Prions
<p>"Stanley B. Prusiner of the University of California
at San Francisco announced that he had isolated the “hypothetical
infectious agent” which he implicated in these diseases. He named
these agents “prions,” a term he coined by combining the words
proteinaceous (because they only contain protein, i.e. no DNA or RNA),
infectious and viron. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or
Medicine in 1997 for his discovery." </p>
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