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A review by simlish
The Family that Couldn't Sleep by D.T. Max
3.0
A book about prion diseases. It came out long enough ago that I wonder if there's been any advances, but prion research takes so long that I kind of doubt it. It was okay -- it took me about thirty pages to get hooked, but once I was past that, it was readable enough. I was in middle school when the mad cow outbreak happened, so it was something I was vaguely aware of, and it was very interesting to get more detail about both that specific exchange, and prion diseases in general.
What I found most interesting was the discovery of a matching genetic base pair that makes people more vulnerable to prion diseases, and the supposition that prion diseases caused the taboo against cannibalism, since cannibalism is the easiest way to get them and that matching base pair became a lot rarer after a big historic bottleneck.
I don't feel that I really grasped that much about prions, but I also got the impression that no one really does, so. At least I'm in good company.
What I found most interesting was the discovery of a matching genetic base pair that makes people more vulnerable to prion diseases, and the supposition that prion diseases caused the taboo against cannibalism, since cannibalism is the easiest way to get them and that matching base pair became a lot rarer after a big historic bottleneck.
I don't feel that I really grasped that much about prions, but I also got the impression that no one really does, so. At least I'm in good company.