Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [41]
It is hard to know for sure. Prusiner has been unwilling to talk to journalists since 1986, when Discover published an article that was highly critical of his methodology. But the circumstances and the contemporary reporting of the birth of Prusiner’s prion certainly fit the hypothesis.
Gary Taubes’ article in Discover, the one that angered Prusiner so deeply, was entitled ‘The Game of the Name is Fame. But is it Science?’ It opens with a quote from Prusiner in which there is none of the circumspection about the difficulties of scientific progress that Prusiner used in later works. This is a celebration of his branding skills: ‘Prion is a terrific word. It’s snappy. It’s easy to pronounce. People like it. It isn’t easy to come up with a good word in biology. One hell of a lot of bad words people introduce get thrown away.’
Taubes interviewed one of the postdoctoral researchers in Prusiner’s lab at the time; Paul Bendheim says that Prusiner ‘rammed that word down the throats of everybody in that laboratory and in the world’. Bendheim and another of Prusiner’s colleagues, Dave Bolton, accused Prusiner of hiring fundraising experts to raise the prion’s public profile and help get research money out of private foundations. Taubes quotes Bolton quoting Prusiner: ‘If we coin a new term for it, and go out and tell people of the potential link to Alzheimer’s, we’re going to draw people’s attention to this. And we’re going to get money.’
Another collaborator, Frank Masiarz, threw in the towel at Prusiner’s cavalier attitude: ‘By creating the name prion, he clearly wanted to push the entire interpretation in the direction of a protein-only agent. I said there’s no point creating a name for something that we don’t even know exists yet.’ Masiarz resigned as Prusiner’s deputy in 1982, just after the publication of the Science article that catapulted Prusiner to fame. In that article, Prusiner defines the prions: they are ‘proteinaceous infectious particles which are resistant to inactivation by most procedures that modify nucleic acids.’
Given the data, the hypothesis that the scrapie agent is a protein is perfectly reasonable. But here’s the rub: Prusiner won’t be bound by his own definition. If there’s a virus, or a virino involved alongside the protein, he will still be right. Taubes’ article ends with a quote from Prusiner that blurs everything: ‘I never said it’s only an infectious protein,’ he says. ‘I’ve never said that in one paper. You’ll not find it. I’ve been very, very careful.’
We think of poets, legislators and journalists as people who carefully and deliberately use words to advantage. Those who write about science are, in the common mind, just recording the facts. That view is naive, to say the least.
In 1964, Physics Letters published a paper by Murray Gell-Mann in which he posited the existence of particles called quarks. Triplets of quarks, he suggested, made up the subatomic particles known as neutrons and protons. There were strong mathematical reasons, to do with patterns and symmetries, for proposing the existence of quarks, but Gell-Mann managed to distance himself from any accountability for their existence. Maybe, he said repeatedly, they are ‘just mathematical’, and would never turn up in experiments. Maybe, he said on other occasions, they are ‘fictitious’. The particle physicist John Polkinghorne caricatured Gell-Mann’s equivocation: ‘If quarks are not found, remember I never said they would be; if they are found, remember I thought of them first.’
The strategy paid off: when quarks were found to exist, Gell-Mann won a Nobel Prize. Had they not been found, he would never have lost face because he had consistently blurred the edges of what his quark idea actually was. Prusiner is in the same position. Whatever the prion turns out to be – protein or