Researching prions and their diseased counterparts could be extremely beneficial to the health of not only humans, but all living things. Take for example Mad Cow disease. If one was able to control how PrPc is structured and maintain that structure, even with a mutation present, this disease would be curable. What could also be important information is that some sheep whose encoding is different than that of a normal sheep become immune to developing scrapie. If scientists are able to pinpoint exactly how this happens and how to reproduce this effect in other variants of the disease, then production of PrPsc would halt.
The reading we had on prions by Prusiner touched on this on page 36, however, to cure a prion disease in a human, there would have to be many controversial tests. I found the debate on human testing very interesting because it can be viewed as necessary to cure an infectious disease, but can also be inhumane.
While I found the posted articles very interesting, I also found them a bit difficult to understand. This site gives a somewhat quick, easy-to-understand explanation of prions and the struggle to make sense of them.
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/madcow/faces.html)
I also found a nice description of how the prions are thought to take over normal PrP proteins. (http://science.howstuffworks.com/zoology/all-about-animals/mad-cow-disease4.htm)
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