Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a Nobel laureate and a leading researcher at the National Institutes of Health, has been charged with abusing one of the dozens of children he brought home from his research trips to the South Pacific and and whose education he paid for in the United States.
Dr. Gajdusek, who was charged on Thursday, denied the accusations of child abuse and perverted sex practices. His bail was reduced to $350,000, from $1 million, today at a hearing in Frederick, Md., about 45 miles west of Baltimore.
As a pediatrician and researcher, he studied the development and health of 56 such children over 20 years. When he accepted the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine with eight boys in tow, he promised to use the $80,000 prize money to send them to college. He shared the award with Baruch S. Blumberg, also of the United States.
Dr. Gajdusek, 72, has been accused of molesting a teen-ager he brought home from Micronesia in 1987. And investigators are now taking a closer look at all the children he has brought to the United States in the last two decades.
"There are a lot of people who we want to talk to," said a State's Attorney, Scott Rolle.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said its investigation of Dr. Gajdusek grew out of an inquiry into of child pornography on the Internet. Agents would not say how the two were related.
Dr. Gajdusek was charged after the young man, now 23, agreed to cooperate with investigators. Court papers say that in a phone call last month, the young man asked Dr. Gajdusek whether he knew what a pedophile was. "I am one," Dr. Gajdusek responded, according to the papers, before he pleaded with the young man not to report him.
Dr. Gajdusek did research in New Guinea and Micronesia. The authorities said he had befriended the children and their families by promising to pay for their education if they returned to the United States with him.
Although Dr. Gajdusek has long said he had adopted the children who lived with him, the authorities have not found any traces of legal adoptions. The Immigration and Naturalization Service said the children, who neighbors say attended local public schools, might have entered the United States legally as students.
Dr. Gajdusek, a graduate of the Harvard Medical School, is the chief of the Laboratory for Central Nervous System Studies at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md.
He was awarded the Nobel for his research into neurological viruses, including kuru, a disorder that plagued islanders in New Guinea for years. Dr. Gajdusek contended that it was transmitted through ritual cannibalism.
He also was part of a team that discovered that Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease could be transmitted from humans to animals. Creutzfeldt-Jakob is the human form of the neurological disease at the center of the mad cow scare in England.
This is not the first time Dr. Gajdusek has been investigated over accusations of child abuse. The authorities dropped an investigation in 1989 after those described as victims would not cooperate.
At the time of his arrest, the authorities said, four people were living with Dr. Gajdusek. A teen-age girl was the only minor. She is now in the custody of social services officials.
"There were children there all the time," said Susan Lindstrom, a neighbor. "We thought they were foreign exchange students."