In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was an outbreak of CJD among patients who had been treated with human growth hormone that had been prepared by pooling pituitary gland tissue from large numbers of cadavers [28]. At least one cadaver must have had, or been incubating, CJD, and the result was that patients given doses of the contaminated batch of human growth hormone died horribly of this invariably fatal neurological degenerative disease. This was one of the great modern medical disasters, now behind us because genetically engineered human growth hormone has replaced the natural product.