SYMPOSIUM: KURU: 50 YEARS. Kuru: 50 years later
Paweł P. Liberski
Kuru is that unique field of scientific research, in which practically everything what has been achieved, had been achieved due to personal research endeavor of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (born in 1923), one of the greatest scientists of the XX century. In October 11-12th, John Collinge and Michael Alpers organized at the Royal Society, London, UK, a meeting “The end of kuru: 50 years of research into an extraordinary disease”. That meeting was attended by the last survivors of early kuru research, who pioneered their work in the fifties of the XX century to open a new field of “slow viruses of man”. The latter term has been introduced by Björn Sigurdsson, who developed Institute of Experimental Pathology, University of Iceland. The term “slow viruses” has been then replaced by the term “prions”. The kuru field has been already honoured by two Nobel prizes – to Dr. D.C. Gajdusek (1976 with Baruch Blumberg, born in 1925) and to Stanley B. Prusiner (1997, born in 1942) and contributed to the third – for Kurt Wüthrich (born in 1938) for “for his development of nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure of biological macromolecules in solution”. One of those molecules was prion protein in 1996.