Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [51]
By the end of the year, Marshall had traced the spiral bacteria back to their first observation. In 1892, an Italian doctor named Giulio Bizzozero reported to the Turin Academy of Sciences that the gastrointestinal tube contained strange, helical organisms which were visible under the microscope. Science is not always efficient, however, and Bizzozero’s discovery, published in Italian, was forgotten and rediscovered several times through the next century.
In the 1940s, a surgeon dealing with stomach ulcers and cancer at the Harvard Medical School observed that almost half of the stomachs he encountered contained spiral bacteria. Unfortunately, in the following decade another surgeon undermined the discovery. Eddie Palmer of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC tried to find the helical bacteria by performing biopsies on more than a thousand stomachs. He saw none, and claimed that they existed only as contaminating infections in autopsied corpses.
In 1967, the Japanese physician Susumo Ito discovered them again, this time while studying the stomach contents of cats while he was working at Cornell Medical School. The cats were not ill, and when Ito performed a biopsy on his own stomach, and found the same spiral bacteria, he assumed them to be harmless – he, after all, was perfectly healthy.
As it turns out, Ito was typically Japanese in carrying an infection by spiral bacteria. Almost all his compatriots had the bacteria in their stomach, which now makes sense of the fact that Japan has the highest rate of gastric cancer in the world. The spiral bacteria are far from harmless.
At first, it was only a hunch. The woman Marshall had examined, the one who had turned up on Warren’s list of patients infected with the spiral bacteria, had complained of nausea, stomach pain and headaches. Marshall had found nothing wrong with her; though she had a history of gastric ulcers, an endoscopy showed that there was no ulcer in her stomach now. Nevertheless, he was intrigued by the revelation that this woman did have something strange in her stomach – and symptoms of disease to go with it. Could it be that the spiral bacteria did cause hitherto unnoticed harm?
After a few months of reading and thinking, Marshall came up with a plan. He would identify 100 people who were due to undergo endoscopy, and get the endoscopists to take extra samples of stomach tissue from them. Once he had the samples, he would examine them to see how common spiral bacteria infection really was. Then he would try to grow the bacteria on a Petri dish and see if they could be linked with any diseases. He would also try to establish where the bacteria came from and how the infection took root.
By the time the hospital’s ethics board had approved the study, Marshall already had a day job – as a medical registrar in the hospital’s haematology department. So it was in his tea and lunch breaks that he hurried off to see the endoscopists, collected the specimens and rushed them across to the microbiology and pathology labs. It took months to gather, but by June 1982 Marshall had all the information he needed.
Not that it all went smoothly. The first step was to persuade the bacteria to grow from the samples. The microbiology lab had been given instructions on how best to grow these gut organisms, knowledge that Marshall had gained from a specialist in chicken diseases at the University of New South