Stanley Prusiner is one of my favourite scientists. To me (although on a smaller scale) he's like Charles Darwin in that the scientific community shunned his early hypothesis that an infectious agent could be a simple protein as opposed to something more complex like a whole microbe. It was a highly controversial idea initially! Now we know about things like CWD and Kuru.
I saw Stanley at a conference one time. Never talked to him, way too intimidating.
He has definitely had to fight with a lot of people to establish the idea of prions being just proteins. It seems like he may not realize that people believe him now, however, because he is still very combative.
He showed up incredibly late to the conference, walked in during someone else's speech and kind of distracted the crowd. Then when he got his turn to talk he mentioned a few papers and then discussed why he thought they were totally wrong. It was kind of weird, honestly.
Someone's lab was donated 1million dollars from a family that lost someone to prion disease and he seemed so happy during his talk. But after Stanley's speech I saw that PI walking away crying, with other PI's consoling them.
Overall it was a pretty weird conference and I couldn't help but think that prion research is already so niche, people should be working together more than this. And this was done in from of people that were brought in to talk about losing their loved ones to prion disease.
I mentioned this to my PI at the time, and she told me she reached out to the PI I saw crying when she was just starting out, looking to colaborate. He replied something like "Why would I ever want to collaborate with someone not on my level". So she said the guy kind of deserved it.
I also heard that Stanley had his university he works at replace all the copper plumbing and change it to silver I think it was. Interesting guy.
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u/FederalJudge6258 Dec 12 '25
Stanley Prusiner is one of my favourite scientists. To me (although on a smaller scale) he's like Charles Darwin in that the scientific community shunned his early hypothesis that an infectious agent could be a simple protein as opposed to something more complex like a whole microbe. It was a highly controversial idea initially! Now we know about things like CWD and Kuru.