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JCI’s Conversations with Giants in Medicine: Stanley Prusiner
In this episode, Ushma Neill talks with Dr. Stanley Prusiner. The discovery that a protein alone could be infectious, proposed by Stanley Prusiner of the University of California San Francisco, was considered heretical in 1982. Now considered orthodoxy, at that time scientists thought that the only infectious agents could be bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. We now know that these proteins, termed prions, which acquire an alternative shape and coax their neighboring proteins to do the same, undergird a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. For his dogma-shattering work, Dr. Prusiner has been widely recognized, including with the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Published July 15, 2024, by Ushma S. Neill
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