Short Wave Folgen

In the mornings, Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel's first job is to get their two garrulous kids awake, fed and out the door to daycare and kindergarten. They then reconvene at the office and turn their focus to their all-consuming mission: to cure, treat, or prevent genetic prion disease. Prions are self-replicating proteins that can cause fatal brain disease. For a decade, Sonia Vallabh has been living with the knowledge that she has a genetic mutation that will likely cause in her the same disease that claimed her mother's life in 2010. Upon discovering she had the mutation, Sonia and her husband made a massive pivot: They went from careers in law and urban planning to earning their Ph.D.s, and founding a prion research lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. On today's episode, Sonia and Eric talk with Short Wave's Gabriel Spitzer about what it's like to run a lab with one's spouse, cope with the ticking clock in Sonia's genes, and find hope in a bleak diagnosis.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The first time Sonia Vallabh understood something was very wrong with her mother Kamni was on the phone on her mom's 52nd birthday. She wasn't herself. By the end of that year, after about six months on life support, Kamni had died. The disease she died from would upend Sonia and her husband Eric's lives, and send them on a careening journey toward a completely new calling: to prevent or cure the disease that's stalking Sonia's family." Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel join Short Wave to tell their story in this second of three episodes on prion disease.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Prions are biological anomalies – self-replicating, not-alive little particles that can misfold into an unstoppable juggernaut of fatal disease. Prions don't contain genes, and yet they make more of themselves. That has forced scientists to rethink the "central dogma" of molecular biology: that biological information is always passed on through genes. The journey to discovering, describing, and ultimately understanding how prions work began with a medical mystery in a remote part of New Guinea in the 1950s. The indigenous Fore people were experiencing a horrific epidemic of rapid brain-wasting disease. The illness was claiming otherwise healthy people, often taking their lives within months of diagnosis. Solving the puzzle would help unlock one of the more remarkable discoveries in late-20th-century medicine, and introduce the world to a rare but potent new kind of pathogen. For the first episode in a series of three about prion disease, Short Wave's Gabriel Spitzer shares the science behind these proteins with Emily Kwong, and explains why prions keep him awake at night.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy