Aussie Scientists Kick Ass and Get A Million Bucks

In my previous post I described a mock prayer from an Aussie to the sun-god "Sol Invictus", mentioning his crook guts. Now "Crook Guts" is aussie slang for stomach trouble. If you get food poisoning the source is pretty obvious, its those prawns you ate on the Air Gabon flight, but for millions of sufferers around the world this gastritis and peptic ulcers had nothing to do with the food they ate.

The prevailing wisdom for the majority of the 21st Century was that these ulcers came from stress and lifestyle factors. This was until 1982, when two Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, isolated and cultured a, then unknown, bacterium from human stomachs claimin that it was the cause of this common stomach illness. The theory was ridiculed by the establishment scientists and doctors, who did not believe that any bacteria could live in the acidic stomach. To force people to pay attention to this theory, Marshall drank a test tube of the bacteria and soon developed gastric ulcers, which he then cured by antibiotics. Go Aussie.


The bacteria was eventually named Helicobacter pylori and twenty-three years later, around 2 hours ago in fact, the two Aussie scientists were named winners of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine- and thus got the million bucks as cash component of the prize. And to wrap it up, the stomach problems caused by this H.pylori are the very same ulcers Charleze Theron "braved" to film Aeon Flux, and Charlize was of course in "Trapped" with Kevin Bacon.... Done. And made you read about science.