I think that debate is mostly being waged by people who don&#x27;t want to accept that our existing models of disease are woefully simplistic.  I find it mainly amusing because the previous battle similar to this was from people who thought nucleic acids couldn&#x27;t be coding molecules while proteins could!<p>I was at UCSF when Prusiner was doing some of his best work on prions- it typically involved infecting mice and waiting 2 months to get a result that could be analyzed molecularly.<p>Anyway, this model system: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fungal_prion" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Fungal_prion</a> 
is pretty well understood, and it&#x27;s generally hoped that understanding its molecular behavior will go a long way to understanding mammalian prions.