D. Carleton Gajdusek

My scientific interests started before my school years, when as a boy of five years I wandered through gardens, fields and woods with my mother's entomologist-sister, Tante Irene, as we overturned rocks and sought to find how many different plant and animal species of previously hidden life lay before us. We cut open galls to find the insects responsible for the tumors, and collected strange hardening gummy masses on twigs which hatched indoors to fill the curtains with tiny praying mantises, and discovered wasps with long ovipositors laying their eggs into the larvae of wood-boring beetles. In petri dishes we watched some leaf-eating insects succumb to insecticide poison while others survived, and on exciting excursions visited the laboratories and experimental greenhouses of the Boyce Thompson Institute for Plant Research in my hometown of Yonkers, New York, where my aunt, Irene Dobroscky, worked, studying in the 1920's virus inclusions in the cells of leaf-hoppers. In my first years at school I had problems with my teachers for carrying to school insect-killing jars, correctly labeled "Poison: potassium cyanide". As a grade schoolboy, I met at the Boyce Thompson Institute laboratories the quiet, amused, watchful and guiding eyes of the mathematician and physical chemist, Dr. William J. Youden, who enjoyed letting me play with his hand cranked desk calculator, with his circular or cylindrical slide rules, and with models of crystal lattice structure, and on his laboratory bench where he taught me to prepare colloidal gold solution time color reactions and to manufacture mercuric thiocyanate snake-generating tablets. Before I was ten years old I knew that I wanted to be a scientist like my aunt and my quiet mathematician tutor. I rejected completely, as did my younger brother, Robert, who is now a poet and critic, the interests of our father and maternal grandfather in business, which had made our life style possible. My life and outlook were greatly influenced by the polyglot immigrant Eastern European communities, adjacent and unwillingly interlaced, living in the carpet, elevator and copper wire manufacturing and sugar refining city of Yonkers, just upstream on the Hudson River from the New York megalopolis and possessing a schoolbook history of a Seventeenth Century Royal Dutch land grant of Indian land to Johng Heer (hence Yonkers) Adrian van der Donck. The cimbalon in our living room, beside the piano, Romanian and Hungarian gypsies who fiddled the czardas and halgatos at our family festivities and camped in the empty store adjacent to my father's butcher shop, an uninterrupted flow of loud conversation in many tongues, rarely English, and kitchen odors of many Habsburg cuisines filling our crowded expanded-family-filled home, gave me an orthodox and optimistic view of America as a land of change and possibility which I never lost. Below our almost rural hilltop home - our family had "risen" - clustered the factories, churches, shops and two to four family houses of immigrant factory workers and tradesmen in the valleys of the almost obliterated Nepperhan and Tuckahoe Indian-named creeks. In this hollow stood Hungarian, Slovak and Polish Catholic and Russian Orthodox churches and a Presbyterian mission to the factory workers. (This exciting conglomeration of Eastern Europeans has been later displaced by Mediterranean and Caribbean and, still later, Black Americans, all similarly "melting". ) My father, Karl Gajdusek, was a Slovak farm boy from a small village near Senica, who had left home as an adolescent youth to emigrate to America before World War I, alone and without speaking English, to become a butcher in the immigrant communities of Yonkers, where he met and married my mother, Ottilia Dobroczki. Her parents had also come, each alone, as youthful immigrants from Debrecen, Hungary to America. On my father's side we were a family of farmers and tradesmen, vocations which never interested my brother or myse