Nobel Scientist Pleads Guilty to Abusing Boy
A leading researcher at the National Institutes of Health who shared the Nobel Prize in 1976 for discoveries involving degenerative brain diseases pleaded guilty today to sexually abusing one of dozens of Micronesian boys he had brought to live with him in his Maryland home.
The scientist, Dr. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, will serve up to a year in prison under a plea agreement arranged by his lawyer, Mark Hulkower, and the prosecutor, Scott Rolle, in Frederick County Circuit Court in Maryland. Dr. Gajdusek had been scheduled to stand trial next week and could have faced 30 years in prison.
As part of the plea agreement, other Federal and state sexual abuse charges against him were dropped, and Dr. Gajdusek will be able to leave the United States to continue his research into virus-borne diseases after serving his sentence.
Dr. Gajdusek has been on leave from his job as chief of the Laboratory for Central Nervous System Studies at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Today, the institutes announced his immediate retirement.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation said the case had grown out of an investigation into child pornography on the Internet, where Federal agents found references to Dr. Gajdusek's published journals about research trips to New Guinea, Micronesia and other Polynesian islands. The journals, published and distributed by the N.I.H., contained descriptions of sex between men and boys, along with descriptions of Dr. Gajdusek's own sexual experiences with boys on the islands. The F.B.I. also received Congressional complaints about the journals.
Mr. Rolle, the prosecutor, presented evidence that the F.B.I. had persuaded a young man who figured in the charges against Dr. Gajdusek to phone the scientist while agents recorded the conversation. During their talk, Mr. Rolle said, Dr. Gajdusek admitted sexually abusing the boy. That investigation led the F.B.I. to other victims.
The youth whose conversation was monitored was younger than 17 when the offenses occurred, from 1989 to 1991. He is one of 56 Micronesian children, most of them boys, whom Dr. Gajdusek (pronounced GAD-ju-sheck) has brought to the United States since the 1960's. Many have apparently been educated at his expense.
Mr. Rolle said he had been willing to make the plea agreement in part because of Dr. Gajdusek's age.
''Here is a 74-year-old man who is not in very good health,'' Mr. Rolle said. ''My goal was to ask: How much of the rest of his life should he have to spend in jail for what I could prove? A jail term was important. He will spend a year in jail.''
Typically, a person who serves a prison sentence must remain in the area where the crime was committed for a probationary period. But that requirement was waived as part of Dr. Gajdusek's plea, which was one reason he agreed to plead guilty, his lawyer said.
A large number of Dr. Gajdusek's relatives, friends and research colleagues were in the courtroom when he entered his plea. Judge G. Edward Dwyer Jr. allowed him to remain free on $350,000 bail and set sentencing for late April.
Dr. Gajdusek has studied diseases in Micronesia, a group of islands in the western Pacific, for 40 years. Mr. Rolle said the children he had brought back with him had attended local schools. When Dr. Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize, he said he would use the $80,000 that came with it to send the children to college.
At the same time that he was making his scientific studies, Dr. Gajdusek kept journals of his trips to the South Pacific that contain passages documenting local sexual customs, especially sexual relations between boys and men.
He published thousands of pages from his journals over the years, thereby making them available to his colleagues. The Washington Post reported last year that ''his writings from New Guinea and other remote regions of the earth are filled with scenes of boys surrounding him'' and having intimate contact with him.
Dr. Gajdusek was raised in Yonkers and received a biophysics degree from the University of Rochester and a medical degree from Harvard University Medical School. He did research at the California Institute of Technology, the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington and, for the last 40 years, the National Institutes of Health.
While in New Guinea, Dr. Gajdusek investigated a disease called kuru that was killing people there. A slow-acting disease, kuru kills its victims by attacking their brain tissue. The disease is similar to mad cow disease, which appeared in several cattle herds in Britain last year.
Dr. Gajdusek traced the spread of kuru to the local custom of people eating the brains of the dead as a sign of respect. The disease is transmitted through infected tissue.