Skip to main content

Dr Marshall - Nobel Prize winniner and a fair dinkum Aussie

I remember watching a programme on BBC - back in 1993, can't remember whether it was in Panorama or what!

It has taken another 12 years for mankind to salute Dr Marshall for his pioneering work on Ulcers.

www.helico.com



Nobel discovery 'bloody obvious'
Robin Warren and Barry Marshall
Robin Warren and Barry Marshall's work on ulcers was pioneering
An Australian scientist who has won the 2005 Nobel prize for medicine has said his discovery was "bloody obvious".

Robin Warren, who shares the prize with his colleague Barry Marshall, said he was "thrilled" to be recognised, but had always believed in their work.

The two scientists have described how they were initially shunned for insisting stomach ulcers were caused by a bacterium, not stress.

Dr Marshall finally swallowed the bacterium himself to prove his point.

The pair, who no longer live in the same part of Australia, were actually having a rare dinner together when they received the call from the Nobel committee telling them they had won.

Professor Warren said he was a "little overcome" by the award.

"It is nice to be officially recognised and it gives some sort of a stamp of approval, but we believed it within a few months because it was so bloody obvious," he told reporters.

Dr Marshall said he was shocked.

"I thought it was a new and exciting discovery but I did not believe it was the type of discovery that one got the Nobel prize for," the researcher at the University of Western Australia in Nedlands, Perth, said.

HELICOBACTER PYLORI
H. pylori is found in the stomach of about 50% of all humans
In developing countries almost everyone is infected
Infection is typically contracted in early childhood, and the bacteria may remain in the stomach for life
In most people there are no symptoms
However, it can trigger ulcers in 10-15% of those infected

The two men made their discovery in the early 1980s, but it took a long time to convince the medical community, who viewed them as eccentric.

"The idea of stress and things like that [as the cause of ulcers] was just so entrenched nobody could really believe that it was a bacteria," Dr Marshall told the Associated Press.

"It had to come from some weird place like Perth, Western Australia, because I think nobody else would have even considered it," he said.

Professor Warren is retired from a pathology position at the Royal Perth Hospital.

Dr Marshall, whom his wife describes as having a "dreadful sense of humour", eventually swallowed Heliobacter pylori, the bacterium they believed responsible for stomach ulcers, and became very ill.

Thanks to the their work, stomach and intestinal ulcers are often no longer a long-term, frequently disabling problem.

They can now be cured with a short-term course of drugs and antibiotics.

It is now firmly established that the bacterium causes more than 90% of duodenal (intestinal) ulcers and up to 80% of gastric (stomach) ulcers.





Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Arundhati Roy: The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture

The 2004 Sydney Peace Prize lecture delivered by Arundhati Roy, at the Seymour Theatre Centre, University of Sydney. Peace & The New Corporate Liberation Theology It's official now. The Sydney Peace Foundation is neck deep in the business of gambling and calculated risk. Last year, very courageously, it chose Dr Hanan Ashrawi of Palestine for the Sydney Peace Prize. And, as if that were not enough, this year - of all the people in the world - it goes and chooses me! However I'd like to make a complaint. My sources inform me that Dr Ashrawi had a picket all to herself. This is discriminatory. I demand equal treatment for all Peace Prizees. May I formally request the Foundation to organize a picket against me after the lecture? From what I've heard, it shouldn't be hard to organize. If this is insufficient notice, then tomorrow will suit me just as well. When this year's Sydney Peace Prize was announced, I was subjected to some pretty arch rema

"Global Doubts as Global Solutions"

by Amartya Sen Melbourne Town Hall Tuesday, May 15, 2001, 6pm 1. Misery and Resignation We live in a world of unprecedented prosperity - incomparably richer than ever before. The massive command over resources, knowledge and technology that we now take for granted would be hard for our ancestors to imagine. But ours is also a world of extraordinary deprivation and of staggering inequality. An astonishing number of children are ill nourished and illiterate as well as ill cared and needlessly ill. Millions perish every week from diseases that can be completely eliminated, or at least prevented from killing people with abandon. The world in which we live is both remarkably comfortable and thoroughly miserable. Faced with this dual recognition, we can go in one of several different directions. One line of thinking takes the form of arguing that the combination of processes that has led to the prosperity of some will lead to similar prosperity for all. The advocacy of this perspective c

Prisoners in the land of the free

Better be careful if you are in the US and want to buy a ciggy lighter. You could be arrested for conspiring to detonate the nuclear arsenal the US has been piling up over the years. America's attitude towards anyone with a Middle Eastern origin is not too shocking. In Chinua Achebe's wonderful piece of writing 'Things Fall Apart' -- there is a passage where African tribal men sit around eating and drinking, contemptuously referring to white men, comparing their white skin to lepers’ white skin. One can understand the ignorance of the African tribals; they thought all white men are lepers! If America as a nation is as ignorant as the African tribals were 100 years ago... it is time to salvage their souls from the dark depths of ignorance. UN should set up an Educational Aid programme to help the ignorant and ill-educated American population, which includes the President of the US. 3 Texas men arraigned on terror charges CARO, Mich. — Three Texas men were arraigned Satur