Gajdusek named these agents “infectious amyloids.” (They are now known as “prions,” the name given to them by Stanley Prusiner, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his work in identifying this new class of pathogen.) But if prions could not replicate like viruses, how did they multiply and spread? One had to envisage a wholly new form of disease process—one akin not to biological replication but to chemical crystallization, whereby the tiny prions, which are actually deviant, pleated forms of a normally present brain protein, act as “pattern-setting nucleants,” or centers of recrystallization,
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