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Gajdusek's best-known work focused on kuru. This disease was rampant among the South Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s. Gajdusek connected the spread of the disease to the practice of funerary cannibalism by the South Fore. With elimination of cannibalism, kuru disappeared among the South Fore within a generation.
Gajdusek was introduced to the problem of kuru by Vincent Zigas, a district medical officer in the Fore Tribe region of New Guinea. Gajdusek provided the first medical description of this unique neurological disorder, which was miscast in the popular press as the "laughing sickness" because some patients displayed risus sardonicus as a symptom. He lived among the Fore, studied their language and culture, and performed autopsies on kuru victims.
Gajdusek concluded that kuru was transmitted by the ritualistic consumption of the brains of deceased relatives, which was practiced by the Fore. He then proved this hypothesis by successfully transmitting the disease to primates and demonstrating that it had an unusually long incubation period of several years.[9] He did this by drilling holes into chimps' heads and placing pureed brain matter into the cerebellum.[10][11] These animals then developed symptoms of kuru. This was the first demonstration of the infectious spread of a noninflammatory degenerative disease in humans.
Kuru was shown to have remarkable similarity to scrapie, a disease of sheep and goats caused by an unconventional infectious agent. Subsequently, additional human agents belonging to the same group were discovered. They include sporadic, familial, and variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Gajdusek recognized that diseases like Kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease were caused by a new infectious agent that had not yet been identified.[2] Further research on the scrapie agent by Stanley Prusiner and others led to the identification of endogenous proteins called prions as the cause of these diseases.
Gajdusek was introduced to the problem of kuru by Vincent Zigas, a district medical officer in the Fore Tribe region of New Guinea. Gajdusek provided the first medical description of this unique neurological disorder, which was miscast in the popular press as the "laughing sickness" because some patients displayed risus sardonicus as a symptom. He lived among the Fore, studied their language and culture, and performed autopsies on kuru victims.
Gajdusek concluded that kuru was transmitted by the ritualistic consumption of the brains of deceased relatives, which was practiced by the Fore. He then proved this hypothesis by successfully transmitting the disease to primates and demonstrating that it had an unusually long incubation period of several years.[9] He did this by drilling holes into chimps' heads and placing pureed brain matter into the cerebellum.[10][11] These animals then developed symptoms of kuru. This was the first demonstration of the infectious spread of a noninflammatory degenerative disease in humans.
Kuru was shown to have remarkable similarity to scrapie, a disease of sheep and goats caused by an unconventional infectious agent. Subsequently, additional human agents belonging to the same group were discovered. They include sporadic, familial, and variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease. Gajdusek recognized that diseases like Kuru and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease were caused by a new infectious agent that had not yet been identified.[2] Further research on the scrapie agent by Stanley Prusiner and others led to the identification of endogenous proteins called prions as the cause of these diseases.
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mag(2013)
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Molecules: Nucleation, Aggregation and Crystallizationpp.1-9, (2009)
Ana Gligić,Mirčeta Obradović,Radivoje Stojanović, Danica Hlača, Bočidar Antonijević, Atif Arnautović, Jakov Gaon, Marina Frušlč,Pyungwoo Lee,Dmitry Goldgaber,Richard Yanagihara,Clarence J. Gibbs,
K. Hamid El Hachimi,Larisa Cervenákova,Paul Browne,Lev Goldfarb,Richard Rubenstein,D. Carleton Gajdusek, Jean-Franis Foncin
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