Alan Dickinson obituary

Geneticist who carried out groundbreaking research into the behaviour of diseases including scrapie and CJD

The geneticist Alan Dickinson, who has died aged 87, was aware even as a young man that he might not live to answer the question that dominated his career: what causes mind-rotting diseases such as scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in people? Such was the risk faced by a scientist who in the 1950s chose to specialise in a field then known as “slow viruses”.

As these disorders, joined in the 1980s by mad cow disease, were reclassified over the years as transmissible spongiform encephalopathies and, latterly, “prion” diseases, the research group that Dickinson founded in Edinburgh trod a unique path. Whereas rival labs elsewhere in the UK and abroad attempted to reduce diseased brains until all that was left was the pathogen, and then routinely failed, Dickinson preferred to study clinical symptoms and patterns of brain damage caused by scrapie in generations of specially inbred mice, then gradually deduce what kind of infectious agent might be causing it.

Continue reading... November 23, 2017 at 08:06PM