THE BSE epidemic in the UK was an unmitigated disaster. It devastated the beef industry, destroyed peoples' livelihoods, unleashed a terrible disease upon the population and cost billions of pounds of public money.
But to a small group of biochemists there was a silver lining. BSE and its human equivalent, vCJD, belong to an obscure group of diseases called prion diseases, transmitted through an implausible mechanism involving shape-shifting proteins that formed clumps in the brain. Without BSE, prion science would probably have remained a backwater. Once the disease struck, however, it went mainstream.
Now, as the US ramps up its BSE testing programme and the threat of a global epidemic becomes ever more real (see "American nightmare"), prion science has come of age. At the time of the UK outbreak there were multiple unknowns and controversies - not least over the very nature of prions themselves. Today, new insights ...
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