The Family That Couldn't Sleep

A Medical Mystery

By: D.T. Max

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins

Publisher's summary

For 200 years, a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. In England, cows attack their owners in the milking parlors, while in the American West, thousands of deer starve to death in fields full of grass.

What these strange conditions, including fatal familial insomnia, kuru, scrapie, and mad cow disease, share is their cause: prions. Prions are ordinary proteins that sometimes "go wrong", resulting in neurological illnesses that are always fatal. Even more mysterious and frightening, prions are almost impossible to destroy because they are not alive and have no DNA. And the diseases they bring are now spreading around the world.

In The Family That Couldn't Sleep, essayist and journalist D. T. Max tells the spellbinding story of the prion's hidden past and deadly future. Through exclusive interviews and original archival research, Max explains this story's connection to human greed and ambition, from the Prussian chemist Justus von Liebig, who made cattle meatier by feeding them the flesh of other cows, to New Guinean natives whose custom of eating the brains of the dead nearly wiped them out.

The biologists who have investigated these afflictions are just as extraordinary. They include Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a self-described "pedagogic pedophiliac pediatrician" who cracked kuru and won the Nobel Prize, and another Nobel winner, Stanley Prusiner, a driven, feared self-promoter who identified the key protein that revolutionized prion study.

©2006 D.T. Max (P)2006 Tantor Media, Inc.

Critic reviews

"Very timely and compellingly written." (Booklist)

You Won't Sleep

D. T. Max has written a biography of sorts about a family plagued by insominia. The malady remained a mysteria from the 1760s when it was first reported to the 1990s when it was recognized as a genetic disorder. Max, a gifted science writer, empathetically illuminates the story of the afflicted family by linking it to the English mad-cow epidemic, medical and biological theory, and related issues.

Ultimately, I look for books that inform, are well written and well read. This book fills the bill on all three counts. I picked it up for the discipline of learning about topics outside my field of reference. I was not disappointed.

Very entertaining and enlightening

Wonderfully written account of prions: the diseases associated with them; the nobel laureates who study them; people affected; and how the problem began, was discovered, and has spread. Like a PBS special and a novel rolled into one, you learn quite a bit while being thoroughly entertained. A page turner.

Fascinating

look into the frightening world or prion diseases.

Title misleading

The title is a bit misleading. The book is informative, but more about Mad Cow Disease then the actual condition and lives of the family that is afflicted with this disease.

Ay caramba!

Prions. Before reading The Family That Couldn't Sleep, I had no idea what those were. Since finishing this book, I've developed an equal sense of respect and fear of them. "Prions are ordinary proteins that sometimes go wrong, resulting in neurological illnesses that are always fatal. Even more mysterious and frightening, prions are almost impossible to destroy because they are not alive and have no DNA." How's that for a mouthful?

At the center of this book is a Venetian family with a deadly legacy of Fatal Familial Insomnia dating back to the 1700s. FFI is a disease that strikes its victims in middle age, and causes complete insomnia, exhaustion, and eventual death within a matter of months. Max, himself a victim of a degenerative neurological disorder, expounds on the history of prions, theories on their origins, and the culminative affects on peoples and lands throughout the world. Cast your mind back to the Mad Cow Disease scare in Europe, or even the first cases of scrapie among sheep in Europe in the 18th century; these can be linked back to very bad little prions.

I really enjoyed the break down of scientific terms and I especially loved the history part. I find that I almost always enjoy the style and flow of books that are written by journalists, which is probably why it put me in mind of Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan and Lost in Shangri-la by Mitchell Zuckoff. A great read whether you're scientifically inclined, or just along for the adventure ride! Another plus: I now kinda understand the scientific references Amy Farrah Fowler, a fictional neurobiologist on the show The Big Bang Theory, periodically makes to her research work. Winning!

Fascinating and terrifying

Prion diseases are now my worst nightmare. This is much scarier than any horror story I have ever read, and it's all true. I am amazed by how little we know about these diseases and how to treat them, even now.

Prions are not a virus or a bacteria, but you can catch them. They are not genetic, but prion diseases run in families. You can't kill them because they aren't alive, but they propagate and spread quickly, invading and destroying. Prions are the most interesting, terrifying, and fascinating diacoveries of modern science.

This book explores them, and it tells several stories about various prion diseases all over the world, throughout time. The story is well written yet approachable, even for such a scientific, difficult to understand topic. The narration is fine, not particularly bad or amazing. The book is dry in some parts, but that's to be expected given the subject matter.

This was interesting enough that I might even consider listening again. However, it didn't quite go deep enough for my taste, and I found myself still wanting more by the end. I also wish it had periodic updates to reflect new discoveries in the field.

My review is not a synopsis of the book, but rather my opinion of it. I received a free copy of this audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review

Interesting, but could have been better

heard about this book (and the issues it addresses online). it's a very interesting story, but it rambles and jumps around a little to much for me to say it's a great book. very interesting to learn about if you want to know about prions

Great read

Super interesting, I was totally involved in the entire time. I love the historical truth to this book. One of the best in my collection, easily.

Title is a misnomer

The title of this book and the medical mystery it implied intrigued me and I was excited to listen to it. It wasn’t long before I felt that the title of the book was a misnomer. I would be surprised if there was one hour of cumulative time on the discussion of the Italian family who “couldn’t sleep”. A more apt title would be something like, Prion Disease: A History of Discovery in Animals and Humans. But then, who's going to read that?

The book dealt more with the study of prions—the smallest known infectious agent which is a naturally occurring protein molecule that lacks nucleic acid. It is these prions that are at the root of this family’s illness called Fatal Family Insomnia (FFI). It starts with sweating and constricted pupils the size of pin points and ultimately prevents family members with FFI from sleeping, leading to death. Members of this family have a 50/50 chance of passing this hereditary illness on to their offspring.

The majority of the book discusses the history and pathology of such prion-related diseases such as mad cow disease in cows, scrapies in sheep, kuru in humans (cannibal-related), Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome and Alzheimer’s and NOT the subject of the book as titled.

Everyone knows how horrible Alzheimer’s is with the loss of mind that accompanies it. Just imagine how awful it would be to have Alzheimer’s but you still know what is happening to you. That is what it is like for this family. FFI is horrendous and rare (only 40 families in the world have it) and it is this rarity that prevents the needed money being allocated to it for researching its cure.

It’s a sad family story, but again, and disappointingly so, the "family" is minor player in the saga. It was an okay book if you’re looking for a medical mystery but it was not what I had signed on for. The author had me at title but I still felt mislead on this one from the beginning.