Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, an American virologist, studied kuru among the Fore people of the South Fore region of Papua New Guinea in the 1950s. Kuru was a fatal degenerative brain disease that spread through the community, and it was linked to the custom of eating the dead's brains during funeral rites. Gajdusek showed that the disease could be transmitted, which meant it was caused by an unusual agent that could persist for years before symptoms appeared. Neurologist Stanley Prusiner later identified that agent as the prion, a misfolded protein, and Gajdusek shared the 1976 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.