A Bit Shameful to Produce Research Like This

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Robin Warren's own account of the moment his and Barry Marshall's work reached the wider medical community is not a story of quick acceptance. In 1983, when the pair submitted their findings to a major gastroenterology conference, the organizers rejected the paper and, according to Marshall's later recollection, told him the committee would be quite happy if he did not attend, because it was a bit shameful to produce research like that. Gastroenterologists had a reasonable-sounding objection: the bacterium turned out to be common in the general population, present in over 80 percent of some surveyed groups, and by some estimates only around 10 percent of carriers ever go on to develop an ulcer.

It took a decade for the field to change its mind through its own machinery rather than through one dramatic self-experiment. In 1994, a National Institutes of Health consensus conference formally endorsed antibacterial treatment for ulcer disease, effectively ending the stress-and-acid explanation as the field's default answer. Marshall and Warren shared the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery, twenty-three years after the biopsies that started it and eleven years after the field they had challenged came around.