My scientific
interests started before my school years, when as a boy of five
years I wandered through gardens, fields and woods with my
mother's entomologist-sister, Tante Irene, as we overturned rocks
and sought to find how many different plant and animal species of
previously hidden life lay before us. We cut open galls to find
the insects responsible for the tumors, and collected strange
hardening gummy masses on twigs which hatched indoors to fill the
curtains with tiny praying mantises, and discovered wasps with
long ovipositors laying their eggs into the larvae of wood-boring
beetles. In petri dishes we watched some leaf-eating insects
succumb to insecticide poison while others survived, and on
exciting excursions visited the laboratories and experimental
greenhouses of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in my
hometown of Yonkers, New York, where my aunt, Irene Dobroscky,
worked, studying in the 1920's virus inclusions in the cells of
leaf-hoppers.
In my first years at school I had problems with my teachers for
carrying to school insect-killing jars, correctly labeled
"Poison: potassium cyanide". As a grade schoolboy, I met at the
Boyce Thompson Institute laboratories the quiet, amused, watchful
and guiding eyes of the mathematician and physical chemist, Dr.
William J. Youden, who enjoyed letting me play with his hand
cranked desk calculator, with his circular or cylindrical slide
rules, and with models of crystal lattice structure, and on his
laboratory bench where he taught me to prepare colloidal gold
solution time color reactions and to manufacture mercuric
thiocyanate snake-generating tablets. Before I was ten years old
I knew that I wanted to be a scientist like my aunt and my quiet
mathematician tutor. I rejected completely, as did my younger
brother, Robert, who is now a poet and critic, the interests of
our father and maternal grandfather in business, which had made
our life style possible.
My life and outlook were greatly influenced by the polyglot
immigrant Eastern European communities, adjacent and unwillingly
interlaced, living in the carpet, elevator and copper wire
manufacturing and sugar refining city of Yonkers, just upstream
on the Hudson River from the New York megalopolis and possessing
a schoolbook history of a Seventeenth Century Royal Dutch land
grant of Indian land to Johng Heer (hence Yonkers) Adrian van der
Donck. The cimbalon in our living room, beside the piano,
Romanian and Hungarian gypsies who fiddled the czardas and
halgatos at our family festivities and camped in the empty
store adjacent to my father's butcher shop, an uninterrupted flow
of loud conversation in many tongues, rarely English, and kitchen
odors of many Habsburg cuisines filling our crowded
expanded-family-filled home, gave me an orthodox and optimistic
view of America as a land of change and possibility which I never
lost. Below our almost rural hilltop home - our family had
"risen" - clustered the factories, churches, shops and two to
four family houses of immigrant factory workers and tradesmen in
the valleys of the almost obliterated Nepperhan and Tuckahoe
Indian-named creeks. In this hollow stood Hungarian, Slovak and
Polish Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches and a Presbyterian
mission to the factory workers. (This exciting conglomeration of
Eastern Europeans has been later displaced by Mediterranean and
Caribbean and, still later, Black Americans, all similarly
"melting". )
My father, Karl Gajdusek, was a Slovak farm boy from a small
village near Senica, who had left home as an adolescent youth to
emigrate to America before World War I, alone and without
speaking English, to become a butcher in the immigrant
communities of Yonkers, where he met and married my mother,
Ottilia Dobroczki. Her parents had also come, each alone, as
youthful immigrants from Debrecen, Hungary to America. On my
father's side we were a family of farmers and tradesmen,
vocations which never interested my brother or myself, but my
father's temperament for laughter and ribald fun, lust for life
in work and play, music, song, dance and food, and above all,
conversation; affected us strongly. On my mother's side were the
more somber academic and aesthetic aspirations of four university
educated first generation American siblings and a heroic interest
in fantasy and inquiry, in the classics and culture, nature,
nurture and process. Because of my mother's unquenchable interest
in literature and folklore, my brother and I were reared
listening to Homer, Hesiod, Sophocles, Plutarch and Virgil long
before we learned to read.
I was born on September 9, 1923 in the family home we still own,
while my maternal grandparents and my mother's youngest sister
shared the home. My brother arrived nineteen months later. He and
I grew up closely together; for every move I made further into
mathematics and the sciences, he moved further into poetry, music
and the other arts. In 1930 we traveled to Europe to visit our
relatives, mostly those of my father's large family, which he had
abandoned twenty years earlier. My brother and I were left for
months in my father's birthplace with his old father and the huge
remaining family (the squire had sired some twenty five
children), while our parents toured European capitals.
Back in America, my early school years were those of great
happiness: I liked school and the enchanting family excursions up
the Hudson valley were frequent. My Tante Irene was working on
problems of economic entomology in the Philippines and South East
Asia, and exotic artifacts and natural history specimens,
particularly the beautiful giant leafhoppers clad in batiklike
patterns, arrived to fascinate me. On her return from the Orient
she took me on ever broader excursions to collect insects, to
watch the emergence of the seventeen-year cicadas and to attend
scientific meetings in the American Museum of Natural History. I became an
early habitué of New York city's museums, attending courses
on Egyptology at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on schoolday afternoons
after my fifth grade classes and at weekend and evening lectures
on entomology, geology and botany at the Museum of Natural
History.
Today, I and my large family of adopted sons from New Guinea and
Micronesia still occupy, on our frequent visits to New York city,
our family home in which I was born fifty-three years ago. Here,
the boys recently discovered, while installing new attic
insulation, daguerreotypes and tintypes of the family taken in
towns east of the Danube and in turn-of-the-century New York city
and also school notebooks which once belonged to my mother, her
siblings, my brother, and myself. From this home, too, we buried
both of my maternal grandparents, and my father and mother. On
the occasion of my pagan mother's death, the unavoidably close
proximity of Slovak Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches, both
named Holy Trinity, led to the confusion which resulted in
burying her with ministrations of the wrong denomination, which
she would have enjoyed, when I attempted to assuage, by asking the
funeral director to call in the priest, the pious Roman Catholic
relatives of my irreverent father, at whose earlier funeral the
Slovak priest had declined to officiate.
I started to read seriously before puberty. Books by Scandinavian
authors, Henrik Ibsen and Sigrid Undset, were
among the earlier works I read myself. I devoured
enthusiastically three biographical works which must have had a
profound effect on me: René Vallery-Radot's biography of his
father-in-law, Louis Pasteur; Eve Curie's biography of her
mother, Marie
Curie; and Paul de Kruif's "Microbe Hunters." I then
stenciled the twelve names of microbiologists whom de Kruif had
selected on the steps leading to my attic chemistry laboratory,
where they remain today. At about this time, when I was about ten
years old, I wrote an essay on why I planned to concentrate on
chemistry, physics, and mathematics, rather than classical
biology, in preparation for a career in medicine. Dr. Youden had
succeeded in making it clear to me that education in mathematics,
physics and chemistry was the basis for the biology of the
future.
During the summers of my thirteenth to sixteenth years, I was
often working at the Boyce Thompson Laboratories. Under Dr. John
Arthur's tutelage, I synthesized and characterized a large series
of halogenated aryloxyacetic acids, many previously
unsynthesized. The series of new compounds I derived from these
failed to yield the fly-killing potency anticipated, but when
they were tested several years later for their phytocidal
capacity one of my new compounds, 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid,
became the weed killer of commerce; and the Institute based its
patent rights to royalties on my boyhood laboratory notebooks -
the only venture I have had which involved commerce.
My experiences at the Boyce Thompson, especially with Youden,
directed me towards physics at the University of
Rochester, where I hoped to fulfill my plan, formulated in
boyhood from my readings and teachings of my aunt and Youden, of
studying mathematics, physics, and chemistry in preparation for a
career in medical research.
From 1940 to 1943 I studied at the University of Rochester under
Victor Weisskopf in physics; Curt Stern, Don Charles, David
Goddard, Jim Goodwin, in biology; Vladimir Seidel in mathematics;
and Ralph Helmkamp in chemistry. In the summer of 1941 I was
inspired by the marine embryology course of Viktor Hamburger's at
Woods Hole Marine Biology Laboratories. In those years of my
teens I learned to love mountaineering, hiking, canoeing and
camping with a passion as great as that for science.
At nineteen to twenty-two years of age while at Harvard Medical
School, I worked with John T. Edsall in the laboratory of
protein physical chemistry, and with James L. Gamble in his
laboratory of electrolyte balance at Boston Children's
Hospital. Thereafter, at ages of twenty-five and twenty-six,
I worked at Caltech with Linus Pauling and John
Kirkwood, where I was also greatly influenced by Max Delbrück, George Beadle, Walter
Zechmeister and James Bonner. It was at Caltech that my peers -
fellow postdoctoral students and young investigators (Gunther
Stent, Jack Dunitz, Elie Wollman, Benoit Mandelbrot, David
Shoemaker, John Cann, Harvey Itano, Aage Bohr, Ole Maaloe, Ted
Harold, John Fincham, Reinhart Ruge, Arnold Mazur, Al Rich, and
others) - had a profound effect on my intellectual development,
goals and appreciation of quality in creative life, and on my
career. This was the "Golden Age" at Caltech and the many close
friends working in several different disciplines, as well as our
mentors, have remained mutually stimulating coworkers in science
and, above all, lasting personal friends for the past thirty
years. With the group of students about Linus Pauling, John
Kirkwood, Max Delbrück and George Beadle, I spent many days
and evenings in wideranging discussions in the laboratories and
at the Atheneum, and in even more protracted exchanges on camping
and hiking trips to the deserts and mountains of the West, of
Mexico and Canada. Max and Mannie Delbrück were often the
hosts for our group at their home, and the prime organizers of
many of our expeditions. This period of less than two years at
Caltech has given me a group of friends who are interested
critics of my work, who together with my major teachers in
clinical and laboratory investigation, comprise, perhaps
unwittingly, the jury whose judgements I most respect.
I had not counted on my captivation with clinical pediatrics.
Children fascinated me, and their medical problems (complicated
by the effect of variables of varying immaturity, growth, and
maturation upon every clinical entity that beset them) seemed to
offer more challenge than adult medicine. I lived and worked
within the walls of Boston Children's Hospital through much of
medical school. Thereafter, I started my postgraduate specialty
training in clinical pediatrics which I carried through to
Specialty Board qualification, while also working in the
laboratory of Michael Heidelberger at Columbia
University College of Physicians and Surgeons, while at
Caltech, and while with John
Enders on postgraduate work at Harvard. I have never
abandoned my clinical interests, particularly in pediatrics and
neurology, which were nurtured by a group of inspiring bedside
teachers: Mark Altschuler, Louis K. Diamond, William Ladd, Frank
Ingraham, Sidney Gellis, and Canon Ely at Harvard; Rustin
McIntosh, Hattie Alexander, Dorothy Anderson, and Richard Day at
Babies Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center in New
York; Katie Dodd, Ashley Weech, Joe Warkany, and Sam Rappaport at
Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and Ted Woodward of
Baltimore.
In 1951 I was drafted to complete my military service from John
Enders' laboratory at Harvard to Walter Reed Army Medical Service
Graduate School as a young research virologist, to where I was
called by Dr. Joseph Smadel. I found that he responded to my
over-ambitious projects and outlandish schemes with severity and
metered encouragement, teaching me more about the methods of
pursuing laboratory and field research, and presenting scientific
results, than any further theoretical superstructure, which he
assumed I already possessed.
From him and from Marcel Baltazard of the Institut Pasteur of
Teheran, where I worked in 1952 and 1953 on rabies, plague,
arbovirus infections, scurvy and other epidemic disease in Iran,
Afghanistan and Turkey, I learned of the excitement and challenge
offered by urgent opportunistic investigations of epidemiological
problems in exotic and isolated populations. My quest for medical
problems in primitive population isolates took me to valleys of
the Hindu Kush, the jungles of South America, the coast and
inland ranges of New Britain, and the swamps and high valleys of
Papua New Guinea and Malaysia, but always with a base for quiet
contemplation and exciting laboratory studies with John Enders in
Boston, Joe Smadel in Washington, and Frank Burnet in Melbourne. To these
teachers I am indebted for guidance and inspiration and for years
of encouragement and friendship.
To Joe Smadel I also owe the debt of further sponsorship and
encouragement, and recognition of my scientific potential for
productive research which led him to create for me several years
later a then unique position as an American visiting scientist at
the National
Institutes of Health, in the National Institute of
Neurological Diseases and Blindness, under Dr. Richard Masland,
wherein I could nurture my diverse interests in a selfstyled
Study of Child Growth and Development and Disease Patterns in
Primitive Cultures. Our Laboratory of Slow, Latent and Temperate
Virus Infections grew out of the elucidation of one of our
"disease patterns", kuru, and blossomed into a new field of
medicine. For about two decades I have enjoyed at the National
Institutes of Health the base and haven for our diverse studies
in remote parts of the world together with a small group of
students and coworkers and many visiting colleagues who have
formed the strong team of our endeavor. Here, Marion Poms, Joe
Gibbs, Paul Brown, Vin Zigas, Michael Alpers, David Asher and
Nancy Rogers have shared these adventures with me through almost
two decades.
My boyhood reading, first in Homer, Virgil, and Plutarch, on
which we were nurtured by our Classicist-Romanticist Hungarian
mother, led, upon the instigation of my poet brother, to my more
thorough return to the classics as a young, too-ardent
scientist-cum-physician, and to the modern literature of European
authors and philosophers, which I had missed in my university
days devoted too exclusively to mathematics and the sciences.
This reading changed greatly my way of thinking. Particularly, I
would have to credit Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Tolstoy; Montaigne,
Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Valery and Gide; Shakespeare,
Wordsworth, Yeats and Lawrence; Poe, Whitman and Melville; Ibsen;
Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Nietzsche, Kafka and Mann; Saadi and
Hafiz.
In 1954 I took off for Australia to work as a visiting
investigator with Frank Burnet at the Walter and Eliza Hall
Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne from where,
between periods of bench work in immunology and virology, I
launched studies on child development and disease patterns with
Australian aboriginal and New Guinean populations.
In eighteen volumes of some five thousand pages of published
personal journals on my explorations and expeditions to primitive
cultures, I have told far more about myself and my work since
1957, when I first saw kuru, under the guidance of Vincent Zigas,
than one should in a lifetime ... I do not see how I can
précis that here.
From Les Prix Nobel en 1976, Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1977
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/ Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate.
D. Carleton Gajdusek died on December 12, 2008.
Copyright © The Nobel Foundation 1976
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Read more about the Medicine Prize during the past century