Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [126]
p. 85 ‘And by then,’ Petterson told Reuters, ‘it was too late’: B. Goldsmith, ‘Nobel Winner Could Have Prevented “Mad Cow”’, Reuters World Report, 6 October 1997, text available at http://www.mad-cow.org/Nobel.html#winner
p. 85 ‘They are always vulgar, and often convincing.’: L. Manuelidis, ‘A 25 nm Virion Is the Likely Cause of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies’, Journal of Cellular Biochemistry, vol. 100, p. 897 (2007).
p. 85 ‘The story, to me, is a hideous replay of the tobacco mosaic virus claim of 1936’: Laura Manuelidis, personal communication.
p. 85 Wendell Meredith Stanley returned to the United States and settled in New Jersey: Stanley’s story is told in L. Kay, ‘W. M. Stanley’s Crystallization of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus’, Isis, vol. 77, p. 450 (1986).
p. 86 In 1935 he published a landmark paper: W. Stanley, ‘Isolation of a Crystalline Protein Possessing the Properties of Tobacco-Mosaic Virus’, Science, vol. 81, p. 644 (1935).
p. 87 Bawden and Pirie published their findings in Nature: F. Bawden et al., ‘Liquid Crystalline Substances from Virus-infected Plants’, Nature, vol. 138, p. 1051 (1936).
p. 87 explicitly states that the prize was for demonstrating that a virus ‘actually is a protein’: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1946/press.html
p. 87 James Watson mentions Bawden and Pirie’s gift explicitly: J. Watson, The Double Helix (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968), p. 119.
p. 88 They defined a virus as a piece of nucleic acid that carried genetic information: F. Crick and J. Watson, ‘Structure of Small Viruses’, Nature, vol. 177, p. 4506 (1956).
p. 88 The paper is called ‘The “Undiscovered” Discovery’: W. Stanley, ‘The “Undiscovered” Discovery’, Archives of Environmental Health, vol. 21, p. 256 (1970).
p. 90 Prusiner has been unwilling to talk to journalists since 1986: Rhodes mentions this in his ‘Pathological Science’ article in New Yorker. Prusiner has talked to a few journalists here and there, but is still reluctant. He declined to be interviewed for the purposes of this book.
p. 90 Discover published an article that was highly critical of his methodology: G. Taubes, ‘The Game of the Name is Fame. But is it Science?’, Discover, vol. 7(12), p. 28 (December 1986), available at http://www.slate.com/id/2096/sidebar/42786/
p. 92 Physics Letters published a paper by Murray Gell-Mann: M. Gell-Mann, ‘A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons’, Physics Letters, vol. 8, p. 214 (1964).
p. 92 Gell-Mann managed to distance himself from any accountability for their existence: M. Gell-Mann, ‘Current Algebra: Quarks and What Else?’, in Proceedings of the XVI International Conference on High Energy Physics, vol. 4, p. 135 (1972).
p. 92 The particle physicist John Polkinghorne caricatured Gell-Mann’s equivocation: J. Polkinghorne, Rochester Roundabout: The Story of High Energy Physics (Longman, 1989), p. 110. Before the words I’ve quoted here, Polkinghorne says, ‘For many years it was [Gell-Mann’s] habit to refer to the “presumably mathematical” quark. I always considered that to be a coded message.’
p. 93 Carol Reeves … has carried out a study of Prusiner’s rhetorical style: As well as drawing on the ‘I Knew There Was Something Wrong with That Paper’ paper mentioned above, this section also draws on the fascinating analysis in C. Reeves, ‘An Orthodox Heresy: Scientific Rhetoric and the Science of Prions’, Science Communication, vol. 24, p. 98 (2002).
p. 94 before they can be ‘firmly classified as prions’: S. Prusiner, ‘Prions: Novel Infectious Pathogens’, Advances in Virus Research, vol. 29, p. 1 (1984).
p. 94 virologist Richard Carp wrote in 1985: R.I. Carp et al., ‘Nature of the Scrapie Agent: Current Status of Facts and Hypotheses’, Journal of General Virology, vol. 66, p. 1357 (1985).
p. 95 Carp says that the prion idea is so firmly established: Telephone interview