Zoo Station

Two Australians, Dr Barry Marshall and Dr Robin Warren have been awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for their discovery that bacterial infection, not stress, causes peptic ulcers.

The Australians' bacterial theory of ulcers was "very much against prevailing knowledge and dogma," Staffan Normark, a member of the Nobel Assembly, said at a news conference in Stockholm. Most doctors believed ulcers came from stress and stomach acid. To make his case, Marshall even deliberately infected himself by swallowing a culture of H. pylori. "I developed a vomiting illness and had severe inflammation in the stomach for about two weeks," he told The Associated Press. "I didn't actually develop an ulcer, but I did prove that a healthy person could be infected by these bacteria, and that was an advance because the skeptics were saying that people with ulcers somehow had a weakened immune system and that the bacteria were infecting them after the event."

He and Warren believed the bacteria came first, causing inflammation, then ulcers. The experiment helped establish that. Warren, a retired pathologist, said it took a decade for others to accept their findings. The long-standard teaching in medicine was that "the stomach was sterile and nothing grew there because of corrosive gastric juices," he said. "So everybody believed there were no bacteria in the stomach.When I said they were there, no one believed it," he added.

Thomas sent me this story from Bloomberg which suggests that Bono, Martti Ahtisaari (for brokering peace in Aceh), and Senators Nunn and Lugar (for nuclear disarmament, especially in the old Soviet states) are among the favourites for the Peace Prize. Given the recent peace settlement in Aceh, I think the bookies have it right by putting Ahtisaari ahead.

Meanwhile, head over to Nobelpreisborse if you want to bet money predicting the winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics (yes, I know that's not the official name). According to the betting market, Ed Prescott is heavily favoured to win, followed by Robert Barro and Paul Krugman. The surprising omission is Jagdish Bhagwati. I personally don't think Krugman will win, and my top 3 would be Prescott, Barro and Bhagwati. What would be really cool though would be Krugman and Bhagwati together for their work on international trade.

Thanks to both Robert and Bhatta for pointing to the obvious problem with this last paragraph. Serves as a reminder to not do serious blogging while on the road (am at Cornell), when blogging time is limited. I just realised I had linked to last year's betting market at Nobelpreisborse. I don't know where the betting markets are this year, so if any of you have any ideas, please let me know. If I were a betting man, I'd still bet on Barro, I guess, though I still wish Krugman and Bhagwati would win.