Become a digitalPLUS subscriber. $13 for 13 weeks.  D. Carleton
Gajdusek dies at 85; Nobel Prize winner identified exotic
disease, was unrepentant pedophile  Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek,
the brilliant yet deeply flawed pediatrician, virologist and
anthropologist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his
identification and description of kuru, the exotic disease of a
remote tribe in New Guinea that was caused by a family of
mysterious agents called prions, died Dec. 12 at the hotel where
he lived in Tromso, Norway. He was 85.  No cause of death has
been released, but he had suffered for years from congestive
heart failure, according to his biographer and former student,
Dr. Robert Klitzman of Columbia University.  An energetic and
intellectual researcher, Gajdusek often said he was more proud
of his anthropological studies among the Fore and Anga people of
Micronesia than he was of the research that brought him the
ultimate prize.  But blinded by his hubris and self-admitted
pedophilia, he spent the last d