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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."
The Nobel Prize committee is almost as slow as Slashdot. The actual discovery, per TFA, was made in 1982.
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
Infect the researchers.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
Smart thinking. You either get a Nobel Prize or a Darwin Award. A win-win situation.
Years before this discovery was made, stomach ulcers like so many other health problems always used to be labelled by the doctors as a "stress" or "lifestyle" related condition, without any proof that anything more definite than that was really directly responsible. Even to this day, it is amazing that medicine still has literally thousands of loosely-defined medical "conditions" and "syndromes" which have no known specific cause but which are nonetheless given proper names for doctors to use as convenient diagnostic labels. Doctors are still trained to diagnose these "conditions", rather than to think harder about possible underlying cause(s). The two scientists in this story were brave enough to challenge the conventional wisdom of their peers that stress and lifestyle factors cause stomach ulcers. It's interesting to wonder how many other "conditions" are actually caused by undetected bacteria or viruses which are waiting to be discovered by scientists prepared to challenge the prevailing dogma.
Scroogle
He infected /himself/? I thought that was what TA's and Post-grads were for.
The Nobel prize, on the other hand, is awarded purely for groundbreaking research, usually on the basis of a single seminal piece of research but sometimes something more like a 'lifetime acheivement' award. In almost all cases, it is awarded long after the original research, when the impact can be properly judged in the historical context. For many Nobel lauriates, the work they received the prize for was an exception in an otherwise ordinary career. And in some cases, (the physics prize for the 3K microwave cosmic background comes to mind) the recipents were not actually scientists, but just stumbled upon the discovery by accident.
First: Does H. pylori eradication lead to increased incidence of Barrett's esophagitis and esophageal cancer? Maybe. The jury is still out. The Japanese have just published a pretty comprehensive review (Japanese Journal of Clinical Medicine. 63(8):1383-6, 2005 Aug)on the subject. The increase in one may be more common with the eradication of the other. Fine. Are they casually related? That's a more complex question that I think the research is sorta investigating. I dont think Scientific American really has the answer.
But that's not the major issue. Stomach ulcer is a condition that PRIOR to the triple treatment (bismuth + antibiotics + acid inhibitors) would take months to years to heal. Some anecdotal stories as long as 6 years. More. Sometimes never. Leading to serious, serious complications that have even worse prognoses. You see what I'm getting at here. Quality of life years lost are huge, affecting huge chunks of the population. Known risk of causing stomach cancer, perforation of your guts (think your guts spilling into your abdominal cavity) and iron deficiency due to chronic bleeding just for a start. Now we're saying... OK. It MAY result in reflux, eosophageal cancer and Barrett's (cells in your eosophagus changing morphology).
Hardly the "eliminating H. pylori is worse than the symptoms created by too much of it." If anything, what this might suggest is that there might be some unwanted complications to altering the internal milieu of the stomach, and they should be addressed. Full stop. Sky's not falling yet, pal.
It's similar to Lynn Margulis' discovery that the mitochondria were originally their own organism and have since been integrated into our cells. She first made that claim in the 1980's, and only now has it started to become accepted dogma. It takes time to change minds, and she's still working on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis
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'.