Prions: The Discovery That Challenged Molecular Biology
On April 9, 1982, Dr. Stanley Prusiner published a groundbreaking paper identifying prions, infectious proteins that cause degenerative nerve diseases like scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. Prusiner's research demonstrated that these proteins, which lack genetic material, could transmit disease, challenging the central dogma of molecular biology. Initially met with skepticism, his findings were later validated, particularly during the mad cow disease epidemic in the UK. Prusiner's work has since been recognized with a Nobel Prize, fundamentally altering the understanding of disease transmission. 
