— A weekly roundup of healthcare investigations
by Shannon Firth, Enterprise & Investigative Writer, MedPage Today
August 19, 2026
• 3 min read
The New Yorker examined the sexual abuse of a famed NIH researcher who for decades brought dozens of young boys back to the U.S. from the Pacific islands. D. Carleton Gajdusek, MD, won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his work on kuru, a rare and fatal neurodegenerative prion disease in Papua New Guinea, and kept journals at the NIH that detailed his sexual interactions with children. Colleagues mostly looked the other way, according to the report. "I realized I'm in the middle of a pedophile operation that has been run out of the NIH by a Nobel laureate for 30 years," said Mark Godec, MD, a fellow at Gajdusek's lab at the time. Godec brought the concerns to a senator, and in 1997 Gajdusek pleaded guilty to two counts of sexual abuse following an FBI investigation. The NIH didn't fire him, instead allowing him to resign. The Nobel Prize winner served a year in jail, where he continued to publish papers.
