Barry Marshall
Barry Marshall
Barry James Marshall, AC, FRACP, FRS, FAAis an Australian physician, Nobel Prize laureate in Physiology or Medicine, and Professor of Clinical Microbiology at the University of Western Australia. Marshall and Robin Warren showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pyloriis the cause of most peptic ulcers, reversing decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused by stress, spicy foods, and too much acid. This discovery has allowed for a breakthrough in understanding a causative link between Helicobacter pylori infection and stomach...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth30 September 1951
CountryAustralia
In medical school, it's quite possible to get taught that you can diagnose everybody and treat everything. But then you get out in the real world and find that for most patients walking through your door, you have no idea what's causing their symptoms.
Dad always explained the car engine when he repaired it, and he had many technical books, so I was making electromagnets by age eight as well as reading my mother's medical and nursing books. I suspect I was born with a boundless curiosity, and this was encouraged through my childhood.
I was hoping I was going to get an ulcer. I was hoping to boost my research career by developing a bleeding ulcer.
Everything that's supposedly caused by stress, I tell people there's a Nobel Prize there if you find out the real cause.
It was so frustrating to see ulcer patients having surgery, or even dying, when I knew a simple antibiotic treatment could fix the problem.
The politics have always been difficult in medicine. There is some truth in the way medical practice is portrayed in TV dramas.
There is no other prize in any country that carries the prestige that a Nobel bestows.
To gastroenterologists, the concept of a germ causing ulcers was like saying that the Earth is flat.
Before the 20th century, the ulcer was not a respectable disease. Doctors would say, 'You're under a lot of stress.' Nineteenth-century Europe and America had all these crazy health spas and quack treatments.
I am told by others that I have a lateral-thinking, broad approach to problems, sometimes to my detriment. In school, my grades always suffered because I was continually mucking about with irrelevant side issues, which I often found to be more interesting.
I was born in 1951 in Kalgoorlie, a prosperous mining town 370 miles east of Perth, Western Australia. Kalgoorlie was a gold rush town which sprang up in the desert after the Irishman Paddy Hannan struck gold there in 1892.
If humans evolved in a tiny area of Africa, they only saw plants and animals within a 100-kilometre radius for a million years. When they began to migrate, there would have been different animals and plants - and potentially a lot of allergy issues.
If you say you are the Safe Food Foundation, that means you're implying that your food is safer or that every other bit of food that we're eating is not safe. If they were a really honest foundation, they would call themselves the anti-GM foundation.
My favourite book as a child was an old 'Newne's Children's Encyclopaedia' which my grandfather had bought just before World War II and donated to our family after seeing how interested we were in it. Each volume had special chapters called 'Things Boys can Do.' My brothers and I would pick out interesting projects.