When the Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to researchers Barry Marshall and Robin Warren earlier this month, a good number of news reports made mention of Marshall's most famous exploit - deliberately infecting himself with the bug that causes stomach ulcers.

The year was 1984, and the two researchers from Perth, Western Australia, had been having a hard time convincing the medical world that the bacterium Helicobacter pylori really did cause the peptic ulcers that everyone else considered to be a side-effect of stress and lifestyle. So Marshall decided the time was ripe to put his money where his mouth was, so to speak, and show them once and for all.