In 1984, when Dr Barry Marshall drank a culture of bacteria to prove to his colleagues that it was bacteria and not stress that was the main cause of stomach ulcers, little did he know that his conviction would win him a Nobel Prize for medicine 20 years later.
Marshall, a University of Western Australia researcher who shares the prize with Dr Robin Warren, said this win vindicated their stand that it was the bacterium Helicobacter pylori that was behind the peptic ulcer disease.
“Thanks to the pioneering discovery by Marshall and Warren, peptic ulcer disease is no longer a chronic, frequently disabling condition, but a disease that can be cured by a short regimen of antibiotics and acid secretion inhibitors,” said the Nobel Assembly of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
“It is nice to be officially recognized and it gives some sort of a stamp of approval, but we believed it within a few months because it was so bloody obvious,” said Warren after the prize was announced. While 54-year-old Marshall is a researcher at the University of Western Australia in Nedlands, 68-year-old Warren is now a retired pathologist from the Royal Perth Hospital.
The discovery was made in 1982, a year after Marshall and Warren teamed up to work on the theory. Warren, who was then a pathologist conducting gastric biopsies, found curved rod-shaped bacteria in some samples of inflamed, ulcerated tissue. He then teamed up with Marshall, who was then a trainee of internal medicine, to study the observation further.
At the time they made this discovery, the widespread belief was that strong gastric juices did not allow anything to grow inside the stomach. “So everybody believed there were no bacteria in the stomach. ... When I said they were there, no one believed it,” said Warren.
“After about three years, we were pretty convinced that these bacteria were important in ulcers, and it was a frustrating time for the next 10 years though because nobody believed us,” Marshall said, adding, “The idea of stress and things like that was just so entrenched, nobody could really believe that it was bacteria. It had to come from some weird place like Perth, Western Australia, because I think nobody else would have even considered it.”
After drinking the culture of the bacteria, Dr Marshall developed a stomach infection, but as a healthy youngster, he didn't develop peptic ulcers. “I didn't actually develop an ulcer, but I did prove that a healthy person could be infected by these bacteria, and that was an advance because the skeptics were saying that people with ulcers somehow had a weakened immune system and that the bacteria were infecting them after the event,” he said.
With the Nobel Prize, the duo will receive a cash reward of US$ 1.3 million, a diploma, and a gold medal at the award ceremony that will be held in Stockholm on December 10.
