Author: Richard Rhodes
Translator: Jeong-hee An
Publisher: Science Books
Hardcover | 367 pages | 223*152mm
| Important! Please read before you order! |
| >>>This book is written in Korean. |
About This Book
The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's
Health
This gripping study of "mad cow disease" by Rhodes (The Making of the
Atomic Bomb, 1987, etc.) weaves careful research and powerful stories
into a chilling narrative that often reads more like science fiction.
Indeed, Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle gets credit for prescience at one
point: The plot of that novel involves an aberrant form of ice crystal
that freezes the oceans and brings about the end of life on earth. For
ice crystal, read "prion," the term coined by Stanley Prusiner, a
California biochemist/neurologist, to describe a proteinaceous
infectious particle that is thought to work by triggering the aberrant
folding of a normal brain protein. The end result is fatty deposits in
the brain, holes where nerve cells used to be, and, eventually, death.
There is no cure. The scary thing about the TSEs (transmissible
spongiform encephalopathies, a generic term used to refer to several
diseases generating this damage in humans and animals) is that they can
be passed within, and sometimes across, species by the consumption of
suspect tissues. (Many kinds of animal feed include ground-up animal
parts.) Normal chemicals and heat treatment that inactivate DNA do not,
for some reason, destroy TSE agents. Rhodes faults the British for being
terribly slow to get started slaughtering infected herds and for failing
to insure that farmers complied with new regulations for feed
preparation. He goes on to assert that there is enough evidence to
suggest that Americans may also fall victim to cross-species brain
diseases: the animal TSEs exist here, and we are regularly exposed to a
variety of products (milk, meat, gelatin) that may carry infection.
Rhodes's argument, that suveillance and protection are needed as much as
research, is persuasive. A powerful and alarming book. --Kirkus Reviews
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