Deadly Feasts by Richard Rhodes

Author:Richard Rhodes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

While Merz was discovering SAF, another determined researcher was closing in on the scrapie agent from another quarter. Biochemist and neurologist Dr. Stanley Prusiner had been a neurology resident at the University of California–San Francisco School of Medicine when he lost a patient to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in 1972. The disease intrigued him. “I started reading about scrapie,” the Cincinnati native told science reporter Gary Taubes several years ago, “and it became clear that this was a wonderful problem for a chemist. It had been attacked by pathologists, physicians, veterinarians. Those who tried to unravel the chemistry of the disease hadn’t taken a very careful approach… . I set up a lab here. I got some money from the neurology department, but not a lot.”

Prusiner was then twenty-nine years old, a trim, handsome man with a strong jaw, prominent eyebrows and a full head of dark, curly hair. Research that requires large numbers of laboratory animals is expensive. With remarkable chutzpah, Prusiner applied to the NIH for a major grant for scrapie research. As he remembers it, “They said, ‘Who the hell are you?’” He was advised he needed training in virology and experience working with scrapie and his grant application was rejected.

Prusiner’s colleagues say they have never known anyone to pursue a Nobel Prize so relentlessly. One example they cite is his decision to study virology at a laboratory in Sweden, whence the coveted prizes originate. After virology training, Prusiner moved to the Rocky Mountain Laboratory to collaborate with Bill Hadlow. Hoping to isolate the scrapie agent, they worked with mice, which produced results faster than working with goats. But waiting out the deaths of successive generations of mice taught Prusiner what his predecessors had already learned, that progress using traditional methods was measurable in successive generations of scrapie researchers. Prusiner and Hadlow worked their way through ten thousand mice before Joe Gibbs cut off funding in 1978. He did so, he says, to push the two scientists to publish their results.

Prusiner returned to UCSF, where he had started. Borrowing a technique the British had developed back in the 1960s, he devised a faster way of measuring scrapie infectivity: he used hamsters that incubated the disease twice as rapidly as mice and he took their measure at the onset of symptoms rather than at death. He estimates that the new system accelerated the work “by a factor of one hundred. Instead of observing sixty animals for a year, we can assay a sample with just four animals in sixty days.” Over the next several years, he told Taubes, “we did more experiments on the biochemistry of scrapie than everyone else in the history of scrapie combined.”

Sooner or later, all roads in TSE research lead to Carleton Gajdusek. Pat Merz began working with Gajdusek and Gibbs in the late 1970s. Gajdusek continued to divide his time between the United States and New Guinea, and in 1978 and again in 1980, Prusiner pilgrimaged to the Eastern Highlands to add kuru to his quiver.

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