1. "Soon, the media would nickname the new condition more sensationally for the nervous, aggressive behavior it provoked in normally peaceful animals, calling it mad cow disease. Caricatures of [it] became a staple of British cartoonists" (173).
-----This quote shows how even though a new disease was discovered, people took it as, in a way, a joke. Any disease is very serious and should be worried about, but instead, people were joking around about it and drawing cartoons about it.
2. "The epidemiologists concluded that the combination of lowering processing temperature and abandoning solvent extraction had protected the hardy BSE agent from inactivation and thus spread the disease-much as CJD had spread in contaminated human growth hormone or kuru in undercooked human brain" (177).
-----This quote is significant because the scientists are trying to figure out how the disease occurred and spread in the first place. They are trying to connect it back to CJD and kuru in order to find out more about it.
3. "If BSE wasn't scrapie, British veterinary scientists argued, what was it?" (178).
-----This quote is important because it shows how difficult it was to determine what a disease was. It was difficult to determine what caused it, how it spread, and many other ideas. This troubled scientists a lot and they had difficulty solving everything.
4. "When the heads arrived at the plant, the meat from the cheeks-usually this is poor-quality meat-was trimmed off for use in hamburger, for human consumption" (182).
-----This quote surprised me a lot because I never actually thought about where the meat that we eat comes from. The meat we eat affects us, so it is risky for us to eat the meat from the heads of slaughtered cows.
5. "I just cannot believe a scientist will say: 'In order to find out how big the problem is we are going to see how many people die'"(187).
-----This quote is significant because Lacey is right. It isn't right for a scientist to see if a problem is big or not before working on it. The number of casualties will only rise so they might as well work on a problem once it shows up.
6. "A plant that was making EDT became infected with a nucleating agent that caused its EDT to precipitate in an abnormal crystalline state...It was junk"(196).
---This quote is important because it's an example of how different nucleants would lead to different physical properties, which would lead to catastrophic results. Similarly, diamond could easily turn into graphite depending on the structure/organization.
7. "One of the great breakthroughs in Alzheimer's research came in the 1980's as a direct result of the work of Gajdusek and his colleagues on spongiform disease..." (197).
---This quote demonstrates the importance of Gajdusek to science and how his contributions helped science.
8. "...assuming that the two families were unrelated, the mutations must have arisen independently; they were identical, and they caused identical illnesses" (201).
-----It is important because this showed that the "protein only" hypothesis was even closer to being right.
9. "..TSEs were somehow both genetically controlled and transmissible"(203).
-----This quote is important because it shows how TSE was transferred and the conditions of it. Having it be genetically controlled and transmissible only made it harder for scientists to work on.
10. "Wouldn't you know" (212).
-----This quote is repeated in this chapter and I believe it is important because the suspicions of mad cow disease in humans was around before the discovery that BSE was probably spread to humans by eating beef.
11. "McDonald's decision to switch to Dutch beef at its 660 outlets..."(213).
This quote is important because McDonald's switched their supplier of beef from the British to the Dutch. I thought it was weird how they just switched suppliers instead of cutting beef out as a whole because the mad cow disease didn't just stay in one specific area.
12. "...BSE contamination of lamb and mutton" (215).
-----This quote is significant because it shows that lamb and mutton might also be contaminated because they are also fed the meat-and-bone meal that cows were fed.
13. "However troubling his personal life, [Gajdusek's] authority as a scientist was never in doubt"(216).
-----This quote is important because though Gajdusek faced hardships in his life, his words as a scientist were still believed. His own personal life didn't have an affect on his role as a scientist.
14. "...the six sheep...had each been fed only five hundred milligrams of brain extract...and the fact that so small an oral dose had infected one with BSE did not encourage optimism"(217).
-----This quote is important because it shows how consuming just a small amount of infected meat may lead to the consumer getting BSE.
15. "My colleagues want a simple formula. It's too complex. You need a little piece just big enough to give the pattern" (241).
-----This quote is significant because Gajdusek is saying how getting a simple solution to something is too hard. Your solution needs to be small, but not too small. It has to give an answer to the conflict you're faced upon.
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