SIGNED. Journal of a Medical and Population Genetic Survey Expedition of the Research Vessel Alpha Helix to the Banks and Torres Islands of the New Hebrides, Southern Islands of the British Solomon Islands Protectorate and Pingelap Atoll, Eastern Caroline Islands, September 8, 1972 to November 26, 1972

Bethesda, MD: National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders and Stroke, 1985. Revised edition.

ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL OF MEDICAL EXPEDITION TO PACIFIC ISLANDS BY NOBELIST CARLETON GAJDUSEK WITH TLS/ALS TO JAMES WYNGAARDEN, NIH DIRECTOR.

11 1/2 inches tall hardcover, green buckram binding, gilt title to cover and spine, inscribed and signed on front free endpaper, "To Jim Wyngaarden/ In homage to your wise direction of/ our complex Institutes, in gratitude for/ your support and encouragement, in/ awe and admiration of your prodigious/ scientific accomplishments and in/ lasting friendship./ Carleton Gajdusek/ December 1985." Map of the Coral Sea, i-ix, 50 full page black & white photographic plates, 378 typescript pages. Near fine. LAID IN, typed letter dated Dec. 31, 1985 on Department of Health & Human Services stationary, "Dear Jim, Here are a few further juornals which I think you are missing. According to my records, your set should now be complete. If you are missing any of those on the list which are not preceded by an asterisk, please let me know./ Sincerely, D. Carleton Gajdusek, M.D." with autograph message signed a second time, "I am back from another 2 months in Papua New Guinea & West New Guinea. The fuel for all we accomplish has always derived from these field expeditions. I am deeply indebted to a wisdom that has prevailed in the offices of my administrative directors & your office over the years that has understood this and made my work possible for a quarter of a century. We must get together at leisure once again--Greetings from Lim Chang Keat in Penang (& Singapore), Happy New Year/ Carleton." Also laid in, stapled typed list titled, Journals of D. Carleton Gajdusek, October 1985.

DANIEL CARLETON GAJDUSEK (1923 –2008) was an American physician and medical researcher who was the co-recipient (with Baruch S. Blumberg) of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1976 for work on the transmissibility of kuru, implying the existence of an infectious agent, which he named an 'unconventional virus'. 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 1951, Gajdusek was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned as a research virologist at the Walter Reed Army Medical Service Graduate School. From 1970 to 1996, Gajdusek was the chief of the Laboratory of Central Nervous System Studies at NINDS at the National Institutes of Health. Gajdusek's best-known work focused on kuru. This disease was rampant among the South Fore people of New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s. Gajdusek connected the spread of the disease to the practice of funerary cannibalism by the South Fore. With elimination of cannibalism, kuru disappeared among the South Fore within a generation. Gajdusek provided the first medical description of this unique neurological disorder. He lived among the Fore, studied their language and culture, and performed autopsies on kuru victims. Gajdusek concluded that kuru was transmitted by the ritualistic consumption of the brains of deceased relatives, which was practiced by the Fore. He then proved this hypothesis by successfully transmitting the disease to primates and demonstrating that it had an unusually long incubation period of several years.

PROVENANCE: JAMES BARNES WYNGAARDEN (1924 – 2019) was an American physician, researcher and academic administrator. He was a co-editor of Cecil Textbook of Medicine, one of the leading internal medicine texts, and served as director of National Institutes of Health between 1982 and 1989. He became the 12th director on April 30, 1982, appointed by President Ronald Reagan. Immediately prior to his appointment, he was professor and chairman of the department of medicine at Duke University School of Medicine, a position he had held since 1967. He has also served as advisor to the broader scientific community as a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1974, and was active from 1975 to 1982 on an NAS committee set up to study the Nation's overall need for biomedical and behavioral researchers; consultant for the President's Office of Science and Technology (1966-1972), a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee (1972-1973), and a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine.