Two Australian scientists Monday won the Nobel Prize in medicine for discovering that a common bacterium causes most stomach inflammation and ulcers.
The “remarkable and unexpected” 1982 discovery by Robin Warren and Barry Marshall overthrew existing scientific dogma that stomach problems were caused by emotional stress and opened up a new area of research into whether infections may cause a host of diseases, the Nobel Prize committee said.
Warren, 68, and Marshall, 54, who experimented on himself to prove the pair’s theory, learned of their honor while having dinner together with family members in a pub in Perth, Australia.
The pair will share $1.3 million.
In 1979, while working as a pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital, Warren noticed small, curved bacteria in biopsies from the lower part of the stomachs of about half of the patients he examined.
Marshall became interested in Warren’s work while working at the hospital in 1981. He began trying to grow and identify the organism. After many frustrating attempts, he succeeded only when he inadvertently left slides unattended over the Easter holiday in 1982 and returned to find colonies thriving, enabling him to identify it as a previously unknown spiral-shaped bacteria, subsequently dubbed Helicobacter pylori.
The pair then went on to show the organism was present in virtually all patients with gastritis and ulcers they examined, leading them to propose that it was the cause.
Marshall decided to try to prove their case with a dramatic test – he drank a culture of bacterium. A week later, he began suffered acute symptoms of gastritis and biopsies showed he had been infected by the organism and had the condition.
Marshall then ingested a combination of bismuth and antibiotics that eradicated the infection, leading to a series of experiments demonstrating that antibiotics could treat ulcers and gastritis.
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