quote:Two Australian scientists today won the Nobel Prize in Physiology and 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.
"The discovery that one of the most common diseases of mankind, peptic ulcer disease, has a microbial cause, has stimulated the search for microbes as possible cause of other chronic inflammatory conditions," the 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.
"Obviously, it's the best thing that can ever happen to somebody in medical research. It's just incredible," Marshall, now at the University of Western Australia in Nedlands, told the Associated Press.
Warren, now retired, told the news agency he was "very excited, also a little overcome" by the news. The pair will share $1.3 million.
Warren was the catalyst for the pair's work when in 1979, while working as a pathologist at the Royal Perth Hospital in Western Australia, he 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. The pair's claim was met by deep skepticism, in part because no one thought bacteria could survive in the harsh environment.
"It was thought at the time that stress and lifestyle were the causes of peptic ulcer disease," said Staffan Normark, a member of the Nobel Assembly, at a news conference at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.
Marshall finally 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.
"At the time, there were no animals that were susceptible to this bacteria. So Barry Marshall instead drank a culture of Helicobacter pylori," Normark said. "He could in this experiment show the bacteria was causing gastritis in the stomach, as evidenced by an inflammation."
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.
"It is now firmly established the Helicobacter pylori causes more than 90 percent of duodenal ulcers and up to 80 percent of gastric ulcers," the Nobel committee wrote.
You know, it really is rare for people in any field to think 'outside the box', yet it seems to be about the only common denominator in most major breakthroughs. That and opportunity/coincidence. (Both, of course, followed by painstaking research and documentation, mind.)
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