Many of the best scientists of
the twentieth century were so because they tended to think
outside normal patterns, to see from odd angles. Some, like
Richard Feynman (safecracker, bongo drum player & painter
of nudes) had eccentricities that were considered merely
colorful and amusing. Some, like Noam Chomsky (eloquent
political gadfly) were marginalized to minimize their threat
to the status quo. And then there were ones like Alan Turing,
a man whose work probably saved more lives in World War II
than any other individual’s, whose sexual proclivities
so threatened society it hounded him into committing suicide.
Dr Daniel Carleton Gajdusek fell into that last category for
his love of boys and his defense of that love.
But who was Dr. Gajdusek
(pronounced GUY-dah-shek) and what did he do? Dr. Gajdusek was
a virologist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his
work on the mysterious epidemics now known as prion diseases.
These involve small bits of twisted proteins that gradually
cause proteins in the body to malform. While his work was
mainly focused on brain diseases like Kuro and
Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (the human version of Mad Cow
Disease), prions have been implicated in a much wider range of
ailments.
For this important work he
received the Nobel Prize in Physiology & Medicine in 1976.
As part of the prize, Dr. Gajdusek wrote a short autobiography
detailing the path his scientific explorations had taken and
their role in his life. Two passages from it stand out
especially:
“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 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.1
Dr. Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia
University, wrote in “The Trembling Mountain,” -an
account of his time as a graduate student under Dr. Gajdusek
in New Guinea – that his brain “worked faster and
at a higher level than anyone’s I’ve ever met.”
Dr. Gajdusek was born on Sept. 9, 1923. He grew up in
Yonkers and went to the University of Rochester and Harvard
Medical School. From 1970 until 1997, he headed the brain
studies laboratory at the National Institute of Neurological
Disease and Stroke, which is part of the National Institutes
of Health.
As mentioned in the autobiography, over the course of his
research in the South Pacific, Gajdusek had brought 56 male
children from New Guinea and Micronesia back to live with him
in Maryland to better their education. He was later accused by
one of these, now an adult man, of sexually molesting him as a
child.
Gajdusek was charged with child molestation in April 1996,
based on incriminating entries in his laboratory notes,
statements from one son and his own admission. He pled guilty
to a single charge in 1997 and, under a plea bargain, was
sentenced to 19 months in jail. After his release in 1998, he
was permitted to serve his 5-year probation in Europe. It was
almost certainly his fame and wide circle of influential
friends which kept the punishment as light as it was.
Thereafter he divided his time between Paris, Amsterdam and
Tromsø, Norway (which is above the Arctic Circle and
dark nearly 24 hours a day in winter – he said the
isolation let him get more work done.)
He remained unrepentant to the end about his sexual
relationships with his adopted sons, Dr. Klitzman said. He
considered American law prudish and pointed out that sex with
young men was normal in the cultures he studied and in the
classic Greek societies at the foundation of Western
civilization.
His children were all legally
adopted, his legal assistant, Dorrie Runman said. He put
several through college and graduate or medical school.
Several of them, now in their 50s, supported him during his
legal troubles, while only one testified against him. Of
course, in present day America all of this becomes evidence of
how insidiously he “groomed” his “victims”.
It would be unthinkable to even contemplate that he actually
loved them and genuinely wanted the best for them.
Dr. Gajdusek was 85 and had long
had congestive heart failure. He died in Tromsø,
Norway, working and visiting colleagues. Ms. Runman (who was
previously married to one of his sons, John Runman) said Dr.
Gajdusek’s survivors included “his adopted sons
and daughters, including Yavine Borimaand Jesse
Mororui-Gajdusek in the United States, and two nephews, Karl
Lawrence Gajdusek and Mark Terry.”
We hope that someday soon the
world comes to recognize the great good Dr. Gajdusek did, not
just through research, but for 56 boys who had a much better
life because of him. They prove his heart was just as great as
his mind. Fare well, doctor.
1 From
Les
Prix Nobel
en 1976,
Editor Wilhelm Odelberg, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1977
Entire
document at:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1976/gajdusek-autobio.html
