Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy and
the other TSEs are definitely some
of the few unknowns left in veterinary and medical science, there
seems to be a multitude of new questions created with everyone
that is solved. Even the presumed agent
is an exercise in biological irony. It is one of the simplest
forms of organic molecule, a million fold smaller than the tiniest
cell and seemingly harmless, and yet it can systematically tear
apart the most complex machine known to science, the brain, as
though it were a notebook of saturated paper. How it spreads and
multiplies can only be theorised because it happens on such a
minute level that even the most advanced microscopes yet developed
can only just make out the complete protein, let alone tell one
form from the other.
Doing the research for this project has surely opened my eyes
to complexities that I never imagined existed in the interaction
of substances in the body, and how the changing of one in the
most basic of ways as its shape can turn it from a benign necessity
of the body into a killer. I hope you have enjoyed looking at
this project as I have putting it together and that it is as eye
opening for you as the research was for me.
