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The Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute Has Today Decided to Award the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1997 to Stanley B. Prusiner for His Discovery of Prions - a New Biological Principle of Infection

The Nobel Foundation contains the news release from the Karolinska Institutet summarizing the presentation of the Nobel Prize to Dr. Stanley Prusiner for prion research, along with a ShockWave animation illustrating the concept.

Although prion research has been going on for over 25 years, the scientific and medical communities have only recently acknowledged the existence of prions and there remains serious debate over their role in a variety of neurological diseases. The name "prion" is derived from "proteinaceous infectious particles," and was coined by Dr. Stanley Prusiner, who discovered the agents and who recently received the Nobel Prize for Medicine for his work. Prions are thought to be the first transmissible and heritable disease-causing agents that lack DNA and RNA. They are composed solely of protein and appear to be the cause of such diseases as kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans, and bovine spongiform encephalopathies, mad cow disease, and scrapie in sheep and goats.

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Date of Scout Publication
October 15th, 1997
Date Of Record Creation
April 3rd, 2003 at 4:29pm
Date Of Record Release
April 3rd, 2003 at 4:29pm
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