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9781400062454

Family That Couldn't Sleep : A Medical Mystery

by
  • ISBN13:

    9781400062454

  • ISBN10:

    1400062454

  • Edition: 1st
  • Format: Hardcover
  • Copyright: 2006-09-01
  • Publisher: Random House
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Summary

For two hundred years a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. In England, cows attack their owners in the milking parlors, while in the American West, thousands of deer starve to death in fields full of grass. What these strange conditionsincluding fatal familial insomnia, kuru, scrapie, and mad cow diseaseshare is their cause: prions. Prions are ordinary proteins that sometimes go wrong, resulting in neurological illnesses that are always fatal. Even more mysterious and frightening, prions are almost impossible to destroy because they are not alive and have no DNAand the diseases they bring are now spreading around the world. In The Family That Couldn't Sleep, essayist and journalist D. T. Max tells the spellbinding story of the prion's hidden past and deadly future. Through exclusive interviews and original archival research, Max explains this story's connection to human greed and ambitionfrom the Prussian chemist Justus von Liebig, who made cattle meatier by feeding them the flesh of other cows, to New Guinean natives whose custom of eating the brains of the dead nearly wiped them out. The biologists who have investigated these afflictions are just as extraordinaryfor example, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a self-described "pedagogic pedophiliac pediatrician" who cracked kuru and won the Nobel Prize, and another Nobel winner, Stanley Prusiner, a driven, feared self-promoter who identified the key protein that revolutionized prion study. With remarkable precision, grace, and sympathy, Maxwho himself suffers from an inherited neurological illnessexplores maladies that have tormented humanity for centuries and gives reason to hope that someday cures will be found. And he eloquently demonstrates that in our relationship to nature and these ailments, we have been our own worst enemy. From the Hardcover edition.

Author Biography

D. T. Max was born and raised in New York City and graduated from Harvard in 1984. He has been an editor at Washington Square Press, Houghton Mifflin, and The New York Observer. For the past eight years, he has reported mostly for The New York Times Magazine. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, and Chicago Tribune. He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife, their two young children, and a rescued beagle named Max.

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION xiii
PART I: ALONE IN THE NIGHT
Chapter 1 THE DOCTORS' DILEMMA: Venice, 1765
3(16)
Chapter 2 MERINO MANIA: England, 1772
19(20)
Chapter 3 PIETRO: The Veneto, 1943
39(14)
PART II: PUSHING BACK THE DARK
Chapter 4 STRONG MAGIC: Papua New Guinea, 1947
53(14)
Chapter 5 DOCTA AMERICA: Papua New Guinea, 1957
67(18)
Chapter 6 MONKEY BUSINESS: Bethesda, Maryland, 1965
85(14)
Chapter 7 "BOH!": The Veneto, 29
99(16)
Chapter 8 A WONDERFUL PROBLEM FOR A CHEMIST: San Francisco, late 1970's to early 1980's
115(16)
Chapter 9 CONVERGENCE: The Veneto, 1983
131(22)
PART III: NATURE PUSHES BACK
Chapter 10 APOCALYPSE COW: Britain, 1986
153(16)
Chapter 11 OINKIES: Britain, 1996
169(18)
Chapter 12 THE WORLD ACCORDING TO PRIONS: United States/Britain, 1970's to present day
187(10)
Chapter 13 DID MAN EAT MAN?: Worldwide, 800,000 B.C.E.
197(12)
Chapter 14 COMING TO AMERICA?: United States, present day
209(28)
PART IV: AWAKENINGS?
Chapter 15 FOR THE VICTIMS OF FATAL FAMILIAL INSOMNIA: The Veneto, present day
237(12)
Afterword: A Note on the Author 249(8)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 257(4)
NOTES 261(26)
INDEX 287

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