Si tratta indubbiamente di un caso di "retro" Nobel. Tutta la storia dei retro-virus è un attentato al buonsenso.

NIH Scientist, a Nobel Laureate, Pleads Guilty to Child Abuse.A Nobel-laureate scientist at the National Institutes of Health, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, pleaded guilty in a Maryland state court Tuesday to two counts of child abuse for molesting a 15-year-old boy he had brought back from a research trip to the South Pacific. Dr. Gajdusek, who has been on administrative leave from the N.I.H. since he was arrested in April, will serve up to one year in jail under the plea agreement. He will begin serving the sentence April 29 and will be eligible for parole in nine months. The sentence will be followed by five years'probation. The N.I.H. on Tuesday announced Dr. Gajdusek's immediate retirement. The Federal Bureau of Investigation apparently began scrutinizing Dr.Gajdusek, 73, when some of his colleagues told law-enforcement officials about his field notes from research expeditions to New Guinea and other South Pacific islands. In some of those journals, Dr. Gajdusek described sleeping with boys and sexual relations between men and boys. He also wrote that children should be sexual. "I would, at this moment, have every youth sleep with his sister, get seduced by his older brother and male teacher, practice with his male and female cousins, aunts, uncles and teachers and maid--anything!--only to know sex as fun and frivolity," he wrote. An affidavit filed in state court by the F.B.I. said that during taped telephone conversations with one of his accusers, now 24, Dr. Gajdusek had admitted to being a pedophile. He was originally charged with two counts each of child abuse and "perverted sexual practice" for having performed oral sex on the boy. If he had stood trial and was convicted, he could have faced 30 years in prison. Dr. Gajdusek, who shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with another researcher for their discovery of a slow-acting virus that causes a neurological disease, has brought 56 children, most of them boys, from Micronesia to live in the United States. He has said that he did so to educate them, and he has legally adopted many of them. Several fellow scientists and some of his adopted children attended the court hearing to show support for Dr. Gajdusek, according to the Associated Press. Investigators identified four victims who said they had been molested by Dr. Gajdusek. All but one have returned to their South Pacific homes. Dr. Gajdusek could not be reached for comment. His lawyer, Mark Hulkower, did not return telephone calls.

USA TODAY Feb. 19

Nobel Prize-winning scientist Daniel Gajdusek was sentenced up to a year in jail for molesting a 16-year-old boy, one of 56 youths he brought from the Pacific islands for stays in his Frederick, Maryland, home since the 1960's. Gajdusek, 73, pleaded guilty to two counts of child abuse involving the Micronesian, now 24. The FBI said the case grew out of an Internet child pornography investigation. Gajdusek, who retired Monday from a National Institutes of Health post, won the 1976 Nobel Price in medicine for his work on viruses that lie dormant before attacking the body.