The mere shape of them causes cascading exponential system failures. And that shape happens to be very stable and requires a lot of energy to be broken up.
Like some kind of rock that falls from the sky or materializes out of thin air, and slowly the whole village turns into identical inanimate rocks.
I guess the relation would be that the useful state of being is somehow not the most stable.
The US gov claimed, you guessed it, commerce clause.
https://www.animallaw.info/case/creekstone-farms-premium-bee...
> If it makes the jump to humans, were screwed.
The known cases involve "cannibalism", like feeding sheep with ill dead sheep. It probably requires a lot of prions to cause a the disease. Don't try it at home, but a few would cause no symptoms, unless someone eats our brain and they produce more prions and someone east their brain and after a few rounds of cannibalism the concentration of prions is high and cause problems.
The solution is to avoid tight loops, i.e. use the dead sheep scrapes to feed other animals or as fertilizer. Bacteria and bad luck destroy the prions, so after a while they disappear unless you have tight loops that amplify their number.
Also, I think the bodies of the sheep/cow with symptoms are burned or destroyed, because when the concentration of prions is high enough to cause symptoms they can be bad enough for other species.
There have been researchers who have been exposed and it and developed it pretty quickly. Canabalism isn't the only way, such as with wild deer.
"unless someone eats our brain and they produce more prions and someone east their brain and after a few rounds of cannibalism the concentration of prions is high and cause problems."
That's not really how it works. The prions will continue to replicate without the need for multiple rounds of cannibalism. There is no known safe limit of prions.
They just do not get any work done within how known biological life works, but that could perhaps also be read as said whole tree of life relying on a misconfiguration of that building block?
This is wildly unqualified rambling on my part, but I wonder if life could develop that is based on that prion form of proteins.
From my understanding, no. But maybe "life developing" is the wrong metric for correctness?
FWIW, The universe itself seems to be dead-set on entering the most stable configuration of everything.