The discovery that a protein alone could be infectious, proposed by Stanley Prusiner of the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), was considered heretical in 1982. Now considered orthodoxy, at that time, scientists thought that the only infectious agents were bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. We now know that these proteins, termed prions, which acquire an alternative shape and coax their neighboring proteins to do the same, undergird a variety of neurodegenerative diseases. F...
