Daniel Carleton Gajdusek - Early Years

Early Years

Gajdusek's father, Karol Gajdusek, was from Smrdáky Kingdom of Hungary now in Slovakia and was an ethnic Slovak who was a butcher. His maternal grandparents, ethnic Hungarians of the Calvinist faith, emigrated from Debrecen, Hungary. Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York, and graduated in 1943 from the University of Rochester, where he studied physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. He obtained an M.D. from Harvard University in 1946 and performed postdoctoral research at Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology, and Harvard. In the early 1950s, Gajdusek was drafted into the military as a research virologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In 1954 he went to work as a visiting investigator at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. There, he began the work that culminated in the Nobel prize.