Barry Marshall · Helicobacter
Ulcers — stress, or a germ?
That time, that place
A young doctor in Perth, Australia, in the 1980s. Stomach ulcers were common and everyone thought they knew the cause: stress and spicy food. The treatment was acid-reducing pills for life.
A pathologist at the same hospital, Warren, had seen something odd. Curved bacteria in the stomach tissue of ulcer patients.
Why this question
Common sense said the stomach was too acidic for bacteria to live in. So the bacteria must have arrived after the tissue died, everyone assumed.
Marshall turned it around. What if the bacteria came first, and caused the ulcer? Then antibiotics would cure it. No pills for life.
What was found
Nobody believed it. The paper was rejected; conferences laughed. Animals fed the bacteria did not get sick.
In 1984 he took bacteria grown from a patient's stomach and **drank them himself.** Within days came vomiting and gastritis. His stomach was full of the bacteria. Antibiotics cleared it.
Ulcers were not a stress disease. They were an infection. Today a few weeks of antibiotics cure them.
The stomach is too acidic for bacteria; ulcers come from stress and diet
Himself — infected by drinking the bacteria, then cured with antibiotics
He shared the 2005 Nobel Prize with Warren. Helicobacter was later linked to stomach cancer as well, and Korea is among the countries where infection is especially common