Two Australians made a discovery that a bacterium, Helicobacter pylori, was responsible for peptic ulcers. Robin Warren, a pathologist from Perth, Australia, saw these small curved bacteria in the lower part of the stomach in many patients. He noticed that signs inflammation were always present around these bacteria. Barry Marshal, a young clinic fellow became interested in Warren's findings and succeeded in cultivating the bacterium from these sources.
In treatment studies, Marshall and Warren showed that patients could be cured of peptic ulcer only when the bacteria were killed off from the stomach. Thanks to this pioneering discovery by Marshall and Warren, peptic ulcer disease is no longer a chronic, frequently disabling condition, but a disease that can be cured by a short period of treatment with antibiotics.
For this achievement, Marshall and Warren received the Nobel Prize for Physiology and medicine in 2005.
How can peptic ulcer be cured? In which branches of science did the scientists get Nobel Prize?