Nobel Prize of Medicine 1997

Nobel Prize of Medicine 1997
Stanley B. Prusiner for his discovery of Prions - a new biological principle of infection

Stanley B. Prusiner was born in 1942 in Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Since 1968 he has been a professor in neurology, biochemistry, and virology at the University of California in San Francisco, and in Berkeley.

Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his work proposing an explanation for the cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In this work, he coined the term prion, which comes from "proteinaceous infectious particle that lacks nucleic acid" to refer to a previously undescribed form of infection due to protein misfolding.