Word: gajdusek
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What do these diseases of man and beast have in common? Probably, says Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek, a top researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Blindness, they are all caused by extraordinarily slow-acting viruses-none of which has yet been definitely seen, even with the electron microscope...
Short Tests. To formulate such a theory, admits Gajdusek, is to call into question much of the traditional thinking of virologists. Generations of researchers have been accustomed to thinking of viruses as microbes that behave somewhat predictably. Typically, as in the case of measles, German measles, chicken pox, the common cold and influenza-of the Hong Kong variety, or whatever-they seem to appear from nowhere, spend a few days, or at most two or three weeks, incubating in the victim's body, then cause a brief, feverish illness...
...That, Gajdusek says, may have been a mistake. Some of these delayed-fuse viruses may take years to exert their malign effects in small animals, and decades in long-lived Homo sapiens. Virologist Gajdusek, a human whirlwind who goes around the world half a dozen times a year, decided to become a model of patience. At the institute, he set up a long-range study program with a variety of animals, ranging from tree shrews to sheep and goats, a dozen species of monkeys, and a number of forbiddingly expensive chimpanzees...
...Parkinsonism. His patience paid off. From New Guinea, Gajdusek brought back parts of kuru victims' brains. He injected some of the material into chimpanzees, and waited-for two years. Then the chimps began to show the wobbly gait, slavering and eye-crossing that mark the human disease. When they died, their brains showed essentially the same type of damage as those of human kuru victims...
...result of a slow-acting virus, transmitted from one Fore to another by cannibalism. Women and children who ate the brains of tribesmen who died of kuru far outnumber men as kuru victims. Cannibalism was stamped out-or so the Australian government thinks -about twelve years ago. Gajdusek reports hopefully that there has not been a single case of kuru among children born in the past twelve years...