DOCTOR'S WORK IN EXOTIC LANDS LED TO NOBEL PRIZE, SUSPICIONS ABOUT RELATIONS WITH CHILDREN

Washington Post

Part 2 of 2: A LIFE OF RARE PURPOSE AND PASSION

DOCTOR'S WORK IN EXOTIC LANDS LED TO NOBEL PRIZE, SUSPICIONS ABOUT RELATIONS WITH CHILDREN

Author: Justin Gillis

Jackie Spinner; Washington Post Staff Writers

With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

-- Herman Melville, "Moby-Dick" First of two parts

When the people died, he sawed open their skulls by the flickering light of kerosene lanterns in a stick hut on the other side of the world. He needed the brains, still warm.

He trekked over mountains and through jungles. Elephant grass and stinging plants lashed his skin. Bees, flies and leeches gnawed at him. He bathed in rivers infested with crocodiles. He drew blood from people dressed in loincloths, wearing bones in their noses.

They kept dying, by the score.

It would start with the slightest tremor. Within months, the victim would be lying on the ground, incontinent and helpless, incapable of eating or walking. Mercifully, death came soon after.

The Fore, stone-age people living in the mountains of a remote, mystical island called New Guinea, named the ailment kuru, their word for shivering.

They believed kuru was caused by sorcerers. Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, M.D., suspected there was more to it than that.

He had come a long way to find them, a long way from the streets of Yonkers, N.Y., and the life of an immigrant butcher's kid. From the time he was a teenager, people could sense he needed something important enough to absorb his energy and his prodigious talents.

He found it in New Guinea, a challenge that would take him to the pinnacle of world science.

He found something else, too. He found an emotional life, one that would ultimately lead him to public humiliation and to jail.

"Pabi is the most interesting lad of the group, at the moment," he wrote in a journal long ago. "He is bright, probably about 13 or 14 years old, although he appears only 10 or 11 at first sight, thin, spry. . . . There is something strangely seductive about him."

In the thousands of pages of journals Gajdusek has published over the course of decades, the great leitmotif is the boys. His writings from New Guinea and other remote regions of the Earth are filled with scenes of boys surrounding him, sleeping next to him, grabbing his genitals, hugging him, holding on to him.

Gajdusek knows triumph. In 1976, he stood in that place of honor in Stockholm as the King of Sweden bestowed on him a Nobel, the greatest prize a scientist can earn.

He knew long ago that he had latched onto something big, but not even he could have foreseen how big. Decades after his initial discoveries, a mysterious new ailment swept out of the African rain forest to ravage the world. As scientists sought to understand the new disease, which they called AIDS, Gajdusek's earlier insights would prove of critical importance. Colleagues can hardly speak of him without appending the phrase "one of the great men of science of the 20th century."

A few weeks ago, at the age of 72, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek was dragged to the Frederick County, Md., jail in handcuffs, left overnight with the dope dealers and thieves. He is accused of sexually abusing a youth he brought home with him from Micronesia. Authorities say they have statements from a second victim. The FBI is questioning scores of other boys and men who lived in Gajdusek's household.

Over the years, he brought at least 36 youngsters from New Guinea and Micronesia to live with him in the Maryland communities of Cabin John, Chevy Chase, Frederick and Middletown. He played father figure to many more on the islands and in his home state of New York.

He won't comment in detail, but he has denied any sexual impropriety. Many colleagues defend him vigorously, saying they don't believe the charges. Unusual as he was -- an unmarried man raising a dozen children at a time, even as he spent months of the year away from home -- they saw him as a benevolent force in the lives of the youngsters.

Other people, it is clear in retrospect, always had questions. They didn't know quite what to make of Gajdusek, but they were struck by certain peculiarities.

Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, a great Australian scientist and a Nobel Prize winner himself, worked with Gajdusek for a time and described his "exasperated affection" for the man.

"My own summing up was that he had an intelligence quotient up in the 180s and the emotional immaturity of a 15-year-old," Macfarlane Burnet wrote in a letter to a colleague.

"He is completely self-centered, thick-skinned and inconsiderate, but equally won't let danger, physical difficulty, or other people's feelings interfere in the least with what he wants to do. He apparently has no interest in women but an almost obsessional interest in children, none whatever in clothes and cleanliness; and he can live cheerfully in a slum or a grass hut."

It will be for the investigative agencies and the courts to sort out the charges against Gajdusek. This much is certain: He has lived no ordinary life.

What follows -- from interviews with friends, colleagues and relatives scattered around the world, from the writings of fellow researchers, and from the thousands of pages he has published about himself over the years -- is his story.

A Child Of the World

Irene Vandewater studied insects.

In the 1920s, she took her little nephew, Carleton Gajdusek, around New York with her to prospect for new bugs. She would go overseas to pursue her research in entomology, and she would come home to tell the wide-eyed lad tales of adventure.

From the time before he could read, he grew up with the whole wide world in his field of vision. His father was a Slovakian farm boy who got out, came to America, married a woman who was herself the daughter of immigrants. They raised two sons in Yonkers, in a polyglot neighborhood of Eastern European immigrants. He grew up hearing the babble of foreign tongues.

Everybody knew that Carleton, the elder son, was an unusual child. He read voraciously. He played with slide rules. He explored, tinkered, asked questions. He prowled New York's fabled museums. He painted the names of great scientists and historical figures on the stairwell to the attic.

He got into trouble, he wrote later, for taking jars of bug-killing poison to school. He found scientists and teachers willing to humor him, give him lab space. Before he was 16, he was synthesizing new poisons himself. His boyhood notebooks later became the basis for a patent on a weedkiller.

It was not, for all that, an idyllic childhood. He wrote later of his difficult relationship with his father, Karl Gajdusek, a butcher. The father would come home late, and he and his wife would quarrel, terrifying young Carleton. "As a child Daddy was not my confidant, not even my friend," he wrote later. "I dreaded him, feared him -- even despised him."

Some of his writings are permeated with a sense of lost childhood, the feeling that he did not have the kind of adolescence other boys had.

Academically, he was a streaking meteor.

At his high school graduation, they called out the scholarship winners. "Gajdusek," the principal said. Polite applause. Next scholarship: "Gajdusek." More applause. "By the tenth one, the audience was on its feet for a standing ovation," said Gajdusek's brother, Robert. "People were going crazy."

Carleton received a biophysics degree from the University of Rochester, then finished Harvard Medical School in three years. He trained in pediatrics. But a garden-variety medical practice, it seems, could not hold his interest. In 1948, he went to the California Institute of Technology for additional training, there falling under the tutelage of a professor named Linus Pauling, later the winner of two Nobels.

Over the next few years, he did research stints in various places, including the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Washington. He began to travel the world, looking into viral diseases, fevers and plague in places such as Iran, Afghanistan and Turkey.

This scientific wanderlust took him to Australia in 1955 to work for Frank Macfarlane Burnet, director of a famed institute there.

"Sir Mac," as he was known, asked around about how to handle this odd and ambitious young man. Somebody in Washington told him that "the only way to handle him was to kick him in the tail, hard. Somebody else told me he was fine but there just wasn't anything human about him." Laughing Death'

North of Australia, near the equator, is the vast, mountainous island of New Guinea, twice the size of California. It is the second-largest island in the world, and was one of the last places to come under the influence of Western culture. Its interior highlands were inhabited, even in the 1950s, by tribes living in huts, hunting game and using stone tools.

New Guinea was within Australia's sphere of influence, and in the '50s, the Australian army was said to be suppressing cannibalism and warfare among the natives. Macfarlane Burnet's son, Ian, had been posted there as a government officer. At the end of Gajdusek's time at the Australian research institute, in March of 1957, he went to New Guinea to pay a call.

Heading into the interior, he met an Australian medical officer named Vincent Zigas, who told him the details of a strange new disease, kuru, that was killing the natives. Zigas introduced Gajdusek to some of the victims, women in the throes of serious brain degeneration. They could barely stand, and they were prone to break into odd fits of laughter.

Gajdusek was fascinated. "I was machine-gunned by his numerous questions," Zigas wrote later. "I had barely answered one when another would be asked."

He offered to take Gajdusek with him on a patrol where the visiting American could see dozens of cases. This proposition "was met with shining, eager eyes full of enthusiasm."

The next few months were a frenzy. An epidemic disease that turned parts of the brain into a spongy mess was something entirely new to Western medicine. Gajdusek saw the importance of the problem and jumped in with both feet.

Australian scientists, who had planned to investigate kuru at their own leisurely pace, invited him to butt out. Through a combination of bluster and politesse, he managed to stay. He shortly became the center of a whirlwind of kuru research.

He needed blood and tissue samples so that collaborators in Australia and the United States could help him figure out what was going on. Getting blood from the kuru victims was easy enough; recent experience led the natives to believe that Western doctors had magic more powerful than theirs. Gajdusek merely had to trek across the wild New Guinea highlands to draw the blood.

The samples of brain tissue were harder. They required dissecting bodies shortly after the victim died. That could mean an autopsy by lamplight on his kitchen table at night in a howling rainstorm.

Gajdusek drew around him a circle of helpers, including Zigas, who were carried along by his enthusiasm. In a matter of months, the first details of their research were ready for publication.

Readers who opened the Nov. 14, 1957, issue of the New England Journal of Medicine found a "special article," by D.C. Gajdusek and V. Zigas, reporting the existence of kuru in New Guinea.

Newspapers dubbed the ailment "laughing death." Time magazine came calling. In Washington, people began to hear of this strange researcher and his work in distant lands.

By itself, the New England Journal paper would have secured Gajdusek at least a footnote in history, because discovering a new illness in people is rare. But there followed a dramatic series of events that ultimately changed the way scientists look at human disease. Mad Sheep And English Cows

Once Gajdusek published, a researcher working in England named William Hadlow realized that kuru bore an awfully close resemblance to a strange ailment of sheep. The sheep slowly went mad, scraping themselves against fence posts until they were raw and bleeding. The disease was called scrapie.

Researchers were pretty sure that scrapie was caused by a virus, but their evidence suggested that the infection took a long time to make the sheep sick. Hadlow published a letter commenting on the similarity between the diseases.

Gajdusek immediately saw the implications. He set out trying to prove that kuru, too, was the product of a transmissible agent that caused disease only slowly. Following a suggestion from Hadlow, Gajdusek and his collaborators, including virologist Clarence J. Gibbs, injected liquefied brain from kuru patients into the brains of higher-order primates and waited patiently. In the mid-1960s, they succeeded in transmitting the disease to chimpanzees and to monkeys, an enormous breakthrough.parts of the dead, as a sign of respect.

Gajdusek by now had joined the staff of the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, and had become a fixture at major scientific meetings. He developed for human ailments an idea other researchers had been pursuing in the case of sheep: that a viral infection could take years or even decades to cause illness.

This was Gajdusek's real accomplishment. He popularized the idea of "slow viruses" in human disease. Now, such viruses are known to cause acquired immune deficiency syndrome and other ailments, and they are suspected in still more diseases, including multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's disease.

After Gajdusek's breakthroughs, the field of slow-virus research exploded. Scientists eventually realized that kuru and scrapie were nearly identical to other ailments, in mink, goats and cattle (the notorious "mad cows" of Britain). And they were quite similar to a rare human ailment of worldwide distribution called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Work on all those ailments has shed light on the biggest degenerative brain disease of all, Alzheimer's disease. While there is no evidence that Alzheimer's is infectious, the brain degeneration in Alzheimer's patients bears similarities to the decay seen in kuru or scrapie.

The Nobel committee, awarding Gajdusek its prize in physiology or medicine, said his studies "represent an extraordinarily fundamental advance in human neurology and in mammalian biology and microbiology." The Women

Her name was Francoise. She latched onto Gajdusek while he was in Paris for a scientific meeting in 1969. In his journal, he compared her to three other women he had known.

"Knowing that I cannot return their gifts of love nor that I will let myself be captivated by their generosity, I try to flee without being overly cruel," he wrote. "It is not easy and I am consciously uneasy since I know that unrequited and unaccepted love can lead to hate. Flight is the best pattern, and I am going to indulge in it."

He bade her goodbye at Orly Airport. He recorded the scene verbatim.

"I love you, Carleton," she said.

"I like you very much, too."

"It's not the same. You don't love me. You just like me."

Safely on the plane, he breathed a sigh of relief. "It is truly well that I have New Guinea to flee to," he wrote.

As his stature in the world grew, Gajdusek wrestled with a complex emotional life.

Outwardly, he showed few signs of interest in women or marriage. Nor did he seem to be gay, in the modern sense; colleagues never got the feeling he was interested in other men.

His brother said Gajdusek maintained a long-distance relationship for years with a woman in China, and dated other women as well, but never had time to fall deeply in love or settle down.

Most of his peers, if they thought about this apparent hole in his life, tended to see it as a simple matter.

"I know a lot of people who aren't married," said Pawel P. Liberski, a professor at the Medical Academy of Lodz, in Poland, who worked with Gajdusek and dedicated a book to him. "He was so involved in the lab and he traveled so much -- he's out of the country about 60 percent of the time -- it'd be difficult to have a marriage."

In Gajdusek's own writings, the matter is more mysterious. His journals record problems as mundane as a missing typewriter key, but nowhere does he explain why he fled from the women who wanted him.

What everybody noticed, over the years, was his extraordinary emotional attachment to children, particularly those he was meeting in the islands.

Sexual Habits

As he pursued his medical research, Gajdusek traveled around New Guinea, playing amateur student of culture. While kuru was concentrated among the Fore people, he needed to figure out exactly how far it extended, to which other groups.

Gajdusek was not an anthropologist, but he became fascinated by the cultural traits of some of the groups he visited. Catching his fancy in particular was a group then called by the pejorative name Kukukuku, now known as the Anga people.

In contrast to the Fore, who could be reserved in certain matters, Gajdusek found the Anga ebullient and open, particularly about sex. He was fascinated to discover their ritualized homosexuality, in which younger boys supposedly took on the traits of manhood through sexual contact with older males.

Such habits have been documented among traditional cultures in several places in the world, including parts of New Guinea, Melanesia and Australia.

Generally, in such cultures, it is believed that girls are born "complete" but that young boys must ingest semen to become strong and virile. Until they are of marrying age, the boys live separately from females, who are deemed to be an unclean and weakening influence. Younger boys are encouraged to fellate older boys and men as part of a symbolic coming-of-age process that moves them gradually toward heterosexual adulthood.

Gajdusek made it a point to research such matters in his travels, and his journals contain extensive commentary about sexual habits among native boys. Over the years, he pursued a research interest in child development, and his travels widened to include other parts of the world, including the Federated States of Micronesia, a far-flung island nation within striking distance of New Guinea.

In huts and other encampments, late at night, he would type out reports, notes, letters and journals. In a single journal entry, he would write about what he had seen that day, what kind of science he had accomplished, which new children he had encountered, what effect they had on him, what his emotional state was, what the local habits and customs were. He might throw in a quote from Nietzsche or from Herman Melville, an author Gajdusek so admired that he made pilgrimages to his grave.

In all the journals, it is impossible to miss the intensity of his feelings for boys. He hired them as guides and interpreters; he spent much of his free time with them; he was sometimes jealous of them, and they of him. He wrote that one lad "jealously keeps his eye on me, fearing that I may flirt with some of the local youths, and thus he repeatedly accompanies me about during the day through the village."

In the journals, his emotional and physical intimacy with the children of Papua New Guinea and other countries is explicit. "I slept well again, like a bitch with her half dozen pups lying and crawling over her, and I awoke to the dramatic skies of a Papuan morning," he wrote on Christmas day in 1969.

What is not explicit is whether he was having sex with them.

Was he simply a curious explorer, taking a friendly, paternal interest in the lads who came his way, putting up with their exuberant affections?

Or was Gajdusek a pedophile whose travels among exotic peoples allowed him to pursue his tastes with little fear of censure?

The evidence made public so far does not supply an answer. An Odd Household

It's not clear exactly when the idea of bringing a boy home from New Guinea first occurred to Gajdusek. By late 1963, an Anga youth named Ivan Mbaginta'o was living with him at his home in Cabin John.

A few more arrived in the mid-1960s, and eventually a dozen youngsters at a time were living there. Later, there were a few girls, too. He called the youngsters his family, and even listed their names on his resume. When a group of them would grow up and go away, he would bring in new ones.

Some of the youths were orphans, and in other cases, he brought children back with the consent of their parents, who wanted them to have the benefit of Western learning. Some of the children who lived with him early on later sent him their own children, or their nieces and nephews.

Much of Gajdusek's energy and most of his money went into educating the youngsters. Some attended college and went on to distinguished careers, either in the United States or back in their home countries.

Still, over the years, people asked questions about this odd household.

Neighbors called local agencies to say the youngsters were running wild while Gajdusek was out of town. Montgomery County police in the mid-1980s heard allegations of sexual abuse. They said they closed their investigation without filing charges because they could not find "current victims."

Gajdusek himself raised eyebrows over the years with certain comments.

"Few normal, well-brought-up, moral children in such Micronesian or Polynesian islands aren't knowledgeable in massaging adults into orgasm," he told Omni, a science magazine, in 1986. "A child who was unfamiliar with sexual practice by early puberty would be antisocial. These people believe sex is a part of normal life at all ages. That is what made so many sailors and beachcombers, including Herman Melville and the missionaries, stay so long on many Pacific islands."

The investigation that led to Gajdusek's arrest in Middletown on April 4 began only last year, when a group of people from NIH brought some of his journal entries to the attention of a U.S. Senate investigator. The FBI started tracking people down. Prosecutors say two victims have told them of sexual abuse by Gajdusek. He is out of jail on $350,000 bond while the investigation continues.

The prosecutors say they have Gajdusek on tape in a telephone conversation, admitting his pedophilia and confirming the names of some victims. The tape has not been played publicly, and some of Gajdusek's friends doubt he meant the words seriously.

They see him as a victim of America's obsession with child sexual abuse, and they insist the journals are simply a scientific record.

"The journals add nothing to the case," said Gajdusek's lawyer, Mark J. Hulkower. "They are anthropological and scientific reports of what Dr. Gajdusek observed in foreign cultures, and contain no evidence of any inappropriate behavior on his part."

The governor of Yap, one of the Micronesian states where Gajdusek is widely known, has taken a public stand in support of him, as have friends, colleagues and many of the people who grew up in his household.

Scott Rolle, the Frederick County state's attorney, who will prosecute Gajdusek, said he was not surprised there has been such an outpouring. Disbelief and denial are common reactions to charges of pedophilia, he said.

"Most pedophiles are not seedy men in trench coats or strange-looking people. They're very normal-looking," Rolle said. "Often they are in positions of prestige and authority. If it's a disease, it can afflict anybody: doctors, teachers, lawyers, even Nobel Prize laureates."

Cannibals And Critics

For more than 25 years now, Gajdusek has been one of the grand figures of science. He got his own laboratory, the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies, at NIH in 1970.

He still publishes research, speaks at scientific meetings and keeps up a punishing travel schedule. He belongs to the National Academy of Sciences, a who's who of American science. His name and face are recognized at conferences throughout the world. Younger scientists are making a lot of the breakthroughs in his field, but they seek his guidance. He has continued to bring in young wards from the islands.

In some ways, though, the years have been unkind.

Minor scientific controversies have taken a bit of the shine off Gajdusek's discoveries. For instance, his claim that kuru was transmitted by people eating their dead relatives has been subjected to close scrutiny by anthropologists.

When the text of his Nobel Prize lecture was published in Science magazine, Gajdusek included pictures of people seated around a feast, with a caption that implied they were eating a relative. When challenged later, he admitted they were actually eating roast pork.

He said he could not publish his cannibalism pictures because they were too offensive. He conceded that eating a body might not have been necessary to transmit kuru; merely handling it in the way New Guineans once did might have been enough.

Moreover, the virus whose existence Gajdusek posited many years ago as the cause of kuru, scrapie and related ailments has never been found, by him or anybody else. His conceptual leap, seeing the possible role of "slow viruses" in human disease, has stood the test of time, and several such diseases have been identified. But the disease agent in kuru itself has proved maddeningly elusive. There is some evidence that it might not be a virus at all, but an odd kind of protein. This and other problems have led a few critics to question the value of Gajdusek's research.

Such revisionism and second-guessing may be normal in the life of a high-profile scientist. Being arrested and hauled off to jail is another matter, a stark indignity.

"I was very much surprised when he was arrested, and the way he was treated," said Julius Axelrod, another Nobel Prize-winning scientist at NIH. "It was really shocking to see such a distinguished scientist be disgraced in this manner."

Gnawed and Pursued'

There is one more thing to know about Daniel Carleton Gajdusek.

He was too smart a man not to be aware of some of his own flaws and contradictions. In a lifetime as a compulsive diarist, he laid out many of them.

His journals carry passages of angst and recrimination, cries from the heart about the corrupting influence of fame, anguished passages about his loneliness, his moments of self-hatred, his lost childhood, his "strange relation" with children.

"It is snowing outside as I sit and wonder and contemplate and review my mad life," he wrote once in Stockholm. "When will it stop -- this rush? If only for a few days or weeks I can find quiet and leisure again in the New Guinea villages, without being gnawed and pursued by my drive and schemes!"

He realized he was caught between two worlds, decrying the phoniness and avarice he found in the United States while at the same time seeking achievement and adulation here. He romanticized life in the islands: birth and death, beauty and decay were right at the surface.

"To be part of this is rewarding," he wrote. "To escape it and come back to it in small but intense doses is like cheating, and I know that, on both sides of my life, I can be accused of fraud and unfair involvement. However, for all its rewards and disappointments, it is the course I have elected."

Tomorrow: Gajdusek's children

Staff writers D'Vera Cohn, Brian Mooar, Philip P. Pan, Fern Shen and Karl Vick contributed to this report, as did correspondents Christine Spolar, in Warsaw, and Kevin Sullivan, in Tokyo.

Caption:

Children surround Daniel Carleton Gajdusek in a 1957 photo taken in New Guinea, where Gajdusek did medical research that won him a Noble Prize. Gajdusek was charged early this month in Maryland with sexual abuse of a child.

Above, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, left, and Vincent Zigas, an Australian official, examine a kuru patient in the New Guinea highlands in 1957.

At right, Gajdusek appears with native people in a photo taken about 1967, probably in New Guinea. Driven by Curiosity: Gajdusek, shown at right giving a lecture in California, has traveled widely in remote parts of the world and over the years has brought dozens of youngsters from New Guinea and Micronesia to live with him in this country.

Gajdusek, center rear, and some of the foreign students he sponsored at breakfast in his home in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1976.

Gajdusek, in an undated photo, with youths at the New York grave of Herman Melville, an author Gajdusek admired.

Gajdusek is swarmed by reporters after being accused of sexually abusing one of many youths who have lived with him.

Above, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek is shown at home with seven of his adopted sons after winning the Nobel Prize in 1976.

PHOTO courtesy of constantine sakles

PHOTO file/frederick post news

PHOTO file/ap

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MAP dave cook