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For the second time in four months, researchers have reported autopsy results that suggest Alzheimer's disease might occasionally be transmitted to people during certain medical treatments-although scientists say that neither set of findings is conclusive. The latest autopsies, described in the Swiss Medical Weekly on January 26, were conducted on the brains of seven people who died of the rare, brain-wasting Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). Decades before their deaths, the individuals had all received surgical grafts of dura mater-the membrane that covers the brain and spinal cord. These grafts had been prepared from human cadavers and were contaminated with the prion protein that causes CJD.

The team was grafting skin from one strain of mice to another. The new skin tended to get destroyed by the recipient animals' immune systems. But when the group injected cells from the donor mice into developing fetuses, the mice that were born were much more likely to accept the skin graft. It seemed they had been primed to the foreign cells while in the womb, and developed a tolerance.