It’s difficult to make a hero out of Edward Jenner, the doctor who developed one of the earliest types of vaccinations (for smallpox), but did so by experimenting on a nine-year old kid (James Phipps, the son of Jenner’s gardener). That kind of callousness fuels the fire of all sorts of negative stereotypes about scientists, with obvious ramifications in our culture today. But the opposite case is featured here, with the photo of the Australian physician Barry James Marshall (born 1951). Marshall’s desire to find a cure for ulcers led to him deliberately infecting himself with toxic, ulcer-causing bacteria.
Back in the day, the mainstream belief about what caused ulcers was that they were stress-induced. In fact, pharmaceutical companies made a lot of money selling antacid drugs back in the 1980s. The financial profits might have been the reason why Barry Marshall and his colleague Dr Robert Warren’s theory — that it was not stress but rather the bacteria Helicobacter Pylori — attracted little scientific attention.
So Marshall decided to take matters into his own . . . stomach. In 1984, after testing himself to ensure he had no H. Pylori in his gut, he took a culture of the bacteria from a sick patient, swilled it into a brew, and drank it.
Just as he predicted, he vomited, got bloated, and lost his appetite — it was acute gastric illness (yay?).
It turns out, H. Pylori is responsible for the vast majority of ulcers. Barry Marshall and Robert Warren ended up winning a Nobel Prize for their discovery, which completely changed the course of many patients’ lives, since antibiotics could cure their illnesses far better than antacids could.
Study of H. Pylori is not over, however. The bacterium is found in the guts of maybe 50% of adults around the world, and yet not all of those people get sick. The interaction of the gut biome with the body is highly complex, and some scientists have even hypothesized that H. Pylori might have played an important role in preventing allergic responses in human evolution. Scientists are still studying this, and Barry Marshall is still an active scientist: but he isn’t drinking gut bacteria these days.
Source(s): “Helicobacter Pylori: a Nobel pursuit?” Barry Marshall and Paul Adams, _Can J Gastroenterol_ 2007 Nov: 22 (11), 895-896. _Ann Clin Microbial Antimicrob_, “23 years of the discovery of Helicobacter Pylori: is the debate over?” 2005 Oct 31, Niyaz Ahmed. _Medium_, “Challenging Science’s Status- Quo: the Tale of Barry Marshall” Doctor Yak, July 13, 2019.
