An explanation for the epidemic of coronary artery disease?

Science builds slowly. It might be compared—fancifully—to a Northern dawn beginning to light up the sky on an overcast morning. Not often are there flashes of lightning, but sometimes there are. This week there may be three. Two papers in Nature provide convincing experimental evidence that prion diseases can pass from cows to man, causing new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (p 831). Meanwhile, a paper in the BMJ provides a possible explanation for one of the 20th century's great epidemics—that of coronary artery disease (p 837).

The epidemic of …