Word: gajdusek
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...Body, One Ax. Last March, a peripatetic U.S. virologist and pediatrician (with a grant from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis) appeared in New Guinea. Crew-cut Dr. Carleton Gajdusek, 35, of Yonkers, N.Y., heard about kuru and plunged into its problems. Tramping through rain-soaked forests to Fore hamlets, he rounded up patients for the neat, bamboo-walled native hospital at nearby Okapa Patrol Post. To do autopsies, he had to haggle with victims' relatives for the bodies. The currency: axes and tobacco. (Dr. Gajdusek got some bodies at the bargain price of only...
...Okapa, Drs. Gajdusek and Zigas ran the risk of getting kuru themselves (if it should prove infectious); lacking surgical gloves, they did autopsies barehanded. They performed them on a dining-room table in the patrol officer's quarters, often eating a meal at one end while discussing the kuru-damaged brains lying at the other. They shipped specimens to Melbourne and to the U.S. National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Md. From 154 patients and their kin, they got a detailed picture of kuru's course, though no clue to its cause...