Land mines kill or maim an estimated 26,000 people every year, many of them civilians. The Nobel committee honored Williams and the group for starting ““a process which in the space of a few years changed a ban on anti-personnel mines from a vision into a feasible reality.’’ The group represents more than 1,000 organizations around the world.
ICBL was little known until Princess Diana made it her favorite charity this year, traveling to Bosnia and Angola on its behalf. Now, with a Peace Prize tucked under her arm, Williams plans to try to pressure President Clinton into signing on–the United States is notably absent from the roster of signa- tories, and the Clinton administration is adamant that it will remain so.
The politically charged Nobel Peace Prize is often the most controversial award. (Others will be announced this week.) But this year it may be the prize for Physiology or Medicine. Stanley Prusiner, a 55-year-old neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, won for his discovery of prions (pronounced PREE-ons), twisted lengths of protein that may cause an odd, fatal class of diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs). Mad-cow disease is the most famous, but the sheep disease scrap-ie and several rare human diseases are also TSEs; all kill by eating holes in the brain.
But many of Prusiner’s fellow researchers say he is a slick PR man who–even worse–may be just plain wrong. Disease transmitters like bacteria and viruses all carry genetic material, DNA or RNA. But in 1982 Prusiner suggested the heretical notion that the germ that caused TSEs did not, that it was a simple protein. Other researchers had suggested the possibility, but Prusiner found what seemed to be the responsible protein and named it: prion, an acronym for proteinaceous infectious particle.
It turned out that mammals’ brains are full of prion protein. So Prusiner proposed that when this normal protein comes into contact with ““pathogenic’’ prion protein–the evil mutant twin–the good protein changes into the bad version. At some point the evil prions start chewing up the brain. But no one knows how prions convert from good to bad, or how they destroy brain tissue. Even weirder, they seem to have ““strains,’’ variations usually due to mutation in genes, which the prion isn’t supposed to have.
Even critics agree that Prusiner’s characterization of prion proteins was brilliant. But they don’t agree that he has proven prions actually cause disease. No one, they point out, has been able to jigger a normal prion protein into the ““evil’’ shape, or conformation, and produce an infection.
This kind of debate is pretty standard in science. It’s just that Nobels don’t usually get dropped into the middle of them. The Nobel committee thinks the debate’s over, and Prusiner won. ““Otherwise he wouldn’t have gotten it,’’ says Gosta Gahrton, chair of the Nobel committee for Physiology or Medicine. ““The committee is sure.''
And where does Prusiner stand? ““If these people who have made so many nasty remarks had data that refutes the prion concept,’’ he says, ““I would have had to say, “Yes, you’re right,’ but that data doesn’t exist.’’ After all, winning a Nobel means never having to say you’re sorry.
