Surely, one of the most fascinating events in our field has been the demonstration of prion diseases (transmissible spongiform encephalopathies) as an international threat to human health. Our group had no prospect of acquiring the safety facilities required to work with these agents, but I did have the good fortune to serve on the US Food and Drug Administration Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies Advisory Committee from 1998 to 2002. We advised about regulatory approaches to preventing prion-disease transmission, particularly in the context of human healthcare (e.g., blood transfusion and blood product processing and distribution). I also served on the National Academies Institute of Medicine, Committee on Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies: Assessment of Relevant Science during 2002 and 2003; we developed a book-length set of recommendations for future TSE research in the USA (Erdtmann and Sivitz 2004 )-its effects on the course of public health research are uncertain.