Kuru, pedophilia, and white-washing science

Evolving Thoughts has an interesting recent post on recently deceased Nobel laureate Carleton Gadjusek, who not only discovered significant things about the transmissability of kuru, aka Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, but was also a convicted (and seemingly unabashed) pedophile. The hairy gorilla of a blogger at Evolving Thoughts (aka John S. Wilkins), prompted by an obituary of Gadjusek that, understandably, doesn’t make Gadjusek’s pedophilia its focus, offers us the following:

Gadjusek was a moral deviant who harmed children (almost necessarily if he had sex with boys). He also discovered a transmissible dementia that has ultimately changed our way of thinking about neurological diseases and the very nature of disease itself. Like the founder of vascular surgery, Alexis Carrel, who worked with the Nazis in eugenic extermination, his work was good even if he was not.