Nobel Laureate Prusiner Tells His Story

Just published by Yale University Press: Stanley Prusiner's new book, Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions - A New Biological Principle of Disease, is now available for purchase. Although I am not personally a big fan of Dr. Oliver Sacks's work, his blurb on Prusiner's book is worth reading: “Stanley Prusiner is a brilliant scientist whose boldness and tenacity enabled him, against all odds and despite near-universal skepticism, to discover and prove the importance of a new class of disease-producing agents—prions—a discovery as fundamental as that of bacteria and viruses. Prions, by subverting the brain’s own proteins, may play a crucial role in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other neurodegenerative diseases—and perhaps afford a clue to their prevention. Madness and Memory is the story of one of the most important discoveries in recent medical history, and it is also a vivid and compelling portrait of a life in science." Special thanks to Dr. Mark Cohen for alerting me to the publication of this new account of a seminal discovery in biological science.

The bookish Dr. Mark Cohen