The Doctor Who Drank a Petri Dish to Win

In June 1984, Barry Marshall, a junior physician at Royal Perth Hospital, scraped a colony of Helicobacter pylori off a culture plate, suspended it in beef broth, and drank it. He had not told the hospital ethics committee. He had told his wife only after the fact.

The orthodoxy he was attacking was a wall. Peptic ulcers, every gastroenterology textbook said, were caused by stress and excess acid. The treatments were lifelong acid suppressants — cimetidine had become the world's first billion-dollar drug — or, for severe cases, a vagotomy, in which surgeons cut the nerve that signals the stomach to make acid. Marshall and the pathologist Robin Warren had been arguing since 1982 that a curved bacterium they kept finding in ulcer biopsies was the actual cause. Their 1984 paper in The Lancet was met with what Marshall later called profound skepticism. Animal models had failed; pigs and rats wouldn't catch it.

Three days after drinking the brew, Marshall had bad breath and nausea. By day eight he was vomiting clear fluid each morning, his stomach no longer making acid at all. A repeat endoscopy showed florid gastritis, and the biopsy grew H. pylori. He took antibiotics and recovered.

The self-experiment, written up in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1985, did not convince the field overnight. Adoption took most of a decade. But it forced the question into the open. Marshall and Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Today, a two-week course of antibiotics cures the infection that used to mean a lifetime of pills, or a knife.