Sex Abuse Case Casts Pall on Nobel Scientist

Sex Abuse Case Casts Pall on Nobel Scientist

February 23, 1997|TERENCE MONMANEY | TIMES STAFF WRITER

His rise to the top of the scientific world is one of this century's great adventures of the mind. It was an odyssey of physical and intellectual daring that found him autopsying brains of reputed cannibals by lantern light in the wilds of New Guinea and accepting a Nobel Prize from the king of Sweden.

His fall from grace seems no less dramatic. Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, 73, an authority on exotic brain diseases and obscure cultures who ran his own federal laboratory at the National Institutes of Health, pleaded guilty in a Maryland court last week to two counts of sexually abusing an adopted son between 1989 and 1991, beginning when the boy was 14. Gadjusek's retirement from the institute, which reportedly paid him $123,000 annually, was effective immediately.

The accuser, now in his 20s, was one of more than 50 youngsters that Gajdusek reared in his suburban Washington, D.C., households over three decades. The children hailed from New Guinea and the Pacific islands of Micronesia, places he visited on the far-flung scientific quests for which he is renowned.

Formal sentencing in the plea bargain agreement is scheduled for April, which will mark a year since the white-haired, bespectacled researcher was arrested at gunpoint at his house in Middletown, Md. The arrest capped a six-month FBI investigation and sting operation that was set in motion, sources say, by current or former colleagues.

State's attorney Scott Rolle, who prosecuted the case, said that Gajdusek is expected to serve nine months to a year in the Frederick County Detention Center. Then there will be five years of probation, though he will be free to leave the country--a key provision of the bargain. Also, other charges and investigations are being dropped.

"It was very important to me that he go to jail because I wanted to send a message to him," Rolle said. "I still believe he doesn't think he did anything wrong."

The plea ends one of the most unusual chapters in American science. The globe-trotting Nobelist spent much of last year holed up in a colleague's suburban Maryland house, trying to work on one hand and contemplating suicide on the other, says his brother, Robert Gajdusek, a literary scholar in Corta Madeira, Calif. The outpouring of support during that time was massive: Hundreds of scientists, dignitaries and friends worldwide offered to vouch for his character and donated money to his legal defense.

"Gajdusek is the most remarkable individual that I have ever had the privilege of knowing," Harvard University cognitive scientist Howard Gardner wrote last year in a letter of support. Gardner, who has closely studied the man and his oceanic body of writings for a book on the nature of genius, added that the charges "made no sense" given Gajdusek's "concern and love for his many children."

On the Internet, conspiracy theories flourished on electronic bulletin boards, such as the one called "getdoc." As one posting had it, the scientist was being destroyed by a dark alliance involving the beef industry, which was said to be eager to discredit his pioneering work on "mad cow disease."

While such thinking may confirm the Net's reputation for unruliness and paranoia, it also suggests the deep reluctance to believe the charges leveled at Gajdusek, who "has done more for public health in this century than anyone alive," as a co-worker put it.

Monumental as his reputation is in scientific circles, the public knew little of it until his 1996 arrest, which was witnessed by a Baltimore TV news crew tipped off to the event. Still, the made-for-tabloid scandal probably would have received heavier coverage if it had not surfaced just two days after the FBI captured Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski, a Harvard-trained mathematician. That week represented something of a low point for American intellectuals, one columnist said.

*

It is often unwise, historians warn, to try to link scientists' achievements directly to their private lives or temperaments, science being the least personal of pursuits. After all, the truth of physicist Albert Einstein's equation E=mc2 still holds whether or not he was cruel to his wives, as a new biography maintains.

But if there is a connection between Gajdusek the man and Gajdusek the scientist, it is his notable indifference to, at times brazen flouting of, conventional opinion and authority, say his friends and detractors alike.

"He's likely to want to say the most shocking thing," said lifelong friend Clark Rodewald, a literature professor at Bard College in New York. "The more bizarre the intellectual position, the more he enjoys defending it."

Dwayne Reed, a former collaborator now at the Buck Center for Research on Aging in San Francisco, concurs: "Part of [Gajdusek's] creativity is that at one level he's a genius, and in another way an intellectual outlaw. He's always been a person who preferred not to live by society's standards. . . . He's not bound by any scientific discipline, in some ways to his great merit."

Those seeking evidence of his unorthodoxy had to look no further than his domestic arrangement. It was not uncommon for Gajdusek to live with as many as a dozen adopted children at a time, and he made no secret of the situation.

Gajdusek's 1992 curriculum vitae lists "54 adopted New Guinean and Micronesian children (36 educated in the U.S., 18 in Papua New Guinea)." And when he accepted the Nobel Prize, he took eight adopted sons with him to Stockholm. Whether he actually adopted the children or simply referred to them as such is not clear, but authorities have not challenged the legality of the adoptions.

The teeming Gajdusek household, where scholars and dignitaries dropped in for rarefied talks, has amazed and puzzled Gajdusek's friends and colleagues for years.

Some social scientists have criticized Gajdusek for, in effect, conducting an anthropology experiment on unwitting subjects. A number of the children were from tribes barely advanced from the Stone Age, and critics say it was cruel to transplant them into a hurly-burly American lifestyle that alienates even full-fledged members of the Modern Age.

Gajdusek has defended the practice of transplanting people from prehistoric cultures into developed societies. He said the future leaders of such undeveloped communities should learn about modern life firsthand--the better to resist the steamroller of Western Civilization when they return home.

Meanwhile, colleagues and former adoptees in many nations have praised him for extraordinary generosity, pointing out that he provided first-rate educations to children from poor, isolated communities. "He's a . . . Mother Teresa," one neurologist friend said.

Moreover, supporters point out that parents who sent their children off with Gajdusek did so voluntarily and often with great pride. Indeed, many of Gajdusek's adopted children went on to name their children after him.

"He gave us the opportunities of our lives," said Jesse Raglmar-Subolmar, whom Gajdusek met in 1965 on the Pacific island of Fais, when the boy was 14. Among the first of Gajdusek's adoptees, he graduated from Hamilton College in New York and is now a director of planning and budget for the Micronesian island of Yap. Gajdusek, he said, was "a trusting guardian and father to me, and he has never abused me or made me feel anything other than that of a son."

Ultimately, it was the uncommon candor evident in Gajdusek's privately published diaries that led to his prosecution on sex abuse charges.

After receiving his medical degree at Harvard in 1946, Gajdusek specialized in pediatrics and viral diseases at various medical centers, eventually landing a fellowship in Melbourne, Australia, under Nobel laureate Sir McFarlane Burnet in 1955.

Soon he was traveling in the highlands of New Guinea, investigating a bizarre brain disease among the Fore people. They used spears and digging sticks, and Gajdusek eventually delved far enough into their Stone Age culture to learn that the fatal disease, called kuru, was caused by a unique infectious agent spread during handling of, and perhaps eating certain parts of, infected corpses.

The kuru research, done with numerous collaborators, won Gajdusek a share of the 1976 Nobel Prize for medicine. There is still controversy over the exact chemical nature of the kuru agent and how it works, but when discovered, it represented a new class of infectious particle, smaller than a virus and in many ways dissimilar. (It doesn't provoke inflammation, for instance.)

It has been called an "unconventional" or "slow" virus by some researchers, a "prion" by others. Mad cow disease and its human equivalent, the rare organic dementia known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, are considered to be caused by the infectious agent.

During the mid-1950s, he began writing a privately published diary of his medical research and travels. According to prosecutor Rolle, the Gajdusek investigation was spurred when colleagues of Gajdusek gave the journals to U.S. Senate staff, calling the staffers' attention to numerous passages in which Gajdusek noted homosexual rituals between men and children in certain New Guinea tribes.

The journals run to thousands of pages, covering an astonishing range of human witness and experience. And while Gajdusek is said to be compiling them still, the privately published versions he sent to colleagues stop at 1976. They constitute "an immensely valuable contribution to the history of science, as unique and as important as the justly famous 18th century journals of Samuel Pepys are to the social history of England," said historian and author Richard Rhodes. "I know of no other comparable record of the daily life of a scientist."

Added Robert Gajdusek: "He regards those journals as the scientific gift he is giving to the future."

In an entry from November 1969, he describes a New Guinea tribe known as the Biami. "The boys are interested in semen and on being friendly, holding hands with them or sitting intimately beside them they reach for one's genitals, as do the Anga boys at low stages of contact. They are trained to masturbate and fellate the adult males and probably, like the Etoro and Waragu, as I know is in the case in the Anga, they believe that eating of semen or rubbing it into their skin is important to the growth and maturation of the boys."

Later he says of the Biami: "Whenever I respond to the overtures of one of the young boys by letting them cling to me, my hugging them or walking with them hand in hand, their adult relatives, often their fathers, knowingly smile and without ambiguity indicate that I should let the boys play sexually with me."

A scathing interpretation of the journals published last October in the Weekly Standard, a conservative Washington magazine, concluded that Gajdusek "was a homosexual pedophile." His wide travels, author Claudia Winkler said, "allowed him to evade the social barriers to gratifying his forbidden taste. . . . The hope of proving that love such as his is, in fact, not harmful to those whom society calls its victims but actually beneficial, was a central motivation of his work."

Supporters read Gajdusek's observations on homosexual ritual behavior as pure anthropology, and any salacious interpretation as evidence of the reader's puritanical, anti-scientific leanings. "Extracts from a lifetime of published journals, available for decades in major libraries throughout the world, taken out of context and paraded on the front page . . . does an injustice to us all," said lifelong Gajdusek friend Peter Fetchko, a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts.

Whatever the journals do or don't say about Gajdusek's private life, they gave impetus to the criminal investigation, which eventually involved not only the FBI but Health and Human Services inspectors and local Maryland law enforcement.

In March 1995, according to an FBI affidavit, Gajdusek had a phone conversation that agents secretly taped. "In that conversation, Gadjusek admitted to sexually abusing [the accuser] and apologized. . . . Gajdusek pleaded with [the accuser] not to report the sexual abuse to anyone" and "to lie to the authorities if questioned about the sexual abuse," the affidavit said.

The accuser, now a college student, told the Washington Post last year that he probably would "never have said anything if the FBI [had] never asked." He said: "I think I love Carleton, and I really respect him a lot, and I'm thankful for what he's done for me, but I don't agree with the things he did."

A colleague said that Gajdusek knew he was under investigation months before his arrest. When he was seized by a dozen law enforcement officials, some with guns drawn, friends and co-workers were outraged that the distinguished, ailing senior citizen would be subjected to "Gestapo tactics," as one scientist said.

But Rolle, who was there, said concessions were made. Gajdusek was allowed to fetch his medicines, he said, and his wrists were cuffed in front of him, as a courtesy, rather than behind him, which is far more uncomfortable.

"It can get a lot rougher," the prosecutor said.

Gajdusek's defense attorney, Mark Hulkhower of the Washington firm of Steptoe & Johnson, said of the likely jail sentence: "We believe it's an appropriate disposition which will allow him to move anywhere in the world after it's over so he can continue the research and studies to which he has devoted his life."