Barry Marshall
Drank a flask of bacteria to prove that ulcers were an infection, not stress
Barry Marshall was born in 1951 in Kalgoorlie, a gold-mining town in Western Australia, the son of a fitter and a nurse. He trained in medicine in Perth, and in 1981, as a trainee looking for a research project, was introduced to a pathologist named Robin Warren who had noticed curved bacteria in stomach biopsies from patients with gastritis.
The textbooks said that nothing could live in the acid of the stomach, and that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy food and excess acid. The treatment was antacids for life, or surgery. Marshall and Warren cultured the bacteria, now called Helicobacter pylori, and found them in almost every patient with ulcers. The medical world was not interested. Their abstract was rejected by an Australian gastroenterology conference in 1983, and drug companies making antacids had no reason to welcome a cure.
Marshall could not prove cause and effect: he could not infect pigs or rats. In 1984, without telling the hospital ethics committee or his wife, he drank a culture of the bacteria. Within days he was vomiting, exhausted and had foul breath; a biopsy showed severe gastritis. He took antibiotics and recovered. It was still another ten years before the US National Institutes of Health accepted that ulcers should be treated as an infection.
Marshall and Warren shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005. A course of antibiotics now cures a disease that once meant a lifetime of pain, and the bacterium's link to stomach cancer has saved many more lives.