Emily Chan
In 1983, Marshall presented the theory at a meeting in the Royal Australian College of Physicians in Perth, Australia. The experience went poorly, and his research was rejected by the professionals in attendance.
“I did the presentation, and the gastroenterologists didn’t believe a bit of it. Someone sort of stood up and said, ‘Barry, you know, people with duodenal ulcers don’t have gastritis—’ But I had done so much literature searching I knew that they were wrong. So it was difficult to tell your senior bosses, trained at the Mayo Clinic, that they were wrong,” Marshall said.
It also challenged traditional treatments, which included antacid medicines that were commonly prescribed to patients suffering from stomach ulcers.
Pharmaceutical companies were not thrilled over the researchers’ assertion that taking a short round of affordable antibiotics would cure the bacterial infection that caused the ulcers.
Marshall knew they had to conduct an animal experiment to persuade the medical community. They started with pigs, but that didn’t work out.
“The thing about pigs is they’re born in such filth, they’re covered with bacteria and have very strong immunity. So, we couldn’t get the bacteria to take! At the end of that experiment, it had gotten nowhere, and I’d wasted six months,” Marshall said.
So, he decided to drink a culture of H. pylori. Within a week, he developed stomach pain and other symptoms of gastritis. Two endoscopies confirmed that he had gastritis and ulcers. Then, he took antibiotics and cured himself.
Ultimately, the discovery earned him and Warren the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2005.
