Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [42]
And it is deliberate. Carol Reeves, an English professor at Butler University, Indiana, has carried out a study of Prusiner’s rhetorical style. His published papers, she says, provide a near-perfect illustration of the power of carefully chosen words. In Reeves’ view, Prusiner’s stock phrase, ‘the triumph of scientific investigation over prejudice’, was a clever smokescreen. As we have seen, the science hasn’t really decided between the various hypotheses. But Prusiner’s rhetoric made it look as though it had. His prose is so dense, and his arguments are constructed in such abstruse and complex ways, that the scientists who were uncomfortable with the prion hypothesis couldn’t work out what was wrong with it. One researcher, Sue Priolla, who led the team at the NIH’s Rocky Mountain Laboratory, told Reeves that ‘most people just read through it and think, “Well, OK, that looks OK,” and they move on.’
But Priolla stuck with her misgivings. Here’s what she told Reeves:
I knew there was something wrong with that paper. I kept rereading it and looking at the data, and then at how they explained their data, and finally, after days of pondering, I realized it was the wording in a string of sentences. It was easy to overlook because it was so subtle.
Reeves examined the text in question with the careful eye of an English professor. She concluded that Prusiner’s whole argument in the 1982 Science paper rests on an assumption about things that may or may not exist. She says that the entire paragraph ‘is actually theory based upon theory based upon theory, clothed in the armor of scientific syntax, requiring enormous reader energy to untangle’.
The masterstroke, really, was Prusiner’s first move: putting a label on something that people were already talking about but hadn’t yet given a snappy name. In his 1967 paper, Griffith had said, as understatedly as possible, that it could be a protein: ‘The occurrence of a protein agent would not necessarily be embarrassing.’ Prusiner, on the other hand, named it: ‘In place of such terms as “unconventional virus” or “unusual slow virus-like agent”, the term “prion” (pronounced pree-on) is suggested.’ He even tells you how to say it out loud, like he’s teaching English rather than presenting a scientific argument.
After that, it was plain sailing. Prusiner simply presented the prion in a way that created the impression that it was a well-documented, well-characterised object. Take this statement, for example: ‘the properties of the scrapie agent distinguish it from both viroids and viruses and have prompted the introduction of the term “prion”’. Reeves points out that this form of words appears several times in the early 1980s, and is a stroke of rhetorical genius. It talks about ‘the properties’ of the scrapie agent as if they are clear – and clearly distinct from what a virus might offer. It uses the passive ‘have prompted’ as if the origins of the word ‘prion’ lay somewhere other than with Prusiner – and as if everyone has now taken it up as the standard.
In a later article, Prusiner says that some agents must be researched further before they can be ‘firmly classified as prions’ – as if ‘prion’ is an established classification. In this same article, a similar boldness comes out as ‘All the Prion diseases share many features.’
There is no fighting such persuasive use of language, especially when the definition of a prion remains so ambiguous. ‘The attempt to subsume within the single term, prion, both the “protein only” and the “protein with nucleic acid” concepts, has made it difficult to engage in precise dialogue,’ virologist Richard Carp wrote in 1985.
Reeves interviewed scientists who admitted that their uptake of the prion terminology resulted from repetition, momentum and confusion; they were bamboozled into it, you might say. Eventually, people stopped fighting. They