Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [50]
As a child, Marshall was similarly intrepid and wily. By the age of eight he was making electromagnets and buying chemicals from a local pharmacy in Perth, Western Australia, in order to manufacture explosives. He played with electronics and electrical equipment. On one occasion he repaired a fraying power lead on his father’s drill, but mixed up the wires – a mistake that caused his father to jump a few feet into the air the next time he used the drill. Marshall’s father also suffered when he suggested to his son that it was a bad idea to make lighter-than-air balloons using domestic house gas: in demonstrating the danger to his son, he singed off his own eyebrows.
No doubt Mullis and Marshall’s neighbours, halfway across the world from one another, were all thinking the same thing: ‘That child is reckless and out of control!’ But they hadn’t seen anything yet. Whereas Mullis manufactured psychedelic drugs that would help him to solve mind-bending problems, Marshall grew up to be anarchic in a different way. Decades on from the explosives factory, the reckless Marshall was experimenting on himself. That was why, in 1984, Robin Warren screamed down the phone to a reporter from the New York Star: ‘Barry Marshall has just infected himself and damn near died!’
It was Warren who started Marshall on his path to a Nobel Prize. In 1981 Marshall had to complete a research project as part of his medical training at the Royal Perth Hospital. He felt drawn to gastroenterology, the study of the digestive system, and asked around to see if there was anything interesting going on. He was directed to the basement. There he found Robin Warren and his cigarillos. Warren is now retired from medicine, but Marshall paints him as something of a maverick in his time. They spent many afternoons together in that hospital basement, Marshall says, drinking strong black coffee and smoking, and trying to figure out the meaning of Warren’s curiously infected patients.
In the course of his research, which involved taking cell samples from the linings of people’s stomachs, Warren had found that many of his patients were infected by strangely curved, almost spiral-shaped bacteria. This caught Warren’s attention – the overwhelming majority of bacteria are spherical or straight, and there were only a few reports of spiral bacteria. Treponema pallidum, the bacterium that causes syphilis, is one. But since his samples of spiral bacteria appeared to be thriving in the hostile acids of the stomach, Warren thought they might merit further investigation: perhaps they were responsible for specific stomach-related health problems. He didn’t have time to study the patients himself. But Marshall was welcome to do it.
Over coffee and cigarillos, Warren explained the intricacies of the stomach to Marshall: how bacteria survived the acid by living beneath a thick layer of mucus, or by secreting urea (an alkali) to create a pH-neutral bubble around themselves. Warren handed Marshall the case notes of twenty-seven patients infected with the new bacterium. The only one with an interesting medical problem was someone Marshall had seen on his rounds: a fifty-year-old woman with undiagnosed abdominal pain. All examinations had failed to find anything wrong with her. The single anomaly in her notes was this infection with a curved bacterium.
Good scientists are like TV detectives: give them a few clues and they will chase down the truth. And, as with the most compelling fictional sleuths, the most successful, world-changing scientists use more than cold, logical deduction. Their appetite for the thrills of the chase leads them to cut corners using their wits, their charm, their unique skills and – just occasionally, when necessity drives them to the edge of reason – their willingness to put themselves in danger.
Marshall started his sleuthing in the hospital