was also the first to compile a bibliography of kuru disease. joe gibbs joined gajdusek to monitor and record the behavior of the apes at the nih and conduct their autopsies. within two years, one of the chimps, daisy, had developed kuru, demonstrating that an unknown disease factor was transmitted through infected biomaterial and that it was capable of crossing the species barrier to other primates. after elisabeth beck confirmed that this experiment had brought about the first experimental transmission of kuru, the finding was deemed a very important advance in human medicine, leading to the award of the nobel prize in physiology or medicine to gajdusek in 1976. subsequently, e. j. field spent large parts of the late 1960s and early 1970s in new guinea investigating the disease, connecting it to scrapie and multiple sclerosis. he noted the disease's interactions with glial cells, including the critical observation that the infectious process may depend on the structural rearrangement of the host's molecules. this was an early observation of what was to later become the prion hypothesis.