Gajdusek's father, Karol Gajdusek, was from Büdöskö, Kingdom of Hungary, now Smrdáky, Slovakia. He was an ethnic Slovak who was a butcher. His mother's parents from Debrecen, Hungary. Gajdusek was born in Yonkers, New York. He graduated from the University of Rochester in 1943. Gajdusek studied physics, biology, chemistry and mathematics. He got an M.D. from Harvard University in 1946. His postdoctoral research was done at Columbia University, the California Institute of Technology, and Harvard. In the early 1950s, Gajdusek was drafted into the military as a research virologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. In 1954 he went to work at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, Australia. In Australia, he began the work that led to his getting the Nobel Prize.