapie, who confirmed that the chimps had
died of the same disease that killed the Fore.
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It was a triumphant moment for Gajdusek, says the science writer DT Max, author of The
Family That Couldn't Sleep, a history of prion disease research:
proof that the disease was caused by an infectious agent. By 1976, when he received his
Nobel prize, Gajdusek had published 150 papers.
He published a further 450 papers on "slow virus" diseases and ethnography.
In 1974 an American neurologist and neuroscientist, Stanley Prisoner, entered the field and
coined the term prion (for proteinaceous infectious particle, and incorporating the first two
letters of his surname).
Prusiner received a Nobel prize in 1997.
In the 1990s a member of Gajdusek's lab had told the FBI that something fishy was going
on and that clues might lie in Gajdusek's diaries.
They contained nothing incriminating, apart from a Prufrock-like reference to his
inhibitions.
The FBI questioned Gajdusek's adopted sons and found one who was willing to testify; in a
taped phone call from the boy, Gajdusek admitted they had masturbated each other.
None of the other boys said Gajdusek had touched them and several were willing to give
evidence in his favour.
Many distinguished scientists pleaded for clemency for him.
Gajdusek was 74 when he emerged after serving a year in prison, his health broken. He
retired to Amsterdam, spending his winters in Tromso, Norway. He was unapologetic about
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his conviction, taking the view that "boys will be boys". He is survived by his adopted
children.
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, medical researcher, born 9 September 1923; died 12 December
2008
Gajdusek's father, Karol Gajdusek, was a butcher, an ethnic Slovak from
Büdöskő, Kingdom of Hungary (now Smrdáky, Slovakia). His maternal grandparents,
ethnic Hungarians of the Calvinist faith, emigrated from Debrecen, Hungary. Gajdusek was
born in Yonkers, New York, and graduated in 1943 from the University of Rochester, where
he studied physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. He obtained
an M.D. from Harvard University in 1946 and performed postdoctoral research at Columbia
University, the California Institute of Technology, and Harvard. In 1951, Gajdusek was
drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned as a research virologist at the Walter Reed Army
Medical Service Graduate School.[5] In 1954, after his military discharge, he went to work
as a visiting investigator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical
Research in Melbourne, Australia.
There, he began the work that culminated in the Nobel prize.
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3.Contribution to medicine
Kuru research
Gajdusek's best-known work focused on kuru. This disease was rampant among the South
Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s. Gajdusek connected the spread of the
disease to the practice of funerary cannibalism by the South Fore. With elimination of
cannibalism, kuru disappeared among the South Fore within a generation.
Gajdusek was introduced to the problem of kuru by Vincent Zigas, a district medical officer
in the Fore Tribe region of New Guinea. Gajdusek provided the first medical description of
this unique neurological disorder, which was miscast in the popular press as the "laughing
sickness" because some patients displayed risus sardonicus as a symptom. He lived among
the Fore, studied their language and culture, and performed autopsies on kuru victims.
was shown to have remarkable similarity to scrapie, a disease of sheep and goats caused by
an unconventional infectious agent. Subsequently, additional human agents belonging to the
same group were discovered. They include sporadic, familial, and variant Creutzfeldt–
Jakob disease. Gajdusek recognized that diseases like Kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease
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were caused by a new infectious agent that had not yet been identified.[2] Further research
on the scrapie agent by Stanley Prusiner and others led to the identification of endogenous
proteins called prions as the cause of these diseases.
"Unconventional viruses ''
In his 1977 paper "Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru,"
Gajdusek postulated that the cause of kuru, scrapie and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease were
caused by what he termed an unconventional virus. In comparison to normal viruses,
unconventional viruses had a long incubation period and did not cause an immune system
response in the host. Although Gajdusek noted that there were no demonstrable nucleic
acids in unconventional viruses, he did not rule out the possibility that unconventional
viruses contained RNA in a smaller amount despite radiation resistance [9]
These infectious agents were later discovered to be misfolded proteins, or prions.
Gajdusek concluded that kuru was transmitted by the ritualistic consumption of the brains
of deceased relatives, which was practiced by the Fore. He then proved this hypothesis by
successfully transmitting the disease to primates and demonstrating that it had an unusually
long incubation period of several years.[6] He did this by drilling holes into chimps' heads
and placing pureed brain matter into the cerebellum. [7][8] These animals then developed
symptoms of kuru.
This was the first demonstration of the infectious spread of a no inflammatory degenerative
disease in human
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Conclusion :
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek .was an 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 kuru, the first
known human prion disease .
In 1996, Gajdusek was charged with child molestation and, after being convicted, spent 12
months in prison before entering a self-imposed exile in Europe, where he died a decade
later. His papers are he at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.[3] and at
the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.[4]
Reference :
Holley, Joe (December 16, 2008) "D. Carleton Gajdusek; Controversial Scientist", The
Washington Post, p. B5.
Jump up to:a b "Physiology or Medicine 1976 – Press Release". Nobelprize.org. October 14,
1976. Retrieved July 21, 2018.
D. Carleton Gajdusek Papers 1918–2000". National Library of Medicine.
"D. Carleton (Daniel Carleton) Gajdusek correspondence, 1934-1988". American
Philosophical Society.
Maugh, Thomas (December 18, 2008). "D. Carleton Gajdusek dies at 85; Nobel Prize
winner identified exotic disease, was unrepentant pedophile". Los Angeles Times.
Retrieved May 12,2012.
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