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Two Australians win Nobel Prize in medicine
(AP)
Updated: 2005-10-03 21:00
Australian Robin
Warren seen at a presentation dinner in Adelaide, South Australia in 1998.
Warren and fellow Australian doctor Barry J Marshall have won the 2005
Nobel Prize in medicine, it was announced in Stockholm Monday Oct 3 2005.
Their award was for discovering that bacteria, not stress, was the main
cause of painful ulcers of the stomach and intestine.
[AP] |
Warren said he was "very excited also a little overcome," at the honor.
"The idea of stress and things like that (causing ulcers) was just so
entrenched nobody could really believe that it was bacteria," Marshall said. "It
had to come from some weird place like Perth, Western Australia, because I think
nobody else would have even considered it."
The discovery has stimulated research into microbes as possible reasons for
other chronic inflammatory conditions, such as Crohn's disease, ulcerative
colitis, rheumatoid arthritis and atherosclerosis, the assembly said in its
citation.
Warren, a pathologist from Perth, Australia, "observed small curved bacteria
colonizing the lower part of the stomach in about 50 percent of patients from
which biopsies had been taken," the Nobel Assembly said. "He made the crucial
observation that signs of inflammation were always present ... close to where
the bacteria were seen."
Marshall became interested in Warren's findings and together they initiated a
study of biopsies from 100 patients.
"After several attempts, Marshall succeeded in
cultivating a hitherto unknown bacterial species — later denoted Helicobacter
pylori — from several of these biopsies," the assembly said. "Together they
found that the organism was present in almost all patients with gastric
inflammation, duodenal ulcer or gastric ulcer."
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