Virus Hunters

Stockholm's Royal Caroline Institute last week honored two leading U.S. virologists, Drs. Baruch S. Blumberg and D. Carleton Gajdusek, by jointly awarding them the 1976 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine (total value: $162,140).

Blumberg, 51, of Philadelphia's Institute for Cancer Research, identified a blood-carried viral particle, "Australia antigen," associated with a debilitating liver disease, hepatitis B. His biomedical detective work, involving an aborigine's blood, not only led to a method of testing potential blood donors for hepatitis but also paved the way for an experimental antihepatitis vaccine.

Gajdusek, 53, of the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda, Md., found the cause of a puzzling fatal degenerative brain disease called kuru, which long plagued the Fore tribe of New Guinea. The agent responsible: a previously unknown kind of cell invader, dubbed a "slow virus"--in this case, transmitted, during cannibalistic rites. Such viruses incubate in the body for years, may be linked to other severe diseases of the nervous system, such as Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease), and perhaps play a role in aging.

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