Ulcers, bugs and the Nobel prize presented by Mike Dixon, Emeritus Professor of Gastrointestinal Pathology, University of Leeds

This presentation is a personal and non-scientist orientated account of my research work on Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that infects up to 20% of the general population in the UK and is a major cause of duodenal and gastric ulcers and has a lesser role in gastric cancer.

I describe my work as an academic and clinical histopathologist in Edinburgh and Leeds and how my professional life was changed by the discovery of H. pylori in 1983 by two Australian doctors, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. The difficulties of persuading the medical profession that peptic ulcers are caused by bacterial infection and the negative role of certain major drug companies are underlined.

The advent of H. pylori caused a paradigm shift in our understanding of several gastro-intestinal diseases and led to new treatments and cures. Such was the impact of their discovery that Marshall and Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2005.