In the early 1980s in Perth, Australia, a young doctor named Barry Marshall teamed up with pathologist Robin Warren, who had spotted curved bacteria in stomach biopsies. Marshall became convinced those bacteria caused stomach ulcers. Nearly everybody said that was impossible. His papers were rejected, his results were doubted, and he was told the bacteria were harmless. He couldn’t get an animal to catch the infection, so he used himself. He drank the bacteria, got sick, and a biopsy proved the infection and the damage to his stomach. Years of patient work followed, and in 1994 a major medical meeting agreed that the treatment for ulcers was getting rid of the bacteria. In 2005 he and Warren won the Nobel Prize.
