Daniel Carleton Gajdusek
(9/9/1923 – 12/12/2008)
was an American physician, medical researcher and corecipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on the causal agents of various degenerative neurological disorders involving prions.
During the 1950s, Gajdusek traveled to New Guinea to research an unusual disease that was killing members of a native tribe called the Fore.
Gajdusek discovered that these tribe members were engaging in endo-cannibalism, the practice of eating members of one’s own tribe. This unusual habit enabled tribe members to add much needed protein to their diet, after the victim had died of natural causes. Upon inspection of the victim’s brains, Gajdusek discovered holes in the brain tissue that resembled sponges. He coined the term transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. He discovered that once the tribe members stopped their cannibalistic ways, the disease went away. He wrote several papers on this new discovery, and things remained rather quiet on this subject until the mid-1980s, when the disease reared its ugly head in cattle in Great Britain.
In the early 1980s, a new epidemic called Mad Cow, or Creutzfeldt-Jacob (CJD) struck England . 146 died people in England which resulted in the slaughter of millions of cows, and almost crippled the cattle and dairy industries. The incubation period of Mad Cow Disease, , could be as long as 25 years. Mad Cow Disease, or CJD, is incurable and 100 percent fatal.
