Killer Proteins: The Science Of Prions

Short Wave

NPR

Daily News, Nature, Life Sciences, Astronomy, Science, News

4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 November 2022

⏱️ 13 minutes

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Summary

Prions are biological anomalies – self-replicating, not-alive little particles that can misfold into an unstoppable juggernaut of fatal disease. Prions don't contain genes, and yet they make more of themselves. That has forced scientists to rethink the "central dogma" of molecular biology: that biological information is always passed on through genes. The journey to discovering, describing, and ultimately understanding how prions work began with a medical mystery in a remote part of New Guinea in the 1950s. The indigenous Fore people were experiencing a horrific epidemic of rapid brain-wasting disease. The illness was claiming otherwise healthy people, often taking their lives within months of diagnosis. Solving the puzzle would help unlock one of the more remarkable discoveries in late-20th-century medicine, and introduce the world to a rare but potent new kind of pathogen. For the first episode in a series of three about prion disease, Short Wave's Gabriel Spitzer shares the science behind these proteins with Emily Kwong, and explains why prions keep him awake at night.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, so if you know shortwave, you know we love data.
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0:09.2	It's short, it's anonymous, now is truly the time to weigh in on our show.
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0:17.8	Thanks so much.
0:19.4	You're listening to shortwave from NPR.
0:23.8	Hey hey shortwaveers, Emily Quank here.
0:25.5	Joining me today is senior editor Gabriel Spitzer.
0:28.6	Hi, Gabriel.
0:29.6	Emily, Emily, I'm here to tell you about this like kind of mild obsession I have with a protein.
0:35.9	Okay, I'm guessing you're not talking about tofu.
0:39.2	Love tofu, but no, no, I'm going a little more basic than that today.
0:42.4	This is like proteins as the building blocks of biology.
0:46.0	So every cell has like 40 million of them.
0:48.8	They're the most ordinary things in the world in some ways.
0:51.6	But there's one protein in particular that I personally find deeply unsettling.
0:57.0	What's that?
0:57.9	Well, it's called a prion and it could cause a bunch of different neurodegenerative diseases.
1:03.1	Okay, and what is it about prions that gives you the creeps?
1:06.1	Well, for one thing, they're not alive.
1:08.1	Proteins are just this kind of basic building material that's not really supposed to have a mind of its own.
	...

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