Barry Marshall

Due to other hospital work, the lab technicians did not have time to immediately throw out the 31st test on the second day, and so it stayed from Thursday through to the following Monday.

In that sample, they discovered the presence of H. pylori.

They later found out that H. pylori grow more slowly than two days, and the stomach cultures were not contaminated by other organisms.

Barry James Marshall (born 30 September 1951) is an Australian physician, Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, Professor of Clinical Microbiology and Co-Director of the Marshall Centre at the University of Western Australia.

Marshall and Robin Warren showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) plays a major role in causing many peptic ulcers, challenging decades of medical doctrine holding that ulcers were caused primarily 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 cancer.

Marshall was born in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia and lived in Kalgoorlie and Carnarvon until moving to Perth at the age of eight.

His father held various jobs, and his mother was a nurse.

He is the eldest of four siblings.

He married his wife Adrienne in 1972 and has four children.

He attended Marist College, Churchlands for his secondary education and the University of Western Australia School of Medicine, where he received a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (MBBS) in 1974.

In 1979, Marshall was appointed Registrar in Medicine at the Royal Perth Hospital.

He met Dr. Robin Warren, a pathologist interested in gastritis, during internal medicine fellowship training at Royal Perth Hospital in 1981.

Together, they both studied the presence of spiral bacteria in association with gastritis.

In 1982, they performed the initial culture of H. pylori and developed their hypothesis on the bacterial cause of peptic ulcers and gastric cancer.

It has been claimed that the H. pylori theory was ridiculed by established scientists and doctors, who did not believe that any bacteria could live in the acidic environment of the stomach.

In 1982 Marshall and Warren obtained funding for one year of research.

The first 30 out of 100 samples showed no support for their hypothesis.

However, it was discovered that the lab technicians had been throwing out the cultures after two days.

This was standard practice for throat swabs where other organisms in the mouth rendered cultures unusable after two days.

In 1983 they submitted their findings thus far to the Gastroenterological Society of Australia, but the reviewers turned their paper down, rating it in the bottom 10% of those they received that year.

After failed attempts to infect piglets in 1984, Sam Wang reported that Marshall, after having a baseline endoscopy done, drank a broth containing cultured H. pylori, expecting to develop, perhaps years later, an ulcer.

He was surprised when, only three days later, he developed vague nausea and halitosis, due to the achlorhydria.

There was no acid to kill bacteria in the stomach and their waste products manifested as bad breath, noticed by his wife.

On days 5–8, he developed achlorhydric (no acid) vomiting.

On day eight, he had a repeat endoscopy, which showed massive inflammation (gastritis), and a biopsy from which H. pylori was cultured, showing it had colonised his stomach.

On the fourteenth day after ingestion, a third endoscopy was done, and Marshall began to take antibiotics.

Marshall did not develop antibodies to H. pylori, suggesting that innate immunity can sometimes eradicate acute H. pylori infection.

Marshall's illness and recovery, based on a culture of organisms extracted from a patient, fulfilled Koch's postulates for H. pylori and gastritis, but not for peptic ulcers.

This experiment was published in 1985 in the Medical Journal of Australia and is among the most cited articles from the journal.

After his work at Fremantle Hospital, Marshall did research at Royal Perth Hospital (1985–86) and at the University of Virginia, USA (1986–present), before returning to Australia while remaining on the faculty of the University of Virginia.

Marshall was quoted as saying in 1998 that "everyone was against me, but I knew I was right."

On the other hand, it has also been argued that medical researchers showed a proper degree of scientific scepticism until the H. pylori hypothesis could be supported by evidence.

He held a Burnet Fellowship at the University of Western Australia (UWA) from 1998 to 2003.

Marshall continues research related to H. pylori and runs the H. pylori Research Laboratory at UWA.

In 2007, Marshall was appointed Co-Director of The Marshall Centre for Infectious Diseases Research and Training, founded in his honour.

In addition to Helicobacter pylori research, the Centre conducted varied research into infectious disease identification and surveillance, diagnostics and drug design, and transformative discovery.

His research group expanded to embrace new technologies, including Next-Generation Sequencing and genomic analysis.

Marshall also accepted a part-time appointment at the Pennsylvania State University that same year.

He established the Noisy Guts Project in 2017 – a research team dedicated to investigating new diagnostics and treatments for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.