Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [43]
Prusiner knew exactly what he was doing, Reeves says: ‘Titles that boldly announce theories as facts, declarative statements about the reality of phenomena whose existence and characterization are under dispute, and speculative statements emphasizing productivity over plausibility are all examples of the clear intent … to manipulate readers’ perceptions.’
But given the absence of evidence, he had to. Scientists are highly resistant to new scientific ideas. The celebrated astronomer Tycho Brahe stood against the ideas of Copernicus for his entire life. ‘New ideas need the more time for gaining general assent the more really original they are,’ said the physician and physicist Hermann Helmholtz. The founder of quantum theory, Max Planck, later lamented over his doctoral dissertation that ‘none of my professors … had any understanding for its contents’. Ironically, Helmholtz was among those ignorant professors.
Although it is a natural reaction to shake one’s head at all this, in many ways stubborn-headed scientists are doing exactly what they are supposed to. Making progress in science is hard because the onus is on the innovator. The unwritten rule says that new ideas must prove themselves. Scientists can’t be reeds blown this way and that by every new fad. Science is a battleground. It is written into the constitution of science that the road to Stockholm will be lined with jeering colleagues.
Interestingly, this has been identified as one of the cultural aspects that has kept science in China and the Far East from leading the world. A philosophical tradition founded on Confucianism, where harmony is the desired state, does not get the job of science done efficiently. Much more powerful is the Western method, derived from the ancient Greek tradition where adversarial debate reigns supreme.
In the scientific fight, both sides should be armed only with experimental evidence. But as we saw in the last chapter, gathering the kind of evidence that gets a radical new idea taken seriously is often incredibly difficult. That is why Prusiner adopted a different tactic: persuasion.
And perhaps we should be glad he did. After this examination of Prusiner’s anarchy, it is worth pointing out again that he seems to have been right all along. Though they are still defined as loosely as ever, prions are now widely accepted as the cause of the disease family that includes BSE, CJD, scrapie and kuru. They may also be involved with some other diseases that hit much closer to home.
Today, an estimated 35 million people worldwide have dementia. By 2050, that will have increased to 115 million, according to our best projections. It costs getting on for £400 billion, close to 1 per cent of the world’s gross domestic product. If dementia care were to be provided by a single international company, it would be the biggest in the world – bigger than Wal-Mart or Exxon Mobil. No wonder, then, that way back in the early 1980s Prusiner said that there was money in the link between prion diseases and Alzheimer’s.
Back then, there was no link to speak of – apart from the fact that both involved degeneration of the brain. Today, it seems there might be. But this is speculative, controversial and emotive ground, and we must tread very carefully indeed when we start talking of a breakthrough.
There are a couple of sketchy links between prion diseases and dementia, and they are to do with what biologists call ‘prion proteins’. Prion proteins are not a mystery: we know that our brain cells make them. We still don’t know what they are for, however. We do have some clues: knock out the ability of mice to make prion proteins, and they lose some of their sense of smell, for instance. The mice also appear to have slightly