ABSTRACT
Science is a human activity and like all human activities, it has its share of drama and pathos. The scientific product is often an interaction of certain ways of thinking, personality traits, and circumstances. This essay examines these factors and how the melding of that could lead to breakthrough discoveries. It may in some instances, go wrong, or take a morally ambiguous path.
In 1984, a 29-year-old internal medicine resident named Barry Marshall, was working in the Freemantle Hospital in Perth, Australia, when he became intrigued with the observation made by a colleague, J. Robin Warren. Warren, who was a pathologist in the Royal Perth Hospital, found a large number of a previously unidentified bacterium in the biopsed tissues of patients with gastritis. This, itself, was surprising as the conventional wisdom was that the stomach was sterile – the gastric juice (which is so caustic that it could dissolve iron nails and the enamel of teeth) was assumed to be able to take care of whatever microbes that made their way to the stomach. At that time too, the cause of gastric ulcers was almost universally held to be due to psychological stress – “a disease of tense, nervous persons who live a strenuous and worrisome life” in the words of a contemporaneous and highly regarded gastroenterologist.1 Flying in the face of these conventions, Marshall hypothesised that these bacterial infections were the cause of gastritis and gastric ulcers.
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