Fatal flaws : how a misfolded protein baffled scientists and changed the way we look at the brain / Jay Ingram.

New Haven ; London : Yale University Press, 2013.

viii, 282 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

The mystery of kuru : a disease like no other -- Barflies and flatworms : how speculation and pure chance advance a new science -- Cannibalism : an answer guaranteed to stir things up -- Igor and Bill : the discoveries that bring kuru to world attention -- The life of a cell : a miraculous, and often precarious, complexity -- The death of a cell : by subterfuge, piracy, or out-and-out assault -- When is a virus not a virus? : when a disease-causing agent reproduces without genes -- Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease : waking up to the potential of a devastating affliction -- Magnificent molecules : the proteins that make life possible -- Protein origami : building the gothic cathedrals of life -- Stanley Prusiner's Heresy : an infectious agent that's a protein and nothing but -- An infectious idea : the campaign for the minds of researchers -- A portrait of the prion : and the experiments that point to their role in the human brain -- Mad cow disease : the uncertain ground where politics and science intersect -- Mad cow in humans : no barrier after all -- The Americas : mad mink, then cows -- Into the wild : deer, elk, moose, and caribou -- Origins : attempting to find where prions come from -- Cats but not dogs : when prions jump the species barrier -- Alzheimer's disease : plaques and tangles but so far no prions -- Parkinson's disease : looking more and more like a prion disease -- Lou Gehrig's disease : the emerging picture of a prion-like process in ALS -- Chronic traumatic encephalopathy : the athletes' plague -- And in the end...