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'Discovery bloody obvious'
Australian medical researcher Robin Warren has described the discovery which won him and a colleague the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine as "bloody obvious".
Australian medical researcher Robin Warren has described the discovery which won him and a colleague the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine as "bloody obvious".
Warren, 68, more media-shy than his fellow prize winner Barry Marshall, told reporters he was "very excited, also a little overcome", by the honour for their discovery that a bacteria, not stress, was responsible for most stomach ulcers.
"It is nice to be officially recognised and it gives some sort of a stamp of approval, but we believed it within a few months because it was so bloody obvious," Warren said.
The rest of the medical profession did not see it the same way, and Warren toiled for years before his discovery was accepted.
In 1982, Warren, a pathologist who inspected gastric biopsies, noted that many of the samples of inflamed, ulcerated tissue under his microscope had curved rod-shaped bacteria.
He asked Marshall, then a trainee in internal medicine, to investigate further, and by persistence and careful observation they isolated and grew the bacteria they saw, dubbed Helicobacter pylori.
The grey-bearded Warren was helped in convincing sceptics of the value of the discovery by his more outgoing partner Marshall, but both men were considered eccentrics for years and were the butt of many unkind jokes from their peers.
By the end of the 1980s, however, the pair had managed to show that antibiotics permanently cured 80 per cent of ulcer patients, resulting in a complete reassessment of how the condition should be treated.
