D. Carleton Gajdusek

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was an American physician and medical researcher, born in Yonkers, New York, on September 9, 1923, to a Slovak father and a mother who emigrated from Debrecen. He graduated in 1943 from the University of Rochester, where he studied physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics, obtained an M.D. from Harvard University in 1946 and performed postdoctoral research at Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology and Harvard. He was co-recipient with Baruch S. Blumberg of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility of kuru, which implied the existence of an infectious agent he named an unconventional virus. In 1996 he was charged with child molestation and spent 12 months in prison after being convicted, and he then lived in self-imposed exile in Europe, where he died in 2008. Despite his admissions, many peers supported him because of his scientific contributions.