Dr. Stanley Prusiner

Dr. Stanley Prusiner is a scientist credited with discovering prions—infectious proteins responsible for certain brain diseases. Unlike bacteria or viruses, prions are misfolded proteins that can cause normal proteins in your brain to also misfold, leading to damage and neurodegenerative conditions such as mad cow disease or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. His groundbreaking work, recognized with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997, revealed that proteins alone can transmit disease, changing our understanding of infectious agents and opening new research areas in neurology and pathology.