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Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
Sign in to saveAlso known as Carlton Gadjusek, D. Carleton Gajdusek, Carleton Gajdusek
American medical researcher
OverviewAI-generated
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was born on September 9, 1923, and died on December 12, 2008. He was recognized in the Nobel Laureates collection, the Nobel Medicine collection, and the American Academy Arts Sciences collection.
Gajdusek received one Nobel Prize. His Erdős number is 4.
Synthesized by Vinony from 8 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Nobel Prize, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Nobel Prize
- The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine1976
“for their discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases”
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Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- human
- Gender
- male
- Citizenship
- United States
- Place of birth
- Yonkers
- Place of death
- Tromsø Municipality
- Occupation
- anthropologist
- Educated at
- Harvard Medical School
- Languages spoken
- English language
- Field of work
- virology
- Image
- Daniel Carleton Gajdusek 2bw.jpg
- Residence
- Yonkers
- Convicted of
- child sexual abuse
Show 8 more facts
- date of birth
- 1923-09-09
- date of death
- 2008-12-12
- member of
- American Philosophical Society
- Erdős number
- 4
- Commons category
- Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
- name in native language
- Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
- P8168
- Boidobra
- interested in
- virology
Sources (13)
via Wikidata · CC0
~11 min read
Encyclopedic overview
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (/ˈɡaɪdəʃɛk/ GHY-də-shek; September 9, 1923 – December 12, 2008) was an American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility of kuru, implying the existence of an infectious agent, which he named an 'unconventional virus'. In 1996, Gajdusek was charged with child molestation and, after being convicted, spent 12 months in prison before entering a self-imposed exile in Europe, where he died a decade later. Despite Gajdusek openly admitting to molesting boys and his approval of incest, he still received support from peers advocating for clemency who felt his crimes were lessened by his scientific contributions.
His papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland and at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Daniel Carleton Gajdusek” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.