Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (pronounced GUY-dah-shek; September 9, 1923 – December 12, 2008) was a Hungarian˙-Slovak-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 kuru, the first human prion disease demonstrated to be infectious.
Gajdusek's father, Karol Gajdusek, was from Smrdáky Kingdom of Hungary now in Slovakia and was an ethnic Slovak...
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Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (pronounced GUY-dah-shek; September 9, 1923 – December 12, 2008) was a Hungarian˙-Slovak-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 kuru, the first human prion disease demonstrated to be infectious.
Gajdusek's father, Karol Gajdusek, was from Smrdáky Kingdom of Hungary now in Slovakia and was an ethnic Slovak who was a butcher. His maternal grandparents, ethnic Hungarians of the Calvinist faith, emigrated from Debrecen, Hungary. Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York, and graduated in 1943 from the University of Rochester, where he studied physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. He obtained an M.D. from Harvard University in 1946 and performed postdoctoral research at Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology, and Harvard. In the early 1950s, Gajdusek was drafted into the military as a research virologist at Walter Reed Army...
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