Oct 12
Scientists, Once Shunned, Win Nobel Prize
by Chris Christensen Add commentscategories: Medicine, News
Everyone knows that ulcers are caused by stress and that once you get them you will probably always have them. No? Well, that used to be what everyone knew. Robin Warren and his colleague Barry Marshall were shunned by the medical community when they suggested that ulcers were actually caused by the bacterium Helicobacter Pylori. The BBC says:
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.
Dr Marshall finally swallowed the bacterium himself to prove his point.
