Ending cannibalism stopped a deadly brain-wasting disease called kuru. But evolution already had devised a cure for the prion disease, a new study shows.
Some of the Fore people of Papua New Guinea have a naturally occurring variant of a brain protein that prevents kuru and related diseases, researchers report online June 10 in Nature. “We’ve never seen anything before that is completely protective,” says study coauthor John Collinge, a neurologist and molecular biologist at University College London. “It just switches off the disease.”