By Richard Rhodes. 259 pp. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1997. $24. ISBN 0-684-82360-8.
In the wake of an epidemic of bovine spongiform encephalopathy,or "mad cow disease," in Great Britain that afflicted nearlya million head of cattle, and the recent emergence there andin France of a new variant of Creutzfeldt–Jakob diseasethat resembles bovine spongiform encephalopathy biochemicallyand appears to have been contracted from eating contaminatedbeef, public interest in the transmissible spongiform encephalopathies,a class of fatal neurodegenerative diseases of humans and animals,is understandably high. After reading several laudatory reviewsof Deadly Feasts in the lay press, I approached the book witha mixture of curiosity and skepticism, wondering . . . [Full Text of this Article]
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