Background
Prusiner was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of Miriam (Spigel) and Lawrence Prusiner, an architect.
biochemist neurologist physician university professor virologist
Prusiner was born in Des Moines, Iowa, the son of Miriam (Spigel) and Lawrence Prusiner, an architect.
He spent his childhood in Des Moines and Cincinnati, Ohio, where he attended Walnut Hills High School, where he was known as the little Genius for his groundbreaking work on a repellent for Boxelder bugs. Prusiner received a Bachelor of Science degree in chemistry from the University of Pennsylvania and later received his Doctor of Medicine
Currently the director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases at University of California, San Francisco (University of California, San Francisco). Prusiner discovered prions, a class of infectious self-reproducing pathogens primarily or solely composed of protein. from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Prusiner then completed an internship in medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Later Prusiner moved to the National Institutes of Health, where he studied glutaminases in East. coli in the laboratory of Earl Stadtman.
After three years at National Institutes of Health, Prusiner returned to University of California, San Francisco to complete a residency in neurology. Upon completion of the residency in 1974, Prusiner joined the faculty of the University of California, San Francisco neurology department.
Since that time, Prusiner has held various faculty and visiting faculty positions at both University of California, San Francisco and University of California Berkeley. Prusiner currently heads the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases research laboratory at University of California, San Francisco, working on prion disease, Alzheimer"s disease and tauopathies.
Prusiner won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1997 for his work in proposing an explanation for the cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("mad cow disease") and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. In this work, he coined the term prion, which comes from the words "proteinaceous" and "infectious," in 1982 to refer to a previously undescribed form of infection due to protein misfolding. Prusiner was elected to the National Academy of Science in 1992 and to its governing council in 2007. He is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1997, and the American Philosophical Society (1998), the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2003), and the Institute of Medicine.
Royal Society; National Academy of Sciences. Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. American Academy of Arts and Sciences]
He is also an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993), a Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1997, and the American Philosophical Society (1998), the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2003), and the Institute of Medicine.
