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Barry Marshall

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Barry James Marshall, FRS FAA (born 30 September 1951 in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia) is an Australian physician and Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Western Australia. He is well-known for proving that the bacteria Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most stomach ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine which held that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid.

Professor Marshall (Medicine and Pharmacology) completed his undergraduate medical degree at UWA in 1974. He met Robin Warren, a pathologist interested in gastritis, during internal medicine fellowship training at Royal Perth Hospital in 1981. Together, the pair studied the presence of spiral bacteria in association with gastritis. The following year (1982), they performed the initial culture of H. pylori and developed their hypothesis related to the bacterial cause of peptic ulcer and gastric cancer.

The H. pylori theory was ridiculed by the establishment scientists and doctors, who did not believe that any bacteria could live in the acidic stomach. To force people to pay attention to this theory, Marshall drank a petri-dish of the bacteria and soon developed gastritis. His symptoms disappeared after two weeks, but he took antibiotics to kill the remaining bacteria at the urging of his wife, since halitosis is one of the symptoms of infection. [1] Marshall's illness and recovery, based on a culture of organisms extracted from a patient, partially fulfilled Koch's postulates for H. pylori and gastritis. This experiment was published in 1984 in the Australian Medical Journal and is among the most cited articles from the journal.

After this work at Fremantle Hospital, Marshall did research at the University of Virginia, USA, before returning to Australia in 1997. He held a Burnet Fellowship at the University of Western Australia from 1998-2003 [2].

In 2005, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine to Dr. Marshall and his long-time collaborator Dr. Warren "for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease". Professor Marshall continues research related to H. pylori and runs a molecular biology lab at UWA.

Recently, Marhsall has been criticised for appearing in an infomercial touting the book "World's Greatest Treasury of Health Secrets" sold by Bottom Line Press, which is not a medical publisher.

Other awards

When Barry Marshall was twenty-one he was a state yo-yo champion.

References

Quotes

  • "Everyone was against me, but I knew I was right."
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