Alan Dickinson obituary

Geneticist who carried out groundbreaking research into the behaviour of diseases including scrapie and CJDThe geneticist Alan Dickinson, who has died aged 87, was aware even as a young man that he might not live to answer the question that dominated his career: what causes mind-rotting diseases such as scrapie in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in people? Such was the risk faced by a scientist who in the 1950s chose to specialise in a field then known as “slow viruses”.As