The Nobel committee today announced the winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 2005: Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren for their discovery of “the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease”
The winners made the unexpected discovery that inflammation in the stomach (gastritis) as well as ulceration of the stomach or duodenum (peptic ulcers) are the result, not of endogenous factors but of infection with a “corkscrew-shaped” bacterium H. pylori