To prove that bacteria cause gastritis, an Australian doctor infected himself.
In 1984 Barry Marshall swallowed a culture of Helicobacter pylori and fell ill; in 2005 he and Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize.
More amazing facts
- 1980 Pac-Man, his creator said, was dreamed up at lunch while looking at a pizza with a slice missing.
- 1981 Bill Gates says he never claimed '640K ought to be enough for anybody'. The line has been pinned on him since 1981, but he has called it made up, and there is no record of it.
- 1982 · 1983 In 1982 ten-year-old American Samantha Smith wrote to Yuri Andropov asking if he wanted war. Pravda printed her letter; he replied and invited her to the Artek camp, where in 1983 she turned down special lodgings to stay with Soviet children.
- 1984 · 1989 Tetris was invented in Moscow in 1984, five years before Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web at CERN.
- 1989 In 1989, the year Tim Berners-Lee proposed the World Wide Web, the golden toad was seen for the last time in Costa Rica's forests.
- 1989 In 1989 PepsiCo bartered for 17 Soviet submarines.