A young, average intern looking for a research project and an older, oft-ridiculed pathologist from an Australian hospital were scoffed at for a decade for daring to challenge the conventional wisdom that stomach ulcers were caused by stress and diet. It took the intern's
self-promotion skills, and a
extraordinarily bold move of ingesting a large quantity of the Helicobacter bacteria they believed were the dominant cause of ulcers, giving himself severe gastritis and subsequently curing it with only fairly standard antibiotics, before the medical world started taking notice. Despite the ongoing
resistance of an 8 billion dollar industry in over the counter heartburn medication, the two have been finally
rewarded with a Nobel Prize for uncovering the
easily diagnosed bacterial cause and fairly simple cure of over 90% of peptic ulcers.