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Viruses: At the Threshold of Life |
Chapter: 4
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Out of the Mainstream In 1957, a young American pediatrician named D. Carleton Gajdusek (gad´u-sek) encountered a strange disease while on a visit to the South Pacific island of New Guinea. The disease, called kuru, was a neurological disorder common in the villages of the Fore tribe. Whole villages would sometimes be endangered by the gradual, always fatal disease. The stricken Fore could not walk or even stand, and most died within a year, their brains riddled with lesions.
Gajdusek inquired about local customs and learned that during mourning periods, the villagers removed and handled the brains and other tissues of their dead relatives as a sign of respect. There was also a ritual massaging of the tissues into the skin, and Gajdusek concluded that this might account for transmission of the disease. Determined to learn more, he took several brain specimens back to the National Institutes of Health in Maryland.
Gajdusek was intrigued with the idea that kuru could be transmitted from one person to another. He was aware that the agent of scrapie (an animal disease of unknown origin) was transferable, and he read of the bold suggestion by another American scientist, William Hadlow, that both diseases could be caused by a similar agent. For the next few years, he and his colleague, Clarence Gibbs, tried to transfer kuru to animals. Finally, in 1965, they succeeded: Chimpanzees inoculated with brain tissue from kuru victims developed the disease. In later years, they made another startling discovery: Chimpanzees inoculated with brain tissue from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease also developed a kurulike disease.
In 1976, the Nobel Prize committee recognized two men for their work in remote parts of the world. Baruch Blumberg was singled out for his discovery of the Australia antigen of hepatitis in the blood of aborigines, and D. Carleton Gajdusek was honored for his work with kuru among the Fore people.
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