Defective Protein Found to Cause Rare Parkinson’s-like Disease
Published in the San Francisco Chronicle; 31 August 2015
By David Perlman
When Stanley B. Prusiner, a UCSF neurologist, first proposed that inert proteins he called prions could somehow fold into strange shapes and infect humans with rare diseases of the brain, his idea 30 years ago was widely dismissed as nonsense.
His critics were wrong.
Twenty years later those infectious prions—which Prusiner coined from two words, protein and infection—won him a Nobel prize, and today his Institute for Neurodegenerative Disease has its own building on the medical center’s Mission Bay campus. It’s a scientific hive where researchers, lab techs and medical students labor to understand the many disorders that endanger the human brain and the human nervous system.
Now Kurt Giles, a British-born neurologist at the UCSF Institute, is reporting that he and his colleagues have found that... Read more ...