An Australian Doctor Drank a Petri Dish to Prove Ulcers Were an Infection

In 1981 Robin Warren, a pathologist at Royal Perth Hospital, kept seeing the same spiral-shaped bacterium in stomach biopsies from ulcer patients. The bacterium was not supposed to live there. The accepted view was that the human stomach, with its hydrochloric acid, was sterile, and ulcers were a disease of stress, alcohol, and excess acid.

Warren persuaded a young registrar, Barry Marshall, to look at the question. The two cultured the bacterium successfully in 1982 — by accident, after a long Easter weekend left a sample plate incubating five days instead of two — and named it Helicobacter pylori. They published the finding in The Lancet in 1984.

The response was scepticism. Drug companies were selling tens of billions of dollars of acid-suppression medicines like cimetidine and ranitidine; an infectious cause would suggest a one-shot antibiotic cure instead. Marshall could not convince an editor or a research grant committee. He also could not infect a pig, a rat, or a baboon: H. pylori turned out to colonise only humans.

In July 1984 Marshall drank a flask of cultured H. pylori — about a billion organisms — without telling his ethics committee or his wife. Within ten days he had developed acute gastritis. A biopsy showed the bacterium colonising his stomach. He treated himself with antibiotics and recovered.

The self-experiment did not immediately convert the field. Acceptance took another decade and several large trials. Marshall and Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Antibiotic regimens, costing under fifty dollars, now cure most peptic ulcers — a disease that, as recently as the 1990s, was treated with surgery and lifelong drugs.