Distinguishing science from pseudoscience

When I was in college majoring in microbiology, we were taught that diseases like scrapie, Creutzfeldt-Jacob and kuru were caused by “slow viruses.” Over many years, it has become clear that misfolded proteins, not viruses, are the cause of these and other spongiform encephalopathies. Stanley Prusiner struggled for a long time to convince the scientific […]