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Two Australians win Nobel Prize in medicine
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-03 21:00
Australians Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize in
medicine on Monday for showing that bacterial infection, not stress, was to
blame for painful ulcers in the stomach and intestine.
Nobel Committee secretary Hans Jorvall
announces that the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine has been awarded to Barry
J. Marshall and Robin Warren. The Australian research duo were awarded the
prize for their breakthrough research on how to treat stomach ulcers with
antibiotics. [AFP] |
The 1982 discovery
transformed peptic ulcer disease from a chronic, frequently disabling condition
to one that can be cured by a short regimen of antibiotics and other medicines,
the Nobel Prize committee said.
Thanks to their work, it has now been established that the bacterium
Helicobacter pylori, which the new Nobel winners discovered, is the most common
cause of peptic ulcers.
"This was very much against prevailing knowledge and dogma because it was
thought that peptic ulcer disease was the result of stress and lifestyle,"
Staffan Normark, a member of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska institute,
said at a news conference.
The Australians' proposal of a microbial cause instead was "very
controversial and unexpected," said Goran Hansson, who chairs the Nobel
committee that awards the medicine or physiology prize. "They had to spend the
first few years convincing the rest of the world."
Marshall even deliberately infected himself with the bacterium in 1985 and
showed that it caused stomach illness, noted Lord May of Oxford, president of
Britain's Royal Society. Marshall suffered inflammation, which can lead to an
ulcer.
Marshall, 54, and Warren, 68, celebrated their new honor
with champagne and beer.
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