by Stanley B. Prusiner
Yale University Press, April 2014
Prions have been getting a lot of press lately. Now, the researcher who coined the term and discovered the often troublesome misfolded proteins brings readers the story of his groundbreaking work. In Madness and Memory, University of California, San Francisco, biochemist, neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate Stanley Prusiner proves himself just as capable a writer as he is a scientist.
Prusiner not only shares the fascinating path to discovery (and the personally painful ridicule) that attended his then-controversial research into the causative agents of scrapie, mad cow disease, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, he also throws open the shutters on how the scientific process is shaped by collaboration and competition.
Part personal memoir and part scientific exposé, Prusiner’s book ...
