Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, American physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2008)
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek ( GHY-də-shek; September 9, 1923 – December 12, 2008) was an American physician, medical researcher, and convicted sex offender who was the co-recipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on an infectious agent which would later be identified as the cause of kuru, the first known human prion disease.In 1996, Gajdusek was charged with child molestation and, after being convicted, spent 12 months in prison before entering a self-imposed exile in Europe, where he died a decade later. His papers are held at the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. and at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.