How Now Mad Cow

Mad Cow Disease or Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy interests me for many reasons. It's gotten so much press and media attention despite being incredibly rare. Indeed, people actually stopped eating beef whereas something like smoking has become so ingrained in our society that we don't even think twice when we see someone light a cigarette. But prion disease (mad cow is a type) is so weird because it involves infectious proteins. What? This goes against decades of biological dogma. Infectious organisms are things like viruses, bacteria, fungi. Aren't nucleic acids the only things that can self-replicate? How does an infectious protein make more copies of itself; there's no such thing (as far as we know) as reverse translatase. And how could prion diseases be sporadic, inherited, and infectious? Prions aren't destroyed by proteases, heat, radiation, or formalin. It just seems so bizarre and scary. Now that we know the mechanism of prion diseases, it hasn't stopped fascinating me. The very concept of something creating new copies of itself makes me think of those robots-take-over-the-world movies. I really realize Nature is a brilliant, cunning, and ingenious engineer.