Folding and Unfolding: Protein to Prion
Stephen Buranyi, 24 July 2025
The mad cow disease crisis began in 1984, with reports of cows ‘acting strangely’ on a farm in Sussex, and ended 32 years later, with the last reported death from a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It was clear early on that something in the brain matter of cows was causing the infection, and that its vector was the charnel houses in which the brains and spines of...