Ulcer researchers win Nobel Prize

Australians Barry Marshall and Robin Warren won this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine yesterday for discovering that bacteria, not stress, was the main cause of painful stomach ulcers.

The 1982 discovery transformed peptic ulcer disease from a chronic, frequently disabling condition to one that can be cured by a short course of antibiotics and other medicines, the Nobel Prize committee said.

Warren, 68, and Marshall, 54, found that Helicobacter pylori played a role in gastritis and peptic ulcers.

"This was very much against prevailing knowledge and dogma because it was thought that peptic ulcer disease was the result of stress and lifestyle," Staffan Normark, a member of the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska institute, said at a news conference announcing the winners.

"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. He made the crucial observation that signs of inflammation were always present in the gastric mucosa close to where the bacteria were seen," the Nobel Assembly said yesterday.

Marshall interested in Warren's findings and together they initiated a study of biopsies from 100 patients.

Marshall Warren celebrated yesterday with champagne and beers with family members in the Western Australia state capital, Perth.

"For about a hundred years, or a thousand years, the standard teaching in medicine was that ... the stomach was sterile and nothing grew there because of corrosive gastric juices," Warren said. "So everybody believed there were no bacteria in the stomach."

"When I said they were there, no one believed it," he said.