Daniel Carleton Gajdusek

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (born September 9, 1923, Yonkers, New York, U.S.A.) is an American physician and medical researcher, who was the corecipient (along with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976. He received the award in recognition of his study of a remarkable disease, Kuru (Fore word for "trembling"). This disease was rampant among the South Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950's and 1960's. Gajdusek correctly connected the prevalence of the disease with the practice of funerary cannibalism, practiced by the South Fore. With elimination of this practice, Kuru disappeared among the South Fore within a generation.

Pedophilia charges

In the course of his numerous research trips in the South Pacific, Gajdusek made a habit of bringing children back to live with him in the United States, where he would pay for their education, act as their doctor (he was trained as a paediatrician) and monitor their development, ostensibly out of scientific interest. From the 1960s to the 1980s over 50 such children, mostly boys, lived with him, and he legally adopted many of them. In April 1996, Gajdusek was arrested in connection with a Federal investigation of child pornography on the Internet. The connection to the original investigation was incidental: Gajdusek's research diaries (published by the NIH), which described man-boy homosexuality among the Fore and also strongly hinted at Gajdusek's own sexual relationships with boys he encountered in the course of his fieldwork, were being discussed online by pedophile groups. The FBI began an investigation of Gajdusek, locating one of his former wards and arranging to tape a telephone conversation in which the now 24-year-old man accused Gajdusek of molesting him at age 16, a charge with Gajdusek did not deny. Gajdusek was charged with child molestation. He was found guilty in 1997 and, under a plea bargain, sentenced to 9 months to a year in jail. After his release in 1998, he was permitted to serve his 5-year probation in Europe.

Related Topics:
Paediatrician - Child pornography - Internet - FBI - Child molestation - Probation

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