This excellent brief on variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is set in the place where this horrifying illness first came to light: the U.K. Experts representing both the scientific community and the government debate the link between vCJD and bovine spongiform encephalopathy—mad cow disease—as they review the histories of BSE and vCJD, describe the prion hypothesis and the metal-balance mechanism of prion deformation, and reopen discussion on whether a virus is the infection transmitter of vCJD. But with an incubation period of perhaps decades, are the deaths recorded so far only the beginning? Produced by the Open University. (15 minutes)