Madness and Memory:The Discovery of Prions--A New Biological Principle of Disease [Kindle Edition]
Author: Stanley B. Prusiner | Language: English | ISBN: B00JDA9DGU | Format: PDF, EPUB
Madness and Memory:The Discovery of Prions--A New Biological Principle of Disease
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In 1997, Stanley B. Prusiner received a Nobel Prize, the world's most prestigious award for achievement in physiology or medicine. That he was the sole recipient of the award for the year was entirely appropriate. His struggle to identify the agent responsible for ravaging the brains of animals suffering from scrapie and mad cow disease, and of humans with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, had been waged largely alone and in some cases in the face of strenuous disagreement.
In this book, Prusiner tells the remarkable story of his discovery of prions—infectious proteins that replicate and cause disease but surprisingly contain no genetic material—and reveals how superb and meticulous science is actually practiced with talented teams of researchers who persevere. He recounts the frustrations and rewards of years of research and offers fascinating portraits of his peers as they raced to discover the causes of fatal brain diseases. Prusiner’s hypothesis, once considered heresy, now stands as accepted science and the basis for developing diagnoses and eventual cures. He closes with a meditation on the legacy of his discovery: What will it take to cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s and other devastating diseases of the brain?
Download latest books on mediafire and other links compilation Madness and Memory:The Discovery of Prions--A New Biological Principle of Disease [Kindle Edition] In this book, Prusiner tells the remarkable story of his discovery of prions—infectious proteins that replicate and cause disease but surprisingly contain no genetic material—and reveals how superb and meticulous science is actually practiced with talented teams of researchers who persevere. He recounts the frustrations and rewards of years of research and offers fascinating portraits of his peers as they raced to discover the causes of fatal brain diseases. Prusiner’s hypothesis, once considered heresy, now stands as accepted science and the basis for developing diagnoses and eventual cures. He closes with a meditation on the legacy of his discovery: What will it take to cure Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s and other devastating diseases of the brain?
- File Size: 5676 KB
- Print Length: 345 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0300191146
- Publisher: Yale University Press; 1 edition (March 31, 2014)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00JDA9DGU
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #107,053 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Basic Science > Biochemistry
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The prion story changed our understanding of neurological disease, not only the infectious type {CJD, "mad cow"}, but also the common Alzheimer's dementia. The key to this revolution was realization of the importance of the folding of amino-acid chains for the correct function of proteins and how this could change in disease.
Looking back, it seems curious how resistant the scientific community was to this idea. The fact that proteins had four levels of structure {the amino-acid sequence coded by the gene, the hydrogen bonding, the folding, and the fitting together of separate chains into dimers, trimers, etc} was basic: I learned this in medical school 50 years ago. But the dogma insisted that if something pathologically significant was wrong with a protein, it could only come from the gene, the DNA coding for the amino-acid sequence. And dogma is very had to displace. Anyone advancing a radically new idea will not merely have their data and interpretations challenged: they will be subject to vilification and personal attack.
For the lay reader, this book will give telling insight into the pettiness, and downright viciousness, of scientists competing in a high-profile area. Those of us who are practising scientists ourselves will by-and-large be aware of the sabotage and dirty dealing which is commonplace in scientific politics, so the book will not shock us. Instead, it will give an inspiring insight into how a person with dogged persistence can eventually succeed by sticking to his convictions and answering every criticism with solid data from rigorous experiments.
The writing of the book has attracted comment from some reviewers. It is not up to the standard of literary fiction, but fully adequate to the task of conveying a tale about science.
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