Stress-free Discovery

Lurking inside each of your organs is a whole world of life. Millions of bacteria mill around, helping, harming, or simply observing our body’s many processes. It’s easy to misattribute any influence these hidden passengers might have on other things. For example, for decades we thought peptic ulcers and stomach inflammation were largely caused by stress and lifestyle. But when a researcher in the early 1980s noticed groups of an unfamiliar bacteria in samples from patients’ stomachs, it opened the door to other possibilities. Barry Marshall, pictured and born on this day in 1951, delved deeper and discovered Helicobacter pylori (right), a bacterium that turned out to be very prevalent and the actual cause of peptic ulcers. With that revelation, which won Marshall a share of a 2015 Nobel Prize, these chronic and debilitating illnesses at once became treatable, and the crucial link between infection, inflammation, and ultimately cancer became clear.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

Website

• Portrait by Pennsylvania State University (Penn State); H.pylori image by Yutaka Tsutsumi, M.D., Fujita Health University School of Medicine
• Portrait originally published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence (BY-NC 2.0); H.pylori image free to use from Wikimedia