Infectious Proteins: The Discovery of Prions and the Science of Mad Cow Disease
The Story of Stanley Prusiner's Nobel-Winning Heresy

About this book:

What happens when a protein breaks biology's most sacred rule? In 1972, a young neurologist watched a patient vanish into dementia caused by Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease—and found himself chasing a ghost. The infectious agent had no DNA, no RNA, no genetic blueprint whatsoever. It was, impossibly, a protein that could replicate, kill, and jump between species. Stanley Prusiner's insistence that such a thing existed didn't just challenge the central dogma of molecular biology; it ignited a decades-long war that saw him mocked, marginalized, and accused of fraud before the Nobel Committee finally vindicated him.

From the mist-shrouded highlands of Papua New Guinea, where the Fore people's funerary feasts seeded an epidemic of "laughing death," to the British cattle farms where mad cow disease jumped the species barrier into humans, this is a scientific detective story that spans continents and generations. It follows Prusiner from his lonely lab bench through the furious backlash of the virology establishment, into the bizarre world of proteins that fold wrong and teach others to do the same—a discovery that now illuminates Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and ALS.

Written with the pacing of a thriller and the rigor of a laboratory notebook, *Infectious Proteins* reveals how a heretical idea became a new biological frontier. You'll never look at a protein—or the fragility of scientific consensus—the same way again.