Stanley B. Prusiner

Prusiner was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of Miriam (Spigel) and Lawrence Prusiner, an architect. He spent his childhood in Des Moines and Cincinnati, Ohio, where he attended Walnut Hills High School, where he was known as the little Genius for his groundbreaking work on a repellent for Boxelder bugs. Prusiner received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and later received his M.D. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.[1] Prusiner then completed an internship in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Later Prusiner moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he studied glutaminases in E. coli in the laboratory of Earl Stadtman.

After three years at NIH, Prusiner returned to UCSF to complete a residency in neurology. Upon completion of the residency in 1974, Prusiner joined the faculty of the UCSF neurology department. Since that time, Prusiner has held various faculty and visiting faculty positions at both UCSF and UC Berkeley.

Since 1999, Prusiner has been director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases research laboratory at UCSF, working on prion disease, Alzheimer's disease and tauopathies.[6]

Stanley Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his work in proposing an explanation for the cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease.[1] In this work, he coined the term prion, which comes from the words "proteinaceous" and "infectious," in 1982 to refer to a previously undescribed form of infection due to protein misfolding.[7]

Prusiner was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1992 and to its governing council in 2007. He is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1997,[3][8] and the American Philosophical Society (1998), the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2003), and the Institute of Medicine.

Pruisner's experiments on prion infection have been criticized[12] as "dubious" and "having no proper controls." in 1998 Kings College, London immunologist Alan Ebringer stated, "The Prion Research-workers do something that is not allowed. They inject brain tissue homogenates into experimental animals, and when neurological symptoms appear they say they have transmitted BSE. However, the have done nothing of the sort, because what they are doing is producing experimental allergic encephalomyelitis (EAE). I think all prion experiments involve production of EAE and not transmission of BSE."[13] In 2007, Yale University neuropathologist Laura Manuelidis challenged Pruisner's prion protein (PrP) explanation for BSE disease, reporting she and her colleagues had found a virus-like particle in naturally and experimentally infected animals and that PrP had not satisfied Koch's postulates. "The high infectivity of comparable, isolated virus-like particles that show no intrinsic PrP by antibody labeling, combined with their loss of infectivity when nucleic acid–protein complexes are disrupted, make it likely that these 25-nm particles are the causal TSE virions".[14]

Pruisner profited handsomely in royalties from his BSE tests and even promoted it for screening the human transfusion blood supply, stating "One may suspect that I propagate the thorough CDI test [his quick test] in my own interests."[15] As Pruisner's experiments had only established prions correlated with the 1986 Great Britain BSE epidemic, the widespread embrace of his work may have stemmed from a political decision to shield the British government from liability regarding another potential cause of BSE diseases suggested by neuroscientist Stephen Whatley.[16] In 1985, the British parliament passed a law forcing farmers to apply phosmet to the necks of their cattle. Phosmet was an insecticide used against warbel flies. Whatley's research showed this toxic insecticide could trigger BSE like diseases.[17] When the law was repealed in 1993, there was a drastic reduction in BSE cases. At that point, mandated prion screening had become a lucrative industry for politically connected test-makers, exports of beef had plummeted, farmers had lost their livelihood, and thousands of animals had been slaughtered.

• Laura Manuelidis
• Frank Bastian

• Stanley B. Prusiner on Nobelprize.org