The progressive construction of a mechanism for prion diseases

Michel Morange (1)

1 IHPST - Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques

The parallel between the discovery that genes are made of DNA, and that the scrapie agent is a protein, is not new. It was the motivation behind the simultaneous award of the Lasker prize to Maclyn McCarty and Stanley Prusiner in 1994. It had already been proposed by Tikvah Alper in 1987 (Alper 1987). It will be the focus of what I have to say. The existence of a good historical study (Keyes 1999), and recent developments in the fi eld - the physico-chemical characterization of different prion strains in yeast (Tanaka et al 2004; Krishnan and Lindquist 2005), and the progress made in the in vitro conversion of the prion protein into a pathogenic form (Legname et al 2004) - put us in a good position to re-examine the complex story of the prion hypothesis. We will see that the parallel made by McCarty and Prusiner raises interesting issues, but does more to obscure the complex history of prions than to illuminate it.

Mots clés: Central dogma; mechanism; prions

Domaines: Histoire, Philosophie et Sociologie des sciences

Michel Morange. The progressive construction of a mechanism for prion diseases. Journal of Biosciences, 2007, 32 (2), pp.223-227. ⟨halshs-00791757⟩