Re: O/T Barry Marshall: I don't do authority

[Guest guest]

Thanks for sharing that article....It is inspiring to hear about someone who

resists authority and perseveres in doing great things!

If students especially heard more of these stories in school, more would be

inspired to also break out of the pack.

Deb

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 9:22 PM, tigerpaw2c <tigerpaw2c@...> wrote:

> January 17, 2009

>

> http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article5524990

> .ece

>

> Times Online - UK

>

> Barry Marshall: I don't do authority

> The Australian doctor who found a cure for stomach ulcers believes

> that being a rebel is good for medicineSimon Crompton

> As legendary medical stories go, Barry Marshall swigging a test tube

> full of potentially lethal bacteria to prove his controversial

> theory stands somewhere between Fleming, the discoverer of

> penicillin, spotting mould on his Petri dishes and Dr Henry Jekyll

> transforming himself into Mr Hyde.

>

> As a 32-year-old upstart gastroenterologist at Royal Perth Hospital,

> West Australia, Marshall defied the conventional wisdom that ulcers

> in the stomach and the gut (peptic ulcers) were caused by excess

> stomach acid, stress and spicy food, and insisted that they were

> caused by a new bacterium that he had discovered. Rubbish, said

> peers and colleagues, who said that every study he had produced had

> failed to prove anything, even though their existing treatments were

> ineffective. So, in 1984, Marshall decided to infect himself with

> the bug Helicobacter pylori to demonstrate how quickly he developed

> signs of an ulcer.

>

> It worked; and he survived. Within a decade, Marshall had gained

> heroic status among the public and much of the medical community -

> not so much because his devotion to proving a theory had endangered

> his life, but because it was a delicious example of someone

> rejecting orthodox thinking and being proved right. His astute act

> of rebellion was eventually rewarded with a Nobel prize in 2005.

>

> His discovery has been hailed as the most significant in the history

> of gastroent-erology and has been compared to the development of the

> polio vaccine and the eradication of smallpox. It has resulted in

> stomach ulcers, once potentially fatal, being easily treated with

> patented antibiotic drugs, many developed by Marshall with pharma

> companies.

>

> From rebel to establishment figure

>

> Today, a youthful 57, Marshall is somehow reconciling his rebellious

> restlessness with the fact that he has become a lauded establishment

> figure. He is Professor of Infectious Disease at the University of

> Western Australia and he has his own research department and biotech

> company, studying potential uses of the unusual bacteria he has

> discovered, including carrying vaccines into the body.

>

> But he is also true to his anti-establishment bent, lecturing

> students around the world about the benefits of working hard at what

> interests them rather than what they're told to. His mantra is that

> the greatest obstacle to knowledge is not ignorance but the illusion

> of knowledge.

>

> When I meet him in London he insists that winning the Nobel prize

> hasn't changed him, it has just given him more opportunities and

> academic freedom. " Most of all it was a great party after the

> presentation, " he deadpans. The story goes that he was in the Perth

> pub he frequented every Nobel night when he got the news. It was the

> pub where he and his co-researcher Warren light-heartedly

> drowned their sorrows because they hadn't won anything. He was told

> that he had become a laureate on his mobile phone minutes before the

> official announcement. " I think I was just frozen, " he says. " You

> think, this is great, but then, what do I do now? "

>

> He is visiting England to support a new global foundation that will

> provide funding so that doctors and academics who come across

> promising research leads in their day-to-day work (as he did) can

> take time out to pursue them. He is also visiting his daughter, a

> legal secretary working in London for a year. Hunched against the

> cold as we take pictures on an unusually clement winter day, he

> doesn't have the swagger you might expect.

>

> Approachable and down to earth, his mind regularly wanders into the

> areas that interest him rather than those you direct him to. It

> hasbeen a problem since he was a schoolboy, he admits, when he found

> it impossible to stick with the syllabus, even in subjects such as

> chemistry, which he loved. Electronics is a passion; when we meet he

> is preoccupied that his hotel doesn't seem to have heard of USB

> connections for computers.

>

> So what did Helicobacter pylori taste like? " It was like clear beef

> soup, " he says. " Drinking it was a difficult thing to do, and I

> suppose it was like bungee jumping; taking that leap is exactly the

> same kind of adrenalin rush as drinking a test tube full of

> bacteria. " He took the draft in the hospital lab shortly after a

> presentation of his work to gastroenterologists at a national

> meeting in Australia was poorly received: some people were rude.

> That pushed him over the edge after many years of professional

> scepticism. " I had to decide whether I wanted to spend the rest of

> my life working on this thing and getting nowhere, or do the

> definitive experiment. " It began in 1981, when he arrived at the

> gastroenterology department of Royal Perth Hospital, still training

> as a specialist doctor. He had been intrigued by patients who had

> stomach pain but no diagnosis, and teamed up with Warren, the

> hospital's pathologist, who had found a strange spiral bacterium in

> their stomachs.

>

> In their spare time, the two worked out that this bacterium was

> causing infections and unpleasant symptoms that would lead to damage

> of the gut wall, and full-blown ulcers. But even their bosses didn't

> believe them; after all, in theory, bacteria shouldn't be able to

> survive in the acidic stomach. And Marshall wasn't even a fully-

> fledged gastroenterologist (something, he now believes, was

> invaluable in giving him an objective view of problems unalloyed by

> conventional wisdom). " There was a real urgency because we were

> talking about a disease that affects millions of people and was

> sometimes fatal. Every night on call in gastroenterology wards there

> would be people coming in with huge gastrointestinal bleeding, and

> having half their stomachs removed, and when you knew you could

> possibly prevent this with a dose of penicillin ...

>

> " We were labelled maniacs and zealots from an early stage. We could

> think about and speak about nothing else, but no one else could have

> a proper opinion on it because it wasn't part of existing science.

> We were pretty incorrigible and annoying to our professors and

> seniors because we always reckoned we knew more than they did, which

> was true enough in that area. Now that I am older I can see that I

> must have been a difficult person to work with. I never had any

> respect for authority. "

>

> That started as a kid, when he moved from a provincial mining town,

> Kaloorlie, to be schooled in Perth, and immediately felt like the

> outsider - a country bumpkin among townies, poor at sport, smart in

> science, but unable to impress with top marks because he preferred

> to do his own experiments in his dad's shed at home, making radios,

> explosives and a hydrogen generator for balloons. " If my science

> teacher told me one thing, I'd be there trying to prove him wrong,

> continually looking for an alternative. Maybe it's laziness on my

> part; if there's anything difficult and tedious, I think there must

> be an easier way to do this. "

>

> He admits that there was something of the show-off about this. When

> he chose medicine as a career (fearing his maths was not good enough

> for electrical engineering) he quickly noticed that everyone

> remembered the spectacular diagnosis, even if you made only one a

> year. " They'd forget about the ten incorrect ones you'd made using

> standard techniques, so it was better to stick your neck out and

> have a go at these things. "

>

> As with many tales of dedicated discoverers, you marvel at the

> tolerance of the family. When Marshall conducted his experiment on

> himself, he and his wife Ariadne, a psychologist, had four children

> aged between 10 and 3. He didn't inform Ariadne, or any of his

> colleagues, about what he was doing, mainly because he knew they'd

> object.

>

> " I'm a selfish so-and-so "

>

> " A few days after taking the bacteria I began to feel this heavy

> fullness after eating, and then on day five the vomiting started.

> One of the reasons I didn't tell my wife about it was that she had

> whiplash from a car accident. There was a lot of chaos in the family

> and in the middle of this each morning I would wake before dawn and

> run to the toilet to vomit. I had bad breath and I looked terrible.

> You have to admit I'm a selfish so-and-so to even go ahead with the

> experiment. "

>

> Ten days after drinking the bacteria, Marshall had an endoscopy and

> other tests to show that his previously bug-free stomach was

> thoroughly infected and that he was showing the same signs as his

> patients.

>

> " At that point I couldn't restrain myself; I had to tell the wife.

> She was speechless. " He laughs. " But it's easier to ask for

> forgiveness than permission. " She insisted that he took antibiotics

> to clear up the infection straight away, though Marshall wanted to

> continue until he had a full-blown ulcer.

>

> A paper in the Medical Journal of Australia followed and, gradually,

> Marshall gained more and more high-powered supporters across the

> globe. By 1997, with the marketing of new patented antibiotic

> treatments, the global battle against stomach ulcers really began.

> What became apparent with time was not only that more than half the

> people in the world were infected with Helicobacter pylori, but that

> the better their hygiene and living conditions, the less likely they

> were to have it. Now there is a Helicobacter Foundation, founded by

> Marshall in 1994, dedicated to finding ways of diagnosing, treating

> and eradicating the bacteria, which is " out of control " in some

> countries and in others still isn't tested for in cases of stomach

> problems. " There's still a long way to go, " he says.

>

> Marshall is still pushing at the boundaries with his work looking at

> Helicobacter pylori as a vaccine carrier. The theory is that, since

> the bacteria are immune to stomach acid, they will be able to carry

> flu and other vaccines into the body by this route, making gaining

> immunity as easy as taking a probiotic drink.

>

> " I'd say that 50 years from now all those vaccinations we worry

> about won't even exist, it will be just built into the food supply, "

> Marshall asserts confidently.

>

> What drives him on with this may still be that strange restlessness

> he felt all those years ago in a Perth pub when he heard that he had

> become a Nobel laureate. Now what? Maybe, he admits, he has got half

> an eye on another Nobel prize.

>

> Top five self-experimenting doctors

>

> Cardiac catheterisation

>

> In 1929, the German surgeon Werner Forssman took a 65cm-long

> catheter and threaded it from an incision in his arm up to the right

> atrium of his heart, and then took an X-ray to prove that catheters

> can be inserted into the heart for investigational purposes.

>

> Polio

>

> In the 1950s, the American Jonas Salk, by killing a sample of the

> polio virus and then administering it to animal test subjects and

> eventually to himself, discovered that patients became immune to the

> live virus. This led to the modern polio vaccine.

>

> DNA

>

> The British scientist lind lin, who had an instrumental

> role in discovering the structure of our DNA, died of cancer,

> possibly because of exposure to X-rays she used in her experiments

> in the early 1950s. Her X-ray photographs established unequivocally

> the structure of DNA.

>

> Gonorrhoea

>

> Hunter, an 18th-century surgeon and anatomist, gave himself

> gonorrhoea by applying the pus of an infected patient to his own

> penis to test his theory that it would develop into syphilis. The

> experiment was flawed, but was later repeated my medical students to

> produce the correct results.

>

> Anaesthetic

>

> The ish obstetrician Sir Young Simpson tested chloroform

> on himself and two assistants in 1847. All three were discovered

> unconscious under a table. After dramatic successes on patients, the

> anaesthetic won royal approval when Queen enjoyed a pain-

> free childbirth with the aid of chloroform in 1853.

>

> Stomach ulcers - the facts

>

> Peptic ulcers - those found in the stomach and the part of the

> intestine just below it - are caused by the bacterium Helicobacter

> pylori. The bacteria cause gastritis (inflammation of the stomach

> lining), which can lead to ulcers when stomach acid exploits the

> weakened areas.

>

> Famous people troubled by H. pylori infection include Joyce,

> Bush (Sr), Pope II, Imelda Marcos and Alfred Nobel.

> The Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini and the actor Lorne Green died

> of bleeding ulcers.

>

> The bacterium is passed on orally, possibly via water or food

> tainted by faecal matter. In Britain, about 30 per cent of the

> population are infected. The rate is 20 per cent among affluent

> groups, and the likelihood of having it increases with age. Most

> adults in developing countries are infected.

>

> Symptoms Many of those carrying the bacteria have no symptoms, but

> all have inflammation of the stomach lining, which can lead to

> heartburn, belching and many other abdominal problems.

>

> Have you got it? Gastroenterologists can find out whether you are

> infected with breath tests, blood tests and internal examination via

> endoscopy.

>

> Treatment is usually simple, with anti-acid and antibiotic drugs,

> although there can be unpleasant side-effects.

>

>

>