Nobel
prizes for prion research were won by:
1976 Nobel
Prize in medicine – D. Carleton Gajdusek
for
establishing that the disease Kuru was a transmissible human encephalopathy
1997 Nobel
Prize in medicine – Stanley Prusiner
for
establishing the protein-only hypothesis for prion transmission
2002 Nobel
Prize in chemistry – Kurt Wüthrich
for
developing NMR techniques that allowed him to visualize the 3-D structure of
proteins in solution, including the prion protein