Prions jump species barrier

Oh, joy.

Among other things, I guess this might be a big step on the way to proving a mechanism that relates bovine CJD to human CJD.

Nice article. I didn't know that there was a single "prion protein" that was causing all the trouble -- I had assumed there were different misfolded proteins causing different diseases. (Which, in a sense, there are -- the exact structure of the prion protein differs from species to species, which is what this article is about. And perhaps there are other, unrelated proteins that exhibit the same sort of problem, and this is just the first one we've found?)

I'm reading "The Omnivore's Dilemma" - great book btw - but it mentions in passing that we still feed cow nervous tissue to pigs and chickens, which seems kind of scary in light of this article.

Interesting article, but it seems to me that this is one of those instances where science takes nature farther than it might go on its own. I can't see that these tests prove anything other than that we can induce a reaction between prions from one animal brain protein from another. I don't believe that this alone can be used as a predictor of real life occurrences. There are a lot of things that we can force to occur in a test tube that would never occur by themselves.