Nobel Prize In Physiology/Medicine, 1976

 

                                                            Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

 1957: Investigation of Kuru in Papua New Guine

Traveled to the Eastern Highlands to study kuru, a fatal neurological epidemic affecting the Fore people (predominantly women and children), characterized by progressive cerebellar ataxia and uncontrollable shivering.

 1957–1961:  The Cannibalism Link

Working alongside Australian medical officer Vincent Zigas and anthropologists Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse, Gajdusek documented that kuru was transmitted through ritual endocannibalism—consuming deceased relatives' tissues (especially brain) during funeral rites.

1966: Transmission of Kuru to Chimpanzees

Following veterinary neuropathologist William Hadlow's 1959 observation that kuru pathology resembled sheep scrapie, Gajdusek and Clarence J. Gibbs Jr. injected brain tissue from kuru victims into chimpanzees. After an incubation period of nearly two years, the apes developed kuru, proving a human degenerative brain disease could be infectious.

1968: Transmission of CJD to Chimpanzees

Gajdusek and Gibbs repeated the experiment using brain tissue from a CJD patient, successfully transmitting CJD to chimpanzees and uniting kuru, CJD, and scrapie under the umbrella of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies (TSEs).

1976: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

Shared the Nobel Prize with Baruch S. Blumberg (who discovered the hepatitis B virus) "for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases."

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