Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [38]
Prusiner was used to the criticism by now. The Science paper had ‘set off a firestorm’ and unleashed a ‘torrent of criticism’, Prusiner wrote in his Nobel Prize autobiography:
Virologists were generally incredulous and some investigators working on scrapie and CJD were irate … At times the press became involved since the media provided the naysayers with a means to vent their frustration at not being able to find the cherished nucleic acid that they were so sure must exist. Since the press was usually unable to understand the scientific arguments and they are [sic] usually keen to write about any controversy, the personal attacks of the naysayers at times became very vicious.
According to Ralf Petterson, the deputy chair of the Nobel committee, the ‘firestorm’ of criticism was responsible for worsening the effects of the BSE outbreak in the UK. The BSE crisis led to the slaughter of millions of animals, disastrous export bans on British beef and a political nightmare for the British Government. Nobel committee members made explicit mention of the scientific community’s reluctance to accept the prion hypothesis as a factor in the scale of the disaster. The scientists had delayed the political decision about when to take action. ‘And by then,’ Petterson told Reuters, ‘it was too late.’
But Chesebro was right. According to the scientific evidence, both the virino hypothesis and the prion hypothesis were plausible – and neither was proved. That’s still true today. Yet Prusiner’s lab now receives millions of dollars in grant money, partly as the result of his suggestion of a possible link between the prion hypothesis and dementias such as Alzheimer’s disease. Manuelidis is effectively sidelined these days, such is Prusiner’s status. In 2007 she expressed her disgust by beginning a paper that outlined the case against Prusiner’s ideas with rhetoric borrowed from Oscar Wilde: ‘I dislike arguments of any kind,’ Wilde once said. ‘They are always vulgar, and often convincing.’
Prusiner has certainly been convincing. And many would say that the tools he has used to promote his ideas have been vulgar in the extreme. ‘The story, to me, is a hideous replay of the tobacco mosaic virus claim of 1936,’ Manuelidis says. She has a point: the prion case is an uncanny mirror of a tale of Nobel Prize-winning anarchy that began before Stanley Prusiner was even a twinkle in his father’s eye. The odd thing is, this episode may in fact be the root cause of Prusiner’s anarchy.
In 1931, the virologist Wendell Meredith Stanley returned to the United States and settled in New Jersey. He had been working in Munich with the Nobel laureate Heinrich Wieland, but an offer had come in from the Princeton branch of the Rockefeller Institute. Leaving Germany turned out to be a good choice: a few years later, Stanley could boast a Nobel Prize of his own.
At the Rockefeller Institute, Stanley began work on finding ways to purify the tobacco mosaic virus. This had been the first virus to be identified – only a few decades earlier – and had quickly become a workhorse of biologists keen to understand the threat these pathogens posed. In 1935 he published a landmark paper in which he claimed to have turned viruses into crystals a few hundredths of a millimetre long. The breakthrough was headline news – the New York Times called it ‘Life in the Making’ – because it reduced something that multiplied itself, and was thus thought to be alive, to nothing more than chemistry. The virus contained no nucleic acids and blurred the distinction between what was alive and what wasn’t. Any thoughts that the virus might be some kind of microbe – something that grew, say, or could replicate itself in the way bacteria did – were pushed out of the picture. The tobacco mosaic virus could be regarded simply