The Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded to Stanley Prusiner, who has tirelessly defended the idea that infectious proteins can cause brain diseases such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, scrapie and mad cow. The Karolinska Institute announced this morning that the University of California, San Francisco, neurologist had won the prize "for his discovery of prions, a new biological principle of infection."
Prusiner coined the term "prion" in 1982 to describe "proteinaceous infectious particles" that many scientists now believe cause disease by folding and recruit other proteins to do the same. The idea a protein acting alone - without DNA or RNA - can transmit the disease was heretical when Prusiner began his promotion Since then the theory has gained support Prusiner's experiments and others, who reported that. a protein called PrP changes shape in the brain of sick animals and that protein is essential for infectivity.
scientists in the field say both his experience and his tireless defense of the theory have had a significant impact. in a statement, Charles Weissmann of the University of Zurich wrote, "Prusiner is a pioneer and iconoclast, and fully deserves the Nobel Prize, he was rewarded."
However, many scientists say there is no definitive proof that prions can cause disease by themselves: no one has been able to inject the purified protein in a healthy animal and make it sick. "I think there is speculation that the protein itself is contagious," says Laura Manuelidis, neuropathologist at Yale University who argued that a virus or other particle is involved in prion process. " I hope [the award] will not stop people from trying to find the final data for the agent is. "
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[voiraussilenumérodu12Juillet1996 science for a special report on prion News.]
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