Carleton Gajdusek is a unique personality and a most productive and imaginative scientist. He has made major contributions in two fields: the "slow" virus infections (including kuru, for which he was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine), and child growth and development and disease patterns in primitive societies. He has published over 750 scientific papers and chapters of books, and continues to be active in investigations of the strange diseases characterized by scrapie and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which appear to be caused by "infectious proteins". He has also made major contributions to knowledge of the hantaviruses (one of which causes Korean hemorrhagic fever). Gajdusek has had a long and close association with Australia, having worked at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute from 1955 to 1957, and visited Australia many times since then. He is well-known to microbiologists in every capital city of Australia, and will be Rubbo Lecturer of the Australian Society for Microbiology in July 1992. Several Australian scientists have worked in his laboratory, including Dr M. Alpers, Director of the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research.