Be careful how you look at the photographs on this website. You might see family who have passed away.
Biographical entry Gajdusek, Carlton (1923 - 2008)
- Born
- 9 September 1923
- Died
- 12 December 2008
Summary
Daniel Carlton Gajdusek was an American physician and medical researcher who spent 50 years conducting research on Indigenous populations in some of the remotest corners of the world. In the 1955, he went to work with immunologist, Sir Macfarlane Burnet in Melbourne and in 1957, Macfarlane Burnet sent him to New Guinea to study child development, behaviour and disease. Gajdusek investigated the cause of a mystery illness amongst the Fore tribe in the eastern highlands and proved that the people were dying from kuru, a slow acting virus infection, related to Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease in humans and scrapie in sheep. For this work, he shared the Nobel Prize in 1976 for Physiology or Medicine.
Details
Correspondence in the NCIG collection indicates that during the late 1960s, he and Bob Kirk shared their collections of Australian and New Guinean blood samples and fingerprint samples. Bob Kirk's collaborator, Roy Simmons at the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories analysed thousands of blood samples for Gajdusek.
