'Stanley Ben Prusiner' (born
May 28,
1942) is an American
neurologist and
biochemist. Currently the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at
University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Prusiner discovered
prions, a class of
infectious self-reproducing pathogens solely composed of
protein. For his prion research he received the
Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994 and the
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997.
Prusiner was born in
Des Moines, Iowa and spent his childhood in Des Moines and
Cincinnati, Ohio, where he attended
Walnut Hills High School. Prusiner received a
Bachelor of Science degree in
chemistry from the
University of Pennsylvania and later received his
M.D. from the
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.
Prusiner then completed an
internship in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Later Prusiner moved to the
National Institutes of Health, where he studied glutaminases in ''
E. coli'' in the laboratory of Earl Stadtman. After three years at NIH, Prusiner returned to UCSF to complete a
residency in
neurology. Upon completion of the residency in 1974, Prusiner joined the faculty of the UCSF neurology department. Since that time, Prusiner has held various faculty and visiting faculty positions at both UCSF and
UC 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.
[1] 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.
[2]
Prusiner was elected to the
National Academy of Science in 1992 and to its governing council in 2007. He is also an elected member of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), the
Royal Society (1996), the
American Philosophical Society (1998), the
Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2003), and the Institute of Medicine.
Awards
★
Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Disease Research from the American Academy of Neurology (1991)
★ The Richard Lounsberry Award for Extraordinary Scientific Research in Biology and Medicine from the National Academy of Sciences (1993)
★ The
Gairdner Foundation International Award (1993)
★ The
Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research (1994)
★ The
Paul Ehrlich Prize from the Federal Republic of Germany (1995)
★ The
Wolf Prize in Medicine from the
Wolf Foundation/
State of Israel (1996)
★ The Keio International Award for Medical Science (1996)
★ The Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University (1997)
★ The
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (1997)
References
1. Stanley B. Prusiner - Autobiography
2. What really causes mad cow disease?
★
Novel proteinaceous infectious particles cause scrapie, Prusiner S. B., , , Science, 1982
★
Molecular biology of prion diseases, Prusiner S. B., , , Science, 1991
External links
★
Prusiner's Nobel Prize page
★
UCSF page
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