D. Carleton Gajdusek

09/0–12/1

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 b

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