This episode covers one half of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which was awarded to D. Carleton Gajdusek. The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute chose to give Gajdusek the award “for [his] discoveries concerning new mechanisms for the origin and dissemination of infectious diseases”. Topics include the Kuru neurodegenerative disease, the discovery of a new category of infectious diseases, and cannibalism.