Stanley B. Prusiner

Stanley Ben Prusiner ( born May 28, 1942 in Des Moines, Iowa) is an American biochemist and physician, for his discovery of prions, a new class of pathogens, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997. As early as 1992, he shared with Detlev Riesner the Max Planck Research Award, the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1993 one and the Richard Lounsbery Award. In 1994 he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. 1995 Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize he was awarded in 1996 Keio Medical Science Prize, 1997, the Prix Charles -Léopold Mayer and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize and the Zülch price. 2009, the National Medal of Science was awarded to him in the USA.

Prusiner studied chemistry and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. His first clinical work as a physician led him in 1968 to the University of California, San Francisco. He interrupted the activities there to do research for three years in the National Institutes of Health ( NIH) in Bethesda (Maryland) on Escherichia coli. He then continued his neurological training continued in San Francisco. Since 1974, Prusiner is a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco.

Since 1983, Prusiner taught in addition Virology at the University of California, Berkeley, since 1988 also in biochemistry at the University of California, San Francisco.

The importance of Prusiner's research performance ( discovery of prions ) is Enlightenment Try the causes of a number of rare related infectious and hereditary diseases, the prion diseases. These include Creutzfeldt -Jakob disease (including the new variant vCJD), kuru, fatal familial insomnia which, Gerstmann - Sträussler - Scheinker syndrome, BSE and scrapie. Prusiner postulated as early as 1982 the importance of prions, but found initially neither hearing nor attention. It took over ten years until his majority view prevailed also in the professional world.