How the Cows Turned Mad by Maxime Schwartz, University of California Press, $24.95/拢17.95, ISBN 0520235312 Reviewed by Debora MacKenzie
IT鈥橲 amazing how quickly BSE has faded from public prominence, sliding from Europe-wide panic to footnote in a few years. But the disease is still out there, and we still don鈥檛 know how many people will die from the variant CJD that it causes 鈥� or from whatever surprises those ever-shifting, species-jumping prions will unleash next.
In How the Cows Turned Mad, Maxime Schwartz, former head of Paris鈥檚 Pasteur Institute, reminds us that the many manifestations of prion disease, from kuru in people to BSE in cattle, are all variations on the same deformed prion protein. His history of how science unravelled this truly unorthodox disease is told well, if a bit primly, devoid as it is of scandal and gossip. He also gives more consideration to the role of Louis Pasteur and his successors than most English-speaking readers will be accustomed to, which is no bad thing.
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Schwartz does, however, badly neglect the politics of the mad cow crisis in Europe and the disease鈥檚 probable worldwide spread. His handling of the most recent scientific developments seems a bit rushed and, of course, cannot be completely up to date. But the rest of the history is an admirably concise tale of the long battle to understand a strange disease.