re: perseverance

ok, so this piece was in the daily telegraph.......i just love nobel stories..

Being a genius never comes easy

October 05, 2005

PHILOSOPHER Thomas Carlyle's assertion that "genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains" could have been penned to fit the work of Australia's latest Nobel laureates, Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren.

What the 19th century thinker was alluding to, of course, was the necessity for "painstaking" attention to detail, for meticulous concentration and focus if one is to be ranked among the pantheon of acknowledged geniuses.

But the aphorism carries also the perhaps unintended idea of "accepting pain" as a price to be paid in the pursuit of one's life's work. Professor Marshall and Dr Warren qualify on both scores.

The dedicated researchers have both demonstrated a superhuman capacity for perseverance – and a capacity to risk real harm to themselves in their determination to prove the validity of their scientific theory.

It is difficult to overstate the significance – and the audacity – of their discovery. Working in gastroenterological research in the early 1980s, the pair observed sufferers of painful stomach and gastric ulcers were invariably infected with a particular strain of bacterium – helicobacter pylori – and they theorised that the bug was the cause of the illness.

To prove the theory to the sceptical medical establishment – which steadfastly believed ulcers were caused by stress – Professor Marshall actually swallowed a culture of the bacterium, duly contracted gastritis – and was cured with antibiotics. Case closed.

In fact, it took 10 years before the groundbreaking discovery was acknowledged, and it was not until about 1996 that the doctors' work was translated into an effective drug therapy for ulcer sufferers.

GPs now routinely treat ulcer sufferers with antibiotics and this once-intractable ailment is entirely curable.

In Australia, the majority of us readily accepts the accolade that we are citizens of "the clever country" even though we're scarcely smart enough to remember to put out the rubbish bin.

But Professor Marshall and Dr Warren are not of the majority. By temperament and by their accomplishments, they are true geniuses.

They inspire us and make us proud.