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Kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and Transmissible Presenile Dementias

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Slow Virus Infections of the Central Nervous System

Abstract

We have long used scrapie virus as our model, in the hope of elucidating the molecular structure and growth characteristics of at least one of these unconventional viruses. We tend to be more conservative than most other groups in our interpretation of the data and call these agents “viruses” in most of our publications. We argue that they are viruses, as viruses were originally defined, and then we play the semantic trick of calling them the “unconventional group of viruses.” As our hypotheses on the minimal number of codons the virus ribonucleic acid (RNA) or deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) should have in order to code for a virus transcriptase or virus structural proteins collapse, and as other conventionally assumed behavior of the virus on ultraviolet (UV) inactivation or hot formaldehyde treatment of RNAse and DNAse treatment is found not to occur, we are pushed further and further into a difficult position with the scrapie virus which was so beautifully pointed out by Dickinson.

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Authors
  1. D. Carleton Gajdusek
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  2. Clarence J. Gibbs Jr.
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institut fuer Virologie, Verbascher Landstr. 7, 8700, Wuerzburg, West Germany

    Volker ter Meulen M.D.

  2. College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, 630 West 168th Street, 10032, New York, N.Y., USA

    Michael Katz M.D.

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© 1977 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Gajdusek, D.C., Gibbs, C.J. (1977). Kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, and Transmissible Presenile Dementias. In: ter Meulen, V., Katz, M. (eds) Slow Virus Infections of the Central Nervous System. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-9883-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-9883-0_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4612-9885-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4612-9883-0

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