| 1 | Name: | Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek | |
| Institution: | CNRS Institut Alfred Fessard | ||
| Year Elected: | 1978 | ||
| Class: | 2. Biological Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 209. Neurobiology | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Deceased | ||
| Birth Date: | 1923 | ||
| Death Date: | December 11, 2008 | ||
A physician and medical researcher, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was the co-recipient, along with Baruch Blumberg, of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his groundbreaking study of the disease Kuru. He is known for establishing the role of "slow viruses" in human disease, espeically of the nervous system. In addition to his studies of kuru in New Guinea, he has extensively studied Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in Europe and the Americas. Born in Yonkers, New York in 1923, Dr. Gajdusek obtained his M.D. from Harvard University in 1946 and performed postdoctoral research at both Harvard and the California Institute of Technology. He studied virus and rickettsial diseases at the Pasteur Institute in Tehran, Iran from 1954-55 and became head of laboratories for virological and neurological research at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 1958. He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1974. | |||