Talk:Tikvah Alper

Central Dogma

This is a very nice article but it contains an error.

The article states: "Alper and colleagues[10] reported these properties of the scrapie agent - a finding that was greeted with astonishment in many quarters, for it appeared to contravene the central dogma that holds that replication (and hence the growth of the disease and its infectious properties) can only proceed via DNA."

This is a misunderstanding of what the Central Dogma is and I would not include any reference to the central dogma here. What the article author may be thinking of is a combination of the cell theory and Koch's postulates. I'm not sure. But to be safe, just stick to the facts of the matter.

Instead write something like this: Alper and colleagues[10] reported these properties of the scrapie agent - a finding that was greeted with astonishment in many quarters, for it contravened the belief that all infectious diseases propagate in the body through the multiplication of cells or viruses by means of DNA or RNA."

Eperotao (talk) 01:10, 5 October 2013 (UTC)

I want to retract this suggestion to omit reference to Central Dogma. But the statement still seems wrong to me as written. Wasn't it the discovery that the beta sheet version of the scrapie prion protein could TURN normal the alpha helix version into a beta sheet what contravened the central dogma? The idea that the information in the folding of a protein could change the folding of another version of the same protein violated that idea that information can only flow from DNA to RNA to protein (not protein to protein).

Eperotao (talk) 20:00, 6 October 2013 (UTC)