Talk:Prion

Prion has been listed as one of the Natural sciences good articles under the good article criteria. If you can improve it further, please do so. If it no longer meets these criteria, you can reassess it.

Article milestones
Date	Process	Result
March 10, 2006	Good article nominee	Listed
March 21, 2007	Peer review	Reviewed
March 2, 2010	Good article reassessment	Kept

Current status: Good article

Molecular Biology: Genetics / MCB

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Ideal sources for Wikipedia's health content are defined in the guideline Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) and are typically review articles. Here are links to possibly useful sources of information about Prion.

PubMed provides review articles from the past five years (limit to free review articles)
The TRIP database provides clinical publications about evidence-based medicine.
Other potential sources include: Centre for Reviews and Dissemination and CDC

This article has been mentioned by a media organization:

"ذره پروتئینی شگفت‌آور The Wonderful Proteinaceous Particle". Shargh. February 1, 2004.

This article was reviewed by Nature (journal) on December 14, 2005.
Comments: It was found to have 7 errors.
For more information about external reviews of Wikipedia articles and about this review in particular, see this page.

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Shy-Drager syndrome (SDS) or multiple system atrophy (MSA): 1st new human prion disease in 50 years

I'll leave it up to those who monitor this Wiki page to add this in:

The newly described addition to the prion disease canon, Shy-Drager syndrome (SDS) or multiple system atrophy (MSA), was first recognised in the early 1960s and has many features in common with Parkinson's disease.

The most important of these is that a protein known as α-synuclein (α-syn) accumulates in the brain, in both Parkinson's and SDS/MSA.

from: http://www.businessinsider.com/a-newly-discovered-brain-disease-may-point-to-something-disturbing-about-alzheimers-and-parkinsons-2015-9

Bioweapon section

Must this section really sound so ghoulish? Is the section necessary at all?

Agreed - this section seems inappropriate in multiple ways, and I think it should be removed. For one, tone-wise it reads as if it is promoting the use of prions as bioweapons, especially since it is not describing any previous use as such (of which there is none). On top of that, it just seems highly unnecessary and tangential to the focus of the article. Polynumeric (talk) 13:57, 18 September 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there. I'm the user who started that section. In case you didn't know, Wikipedia _DOES NOT_ censor anything. Here is the quote from the Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not-page: "Wikipedia may contain content that some readers consider objectionable or offensive‍—‌even exceedingly so. Attempting to ensure that articles and images will be acceptable to all readers, or will adhere to general social or religious norms, is incompatible with the purposes of an encyclopedia." --Pek~enwiki (talk) 20:21, 27 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree it's a thing to be taught that may be necessary. Wikipedia DOES NOT INCLUDE censorship Random kid who likes science (talk) 14:57, 25 May 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Continuing this discussion, this section does seem necessary, but I believe it's better to note how it could be expressed with more relevant evidence or application than just "it could be used as a bioweapon." Technically, wouldn't forced hunger result in prion transmission due to a lack of sterilized food sources? Voltairienne (talk) 18:12, 26 April 2025 (UTC)Voltairienne[reply]

The part I'm stuck on is how it's entirely speculative. There are a miniscule number of publications talking about how maybe possibly perhaps someone could arguably potentially use prions as a weapon--but the lack of actual real-world examples of usage, stockpiling, or even serious development of prion-based weapons argues against expounding on the idea here. Prions just aren't very good bioweapons, with their inconvenient delivery, low infectivity, and long latency. The result is that low-impact sources are wagging the encyclopedia's dog.

We don't have a section in our article on golf balls about how terrorists or state actors could use golf balls as projectile weapons—even though a well-struck ball can kill (and sometimes has.)

Editors arguing for inclusion cite WP:NOTCENSORED, but I would argue that the more relevant policies are WP:NPOV, WP:WEIGHT, and even WP:NOTCRYSTAL. We should drop the section on bioweaponry not because we wish to censor the viewpoint, but because the viewpoint is a negligibly-small - even fringe - part of the discourse on the topic and therefore not ripe for inclusion in Wikipedia at this time. TenOfAllTrades(talk) 18:38, 26 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Biology

What is metabolism 2409:4071:4E8E:F3B8:0:0:8589:4F15 (talk) 05:12, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

metabolism is not in the article. You need to be more specific. Graham Beards (talk) 07:54, 22 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

amyloid mention

>Amyloids are also responsible for several other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease and Parkinson's disease.[12][13]

wasn't that found to be wrong recently? 2A02:8070:6287:E0C0:7069:2168:A092:FD4E (talk) 00:56, 16 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Citation 63 link goes to unrelated website

The link for Citation #63 goes to a website called "men's journal", so it should be fixed, but it appears a lot in the article, so we might have to work together to fix it. TypoEater (talk) 14:57, 2 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]