Nobel Prize Awarded for Stomach Ulcer Discovery

gollum123 writes to tell us the BBC is reporting that the Nobel prize for medicine has been awarded to two Australian scientists for their work with ulcers. Their research has shown that the majority of ulcers are caused by bacteria and can be cured with a short-term course of drugs and antibiotics. From the article: "Dr Marshall proved that H. pylori caused gastic inflammation by deliberately infecting himself with the bacterium. The Nobel citation praises the doctors for their tenacity, and willingness to challenge prevailing dogmas."

Comments

I'm surprised he didn't end up dead

[SpacePunk]

He actually found a cause, and proposed a cure. Most modern barbers are happy to continually treat symptoms since that's what brings in the big bucks.

Re:1982!

[slavemowgli]

Don't be silly. The Nobel prize is pretty much the highest award you can receive in the fields where it is awarded - so it's certainly understandable that the committee wants to make sure that those who receive the prize really *have* made a ground-breaking discovery that deserves the prize. And waiting for some time to see what influence a discovery will have is pretty much the only way to find out.

That being said, yes, the discovery was made in 1982, but it wasn't even *confirmed* until 1987, so it's not just the Nobel prize committee, either.

About time!

[ashridah]

About time this happened.

My mother was the unfortunate sufferer of a stomach ulcer for almost 30 years of her life.

One day, her doctor finds out she has it (after all, who keeps trying to fix a 30 year old condition that hasn't killed you yet?), and gives her the newly recognised course of broad-spectrum anti-biotics & neutralisers (since the stomach is kinda hard to treat, acidic n all, tends to destroy the anti-biotics before they have an effect ;) ), and a month later, she's fine!

It's scary how long it took for the standard opinion to get torn down, and how simple the final answer really was! In hindsight, the original theory sounds decidedly suspicious. Stress, indeed.

ashridah

Re:1982!

[Phreakiture]

The Nobel Prize committee is almost as slow as Slashdot. The actual discovery, per TFA, was made in 1982.

Similar to what I was going to post. I have known this since 1996 or so, when I heard a presentation by a Dr. Barach. He was saying that the cure for ulcers is tetracycline (antibiotic) and bismuth. In short, antibiotics with a shot of Pepto-Bismol should do it.

The trouble with Dr. Barach knowing this is that, being a veterinarian, he was forbidden to use this knowledge on people. We have this taboo, which is sometimes codified into law (as it was where he practiced) that one person cannot be licenced as both a DVM and an MD.

Re:So Ulcers..

[Phreakiture]

So Ulcers . . . Are not caused by stress?

Peeve alert: starting sentences in the subject line and finishing them in the body is annoying. Just so you know.

Anyway, what I really am posting about, though, is that stress weakens the immune system, giving the bacteria the ability to take hold. There are other, similarly-behaved things, such as eczema (a skin affliction), which is viral, but will mostly only manifest when you are stressed badly.

Re:1982!

[Wannabe Code Monkey]

This is cool becasue Barry Marshall was a junior doctor who saw something he couldn't explain and decided to investigate and test it, in classic geeky fashion.

This is what religious fundamentalists/people who push intelligent design will never understand. From the article: The Nobel citation praises the doctors for their tenacity, and willingness to challenge prevailing dogmas. That's the beauty of true science, it's a quest for truth regardless of what was previously "known". If you discover something that conflicts with earlier thinking, not only are you recognized, but you're celebrated. This is because truth, not of centuries of tradition, is the motivating factor behind science.

I mean, just think about what faith is... No matter how much evidence goes against what you believe, you will still believe it anyway. Simply because it was told to you by your parents and your local wizard. It must be pretty amazing that out of the hundreds of religions all over the face of the Earth you happened to be born into the one "right" religion. Science doesn't care where you come from, or who your parents are, it's all the same search for truth. Science is much more unifying than religion.

Re:Diagnosing "Conditions", not finding Causes

[the eric conspiracy]

Mod parent up.

This is a very insightful view of what is a real problem with the current practice of medicine . There are many 'syndromes' that are considered to be triggered by lifestyle when actually there are deeper root causes. All too much of medicine is based on statistical studies that show correlations - and correlations do not in any way provide causality.

The real breakthrough in the discovery of a bacterial cause of ulcers is the spotlight it places on the worth of really finding the root cause of a problem rather than just hand waving and correlative studies. Hopefully the medical profession and medical research takes this lesson seriously because it provides a path to real progress in treatment of many debilitating serious chronic diseases. We spend too much time treating symptoms rather than auses and it drives the cost of medical care sky high.

Faith vs. Dogma

[Stu Charlton]

I mean, just think about what faith is... No matter how much evidence goes against what you believe, you will still believe it anyway.

Faith is an essential means to remain optimistic in an uncertain world. Faith is belief in the face of doubt / the absurd. Faith is arguably very important to scientific discovery, lest one doubt their hypotheses.

On the other hand, blind believe in the face of evidence strikes me more as dogmatism. And there certainly has been a lot of that in the history of science.

Re:Faith vs. Dogma

[@madeus]

Faith is an essential means to remain optimistic in an uncertain world. Faith is belief in the face of doubt / the absurd. Faith is arguably very important to scientific discovery, lest one doubt their hypotheses.

Faith however, is not essential and I would argue it's not particularly desirable. I prefer to practice realism (to the best of my ability) than delude myself with a reality distortion field built on expectations that are by definition unrealistic and founded on false premises.

You can still be a kind, generous, altruistic and forgiving person and not have faith, but because you believe it's an appropriate way to behave and has net benefits (in that it can be beneficial to you, and to society as a whole because it encourages reciprocal behaviour, as indeed it does).

Those pushing religion tend not to be keen on that idea though, they prefer to push the notion that you need to latch on to a specific 'faith' system to support you lest you fall of the wagon. I believe that approach is misguided and potentially dangerous.

'Faith' as a solution is at best a kludge and at worst a red herring, that can lead down a dark path with disastrous repercussions on a global scale. Addressing root causes such as inequality, injustice, and persecution are more effective approaches at dealing with the things that drive people to 'faith' based groups in the first place.

I do not believe the world can ever be 'a perfect place' - history and logical deduction seem to suggests otherwise, as any social environment that relies on co-operation also leaves open the opportunity for another to profit by shafting others in the group, meaning there will always be an incentive not to co-operate (The Scorpion and the Frog) - and that's to say nothing of human nature, chemical imbalances and behaviour in exception circumstances.

There is clearly room for significant improvement in the way we interact with each other, particularly on a global scale however I do not believe faith based systems are an effective means of progression to that point. The acceptance of an unfavourable circumstance and a logical extrapolation of the most effective way to resolve an issue are more helpful than any system based on sheer optimism.

With specific regard to:

Faith is arguably very important to scientific discovery, lest one doubt their hypotheses

I think if you don't have any doubt about your hypotheses there is something seriously wrong with your approach. Even if your right you ought to have doubts about it and set out to prove yourself wrong until you are certain you are right, that's how hypotheses progress to being regarded as 'proven'.

Re:COLD FUSION research will be awarded with Nobel

[shis-ka-bob]

Cold fusion is far from real, at least the Pons and Fleischmann style of fusion in duterium doped palladium. If you are going to produce a meaasureable amount of heat from nuclear fusion, you are going to produce a measureable amount of neutrons. I used to work for the DOE and we spend months carefully trying to reproduce P&F's work. We noted an excess of counts in the neutron detectors only once, and that was during a thunderstorm when the electronics could be expected to be exposed to electrical noise. The BF3 detectors can produce spurious counts and they are very sensitive to changes in the discriminator threshhold, so this wasn't a surprise. We found no excess of neutrons within the limits of our detectors.

Concerning an excess of heat. Don't forget that putting interstitial hydrogen into a metal is an exothermic process. We could generate heat, in fact we scared the h*ll out of ourselves with one of the 'deuterium gas in titanium' experiments. It generated so much heat that we were afraid about the strenght of the container. Pure hydrogen exploding into air could really ruin your day. This also produced counts in a neutron detector, but these were consistent with the known temperature sensitivity of the detectors. So, we did see heat, but only heat that could be understood in terms of basic chemistry.

I will state that I was rather skeptical of the whole topic, but I did work for the DOE and I would have been happy to be proven wrong. Free, clean energy is worth more than my pride. So, even if the odds were a million to one against success, the DOE is justified in studying this topic. There just were not results that could be reproduced. As Fermi noted, 'Anything worth doing once is worth doing twice.' If you can't do it twice, it isn't science.

Please, prove that this works. But extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. Finding a way to overcome nuclear forces (potential barriers of millions of electron volts) with electrostatic forces at THERMAL energies (tens of milli electron-Volts)is an extraordinary. Perhaps something like sonoluminescence can produce very high localised temperatures in a jar of water, but this produces light with a few electron volts. The probability of particles tunneling across a barrier varies as exp( -E/kT) as long as E is millions of electron volts and kT is around 60 meV, you have a number like exp(-10^7). These basic considerations make CF an extraordinary claim. Where is the extraordinary evidence?

Re:1982!

[n6kuy]

Hmmm..
I'll bet what you need to make you feel better is some of Professor Smith's Patented Emulsified Snake Oil (cures all manner of discomfort and sickness, you know).

Here, have a swig...