Carleton Gajdusek was only five years old in 1928 when he and his entomologist aunt wandered through the woods overturning rocks, looking for insects. Then, they observed in petri dishes how some insects succumbed to insecticides while others were unaffected. That’s all it took for Carleton to be bitten by the science bug.

As a boy, he read voraciously and was so taken by Paul de Kruif’s 1926 Microbe Hunters that he stencilled the names of the scientists in the book on the steps leading to the chemistry lab he had set up in the family’s attic. Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Élie Metchnikoff and Paul Ehrlich got steps, but the last step was left blank for himself. Like his heroes, Carleton was going to become a microbe hunter and earn his own step. He did that in 1976, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of a novel type of infectious agent that was causing a terrible ailment among the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea.

Known as “kuru” in the language of the Fore, meaning “shaking,” the disease starts with tremors and progresses to total incapacitation and then death within months. Gajdusek, who had obtained a medical degree from Harvard and further trained under Nobel laureates Linus Pauling, John Enders and Frank Macfarlane Burnet, believed that kuru was transmitted by a ritualistic practice followed by the Fore. As a form of respect and mourning, family members consumed the brains of deceased relatives.

Gajdusek proved that this was the mode of transmission by drilling holes in the skull of chimps and inserting mashed tissue from the brains of kuru victims into their cerebellum, the part of the brain that coordinates voluntary movement. The chimps developed symptoms of kuru. Gajdusek was unable to isolate an........

© Montreal Gazette