Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [56]
We have now reached the point in the story where the criminal is behind bars, and the police superintendent shakes his head and tells the detective he was lucky – he got away with his maverick methods this time. The detective takes the dressing-down on the chin, but his internal monologue tells him he was right. He stands by his reckless methods; he knows he’d do it all again if he had to. As the story draws to a close, everybody agrees that he’s the finest damned detective the force has ever known.
That’s not a bad description of Barry Marshall. Subsequent research revealed that the spiral bacteria are spread, like cholera, through the oral–faecal route – most often in young children. They might have a few days of vomiting, then the infection settles down. For the rest of their lives – for the most part – there are no symptoms. Around half the world’s population is infected with the spiral bacteria.
In the early 1980s, the answer to persistent stomach problems was often surgery. Pharmaceutical companies made millions of dollars by selling drugs to treat the symptoms. Barry Marshall’s reckless anarchy meant that by the 1990s the game had begun to change. Although just 10 per cent of people who were treated the old way were cured, the success rate under Marshall’s new regime was 70 per cent. In the developed world, at least, stomach surgery is now rare, and family doctors, not hospital doctors, deal with ulcers. In 1994 the US National Institutes of Health declared that the first line of attack for doctors presented with a peptic ulcer should be to identify and eradicate the spiral bacterium known as Helicobacter pylori.
Barry Marshall’s recklessness is by no means a unique phenomenon. Entire books have been written about scientists who experiment on themselves, Who Goes First? being probably the most famous. The stories of those who are reckless with the lives of others make less comfortable reading. In 1900, for instance, a group of US Army researchers agreed that they would all suffer mosquito bites to test whether mosquitoes were responsible for transmitting yellow fever, which had become a problem for the army in Cuba during the Spanish–American War. Shortly afterwards, their leader, Major Walter Reed, left Cuba and headed back to Washington. Though many have tried to defend Reed’s departure, the evidence points to an unwillingness to put himself at risk – even though he had agreed with his men that they would all be in it together. In his absence, one of the group, Jesse Lazear, died of yellow fever.
Then there is the shameful US Public Health Service project known as the Tuskegee syphilis study. For forty years, between 1932 and 1972, impoverished black men were the unwitting subjects in a study of syphilis. They were not told they had the disease, and they were not given penicillin when it became available in the 1940s as a standard and successful treatment. They were even prevented from attending other treatment centres.
The men were led to believe that they were already in a treatment programme. Instead they were condemned to, in many cases, a lifetime of illness and abuse. Dangerous and painful spinal taps, of use only to the scientists, were offered as ‘special free treatments’. The scientists offered the men free transport to the medical centre, and free meals. They also offered to pay funeral costs if the men allowed their bodies to be autopsied as part of the study. The 399 men involved fathered nineteen children with congenital syphilis, forty wives were infected with the disease, and more than a hundred of the men died, directly or indirectly, from their untreated infection.
An equally shameful but more recent example of scientific recklessness with the lives of others