Medical students learn classic pathology cases to help them identify diseases. One such case involved human cannibals who ended up with tremors, seizures, balance disorders, and hallucinations after eating nervous tissue. The fatal diseases, Kuru disease and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD), which are akin to mad cow disease, are caused by mysterious transmissible proteins known as prions. These proteins can be found in neurons. When a prion becomes pathologically misshapen, an infectious change reaction occurs where prions in the host become shaped the same way as the infecting prion. Could prions play a role in evolution?
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