A doctor drank a broth of bacteria to prove what really causes ulcers.
For decades, stomach ulcers were blamed mainly on stress, spicy food and too much acid. In 1984 the Australian doctor Barry Marshall, struggling to convince colleagues otherwise, swallowed a culture of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori. Within days he was ill. In 2005 the work earned a Nobel Prize.
In 1981 Marshall, a young trainee at Royal Perth Hospital, teamed up with the pathologist Robin Warren, who was interested in spiral-shaped bacteria he had seen in stomach samples from people with gastritis. The prevailing view was that no bacteria could survive in the acid of the stomach, and that ulcers were a physiological problem rather than an infection. Marshall and Warren suspected the bacteria were driving both gastritis and ulcers.
Just growing the organism was a struggle. The first 30 of 100 samples showed nothing, because lab staff threw cultures out after two days, as was routine for throat swabs. Then one sample happened to be left from Thursday until the following Monday, and the bacterium appeared. It simply grows more slowly than expected. In 1983 the pair submitted their findings to an Australian gastroenterology society, whose reviewers rejected the paper, ranking it in the bottom tenth of that year's submissions.
After attempts to infect piglets failed, Marshall had an endoscopy to confirm his stomach was healthy and then drank the culture. He expected an ulcer years later. Instead, within three days he had nausea and bad breath, then vomiting, and an endoscopy on day eight showed severe inflammation with H. pylori thriving. He then took antibiotics. Published in 1985, the experiment showed the bacterium could cause acute gastritis, though not on its own that it caused ulcers. Later work showed that treatment to kill the bacteria could cure duodenal ulcers.
The story is often told as a lone rebel against a closed-minded establishment, and Marshall has said that everyone was against him. Others argue that doctors were showing proper scientific scepticism until the evidence arrived. Either way, it is now firmly established that many ulcers are infections, and H. pylori is also linked to stomach cancer. Marshall and Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
Source: Wikipedia — Barry Marshall · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
