Stanley B. Prusiner Biography, Life, Interesting Facts

Childhood And Early Life

American neurologist and biochemist Stanley Prusiner was born on the 28 May 1942 in Des Moines, Iowa to Lawrence Prusiner and Miriam Spiegel.

Education

Stanley Prusiner was a pupil at Walnut Hills High School then enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania where he obtained a B.Sc. He obtained a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Rise To Fame

On completion of his medical degree, Stanley Prusiner did an internship at the University of California in San Francisco. He then studied glutamines in E.Coli in the laboratory of Earl Stadtman at the National Institutes of Health. After three years, Stanley Prusiner returned to the University of California in San Francisco and took up a residency in neurology which he finished in 1974. He then joined the University of California’s neurology department.

Career

Stanley Prusiner received the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1994. Then in 1997 Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for his research into the cause of Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob (commonly known as Mad Cow Disease).

He was the first scientist to come up with the term prion, to refer to a previously undescribed infection related to protein misfolding. 

Books Prusiner has written are Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions - A New Biological Principle of Disease (2014) Prion Diseases and Prion Biology (1999) and Prions Prions Prions (Current Topics in Microbiology and Immunology) 2011.

Awards And Achievements

Apart from the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1997, Stanley Prusiner has won many other awards and acknowledgments. He was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1992, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, a Foreign Member of the Royal Society in 1997 and the American Philosophical Society in 1998. The American Academy of Neurology awarded him the Potamkin Prize for Alzheimer’s Disease Research in 1991.

Later Years

Stanley Prusiner serves as the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at the University of California.