By Tamara Hunter

As one of UWA’s research giants settles into retirement, he reflects on the Nobel Prize-winning discovery that put Western Australia on the map.

Professor Barry J. Marshall AC is feeling contrite. He and his wife of 53 years, Adrienne, are reminiscing about that time in 1985 when he swallowed a broth of dangerous bacteria to prove a scientific point.

Adrienne had recently had a car accident and wasn’t paying full attention when Professor Marshall, then working as a gastroenterologist at Fremantle Hospital, blamed his raspy throat on a recent endoscopy.

“I said: ‘Why did you have an endoscopy?’ and he said: ‘I wanted to show I didn’t have Campylobacter.’ I said ‘Oh, that seems reasonable.’ At the time I was thinking ‘That’s weird — I should ask him more’.”

Within days Professor Marshall’s breath had turned foul and he was becoming increasingly ill. It was only when he returned from a second endoscopy — excited after discovering he was now infected with Campylobacter pyloridis (later renamed H. pylori) — that she realised he had deliberately infected himself.

He and pathologist Robin Warren, whom he had met while working at Royal Perth Hospital in 1981, had been trying for four years to prove Robin’s paradigm-shifting theory that stomach ulcers were caused not by stress, as was commonly held, but bacteria.

Although supportive of the theory, Adrienne was cranky Professor Marshall had risked infecting not only himself, but her and their four children.

“Could have happened,” Professor Marshall admits. “Sorry.”

In part two of the experiment, Professor Marshall successfully treated himself with antibiotics – eliminating the bacteria and further proving Robin’s theory.

Four decades on, as the Marshalls reflect on all that followed — the scientific battles, the cure, the Nobel and other prizes and, most importantly, the millions of people whose lives have been transformed by having their ulcers successfully treated — both know he would do it again.

“There’s a big tradition of doctors doing self-experiments with infectious diseases and horrible devices,” Professor Marshall says. “Not all of them survived, unfortunately.

“Nowadays I could probably get it approved if I sat down and put a proper protocol together, but back then I felt time was running out for me.”

Even after Professor Marshall and Robin’s findings were published in The Lancet and the Medical Journal of Australia, it would take another decade of research for the medical world to be convinced.

Image: Nobel Laureates: Clinical Professor Barry J. Marshall AC and Late Emeritus Professor J. Robin Warren AC.

The wrong science that caused all this was ‘bacteria cannot survive in acid’,” Professor Marshall says.

“When Robin and I started work, we were saying ‘bacteria can survive in our stomach because we can see bacteria’.”

As specialists continued to demur, Professor Marshall successfully treated individual patients and got the word out via receptive GPs and the media. In a US magazine article, he told readers if they sent $2 his office would send information they could take to their doctor. Within days, 12,500 letters and $25,000 had poured in.

The overwhelming response spoke to patients’ desperation for a cure at a time when chronic ulcers could lead to massive bleeds, peritonitis, radical stomach surgery and even death. It was their stories that spurred Professor Marshall on.

I didn't need to be the one doing it, so I could have stayed in Australia and taken a less accelerated career. But let’s face it – that wouldn’t have been as exciting.

Professor Barry J. Marshall AC

“Their lives had been ruined by the presence of an ulcer or something that felt like an ulcer – but they didn't actually have it, they just had the helicobacter,” he says.

By 2005 the science behind Barry and Robin’s H. pylori work was so rock solid and the impact so significant, it jointly earned them the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

The prize put the pair on the world stage, setting off a 20-year whirlwind of media engagements, lectures, research, advisory roles and relentless international travel.

Robin – the quiet perfectionist whose eagle eye and professional curiosity had first nudged the journey into motion in 1979 – died in July 2024 aged 87. 

Barry, now 73, stepped down this year from his role as co-Director of the Marshall Centre for Infectious Diseases at UWA, established in 2007 to celebrate the Nobel Prize.

The centre has several sister versions in China, a relationship that has seen China invest large research sums and send many postdoctoral students to UWA to study in Professor Marshall’s lab. Almost all have returned home to develop distinguished careers of their own.

Although he still works on pet projects and continues to travel to significant international meetings, Professor Marshall has embraced the slower pace of retirement.

Image: (L-R): Pro Vice-Chancellor of Industry and Commercial, Samantha Tough, Barry J. Marshall AC, Chancellor Diane Smith-Gander AO and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research), Professor Anna Nowak. Image credit: Jarryd Gardner.

Part of him wishes he’d achieved a better work-life balance earlier, so Adrienne’s own career in psychology could have flourished. But both know Profess or Marshall’s hyper-focused, curiosity-led nature meant that once fixed on a thing, he was never going to leave it half-done.

“Robin and I pretty much laid the roadmap for curing ulcers early on,” he says. “At that point I didn't need to be the one doing it, so I could have stayed in Australia and taken a less accelerated career. But let’s face it – that wouldn’t have been as exciting.”

Read the full issue of the Summer 2025 edition of Uniview [Accessible PDF 13MB].