PrP

In the late '90s, everyone started freaking out about their beef products, especially in Europe. Cows in Britain had started falling ill with a strange fatal neural disease. But not only the cows were getting sick - people who ate infected meat were hit too, dying by way of a new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. The cow disease became known as Mad Cow for the way in which the infected cows acted. Soon enough it had become epidemic, and people looked for the cause - and found it to be a little protein, called a prion. Prions are misfolded proteins which cause diseases in animals. But…

Alzheimer's disease is the most common form of dementia in the world, affecting more than 26 million people. Creutzfeld-Jacob disease (CJD), another affliction is far less common, but both conditions share many of the same qualities. They are fatal within a few years of diagnosis, they are incurable and they involved the crippling degeneration of the brain's neurons. Now, a group of Yale researchers have discovered that the two diseases are also linked by a pair of critical proteins. Look into the brain of someone with Alzheimer's disease and you will see large, insoluble "plaques" sitting…