The Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine in 2005, Professor Barry J. Marshall, is the responsible of the paradigm shift in the treatment of stomach ulcers. For many years, the scientific community associated this disease with factors such as stress, and no one could conceive that bacteria could survive in the stomach. Prof. Marshall did it, but during 10 years he was much criticized. Eventually, he showed that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori is the cause of most peptic ulcers, and consequently, the disease can be cured with antibiotics. On October 19, Marshall gave the opening lecture of the "http://www.worldhealthsummit.org/" World Health Summit 2014, where we met him to know more about his experience as a researcher. How did you feel when everybody said that you were wrong in that time? Were you frustrated, angry or just the opposite?My answer to that is that science is not a democracy. If you are a true scientist and you are confident about your own data, you don’t need to worry about everybody being against you. You know that eventually, you’ll be the winner. And the most simple, cost-effective solution to any problem is going to be the ultimate successful one. I knew that eventually everybody would want to use antibiotics.At that time, did you have the support of a PI or your boss?It took me two years of trying before I had any finding. And after that, I didn’t need any boss because I had my own money and my own salary from the Australian research funding agency. Peer review funding is good, but originally with a funny idea or strange theory you don’t have any peers, so you have to develop some collaborators or supporters. Then with the initial very small thing you do, that in my case was a post, you have a few supporters that will help you to talk to more senior people, who can mentor you, give you some advice and make suggestions. However, you don’t have to take the suggestions because they are often the guides. But that’s when you start, and that might connect you with the right networks. In my case, ultimately within two years, I had national and international supporters.In 1984 you drank a huge amount of helicobacters. What led you to do this? Before I had any supporters, nobody believed that bacteria could cause anything as I suggested. There was an association with bacteria and people with ulcers. But which comes first? Could both be a coincidence and just an association from something else or one could be causing the other? We tried some animal models, but we couldn’t infect any animal with helicobacter because it is just a human bacterium. So if we decided to do a human experiment, it would have been very difficult for me to ask for some others volunteers because nobody knew anything about the bacteria. I’ve done it now, nearly 30 years later when we do have volunteers, most of them medical students, because we know that nothing is going to happen to them. But the first one is best to do it on yourself. It is a tradition in medicine, so I drank two Petri dishes of the bacteria, and after ten days I had a biopsy that showed that the bacteria had infected my stomach, so there was inflammation. We already knew from the literature and studying the histology of ulcers that people with inflammation in the stomach are more likely to get the ulcer, so we assured that inflammation could come first and predispose people to ulcers. It was a nice story and nobody believed that for another 10 years. But did you tell your family or colleagues that you had drunk the bacteria?I didn’t tell anybody, I was very embarrassed and shy about this. When I published it, I did it in third person. Any of my close friends knew that was actually me for a few years, but then they figured it out and said ‘ok, don’t say it to me’.Would you do something similar now with the ebola crisis for instance?I think that if I was an ebola worker I would be quite happy to take one of the vaccines but obviously it would be very hard to prove one vaccine or the other because with the precautions it is unlikely to be infected. In the World Health Summit we just saw that maybe 1 out of 500 workers is going to be infected even if they are careful. However, I would be probably quite happy to take some kind of vaccines.In your speech at the opening ceremony of the World Health Summit you said that researchers should be reluctant with the current teaching in medicine and sciences. So what would you change of that system?The Australian government has a new kind of system which is going to connect up the medical research funding to the medical budget. If you spend one hundred billion dollars, you should spend another one hundred billion on research. Otherwise, you’re continuously spending a billion dollars extra every year in giving treatments to people but not cures. So you have to say: we focus on trying to have a cure and take the most expensive diseases, and the proportional part is going to go straight into the research.Finally, what would you say to Vall d’Hebron researchers to encourage them to continue with their careers?I think you must have enough spare capacity in the health system, in hospitals. The smart hospital doctors are not just satisfied with everyday treating people with the same stuff. Those doctors should be involved in clinical research and you should have the connection between the clinical research, the patients and the clinical side, down to the bench. So nearby you have medical research laboratories and you want to make sure that basic scientists do have a little bit of experience and back up into the hospital. It’s said that basic research teams don’t have a proper direction because they don’t figure out what is the big problem.In our case we have the hospital very close… So you have to keep those connections and maybe try to keep a balance so that you don’t remunerate all the money into the medical side of things and staff the research. You want as much as researchers as physicians and you have to make sure that their conditions are good. We need more job security in research because at the moment if you don’t get funding you don’t know what you are going to do. This is a situation that happens all over the world, and researchers have a family, a mortgage, and they don’t know if they will continue working from year to year.