Stanley Prusiner, a professor of biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, has received the New York-based Metropolitan Life Foundation's 1992 Award for Medical Research in Alzheimer's Disease. Prusiner received $200,000 to further his research plus a personal prize of $50,000 in February.
Prusiner, 49, discovered the prion, a pathogen that causes several rare human brain diseases and is related to the agent that causes scrapie, a disease of cattle, sheep, and goats (Science, 216:136-44, 1982).
Prusiner received an M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1968. He has been at the UC-San Francisco School of Medicine since 1974.
