This Kathryn Schulz/The Wrong Stuff blog post provides an insightful interview with clinical researcher Barry Marshall, the 2005 Nobel Prize winner who, along with colleague Robin Warren, proved that up to 90 percent of peptic ulcers are caused by a bacterium and not by stress as medical “wisdom” had long held.

The entire interview is interesting, but the most fascinating part is where Dr. Marshall explains the difficulty of attempting to persuade the scientific establishment to abandon the conventional wisdom about ulcers even when he could provide clinical evidence that the conventional wisdom was wrong. As with much of the progress in medical research over the past 50 years, Marshall’s breakthrough in changing the conventional wisdom emanated from Houston:

When and how did you start to convince people?

Part of it had to do with David Graham, who was chief of medicine at [Baylor College of Medicine], in [Houston] Texas, and a thought leader in gastroenterology. Graham started off as a real skeptic but quickly turned around. To his credit, Graham never said that I was wrong. He said, "I don’t know, and I’m going to find out." And a couple of years later, he said, "I’ve checked it out and it looks pretty good, it looks like it could be true."

And then in 1993 or ’94, the NIH had a consensus conference, and Tachi Yamada summed it up. Yamada is currently the head of [the Global Health Program of] the Gates Foundation; he’s a very, very smart guy, and he said, "Looks like it’s proven: Bacteria cause ulcers, and everybody needs to start treating ulcers with antibiotics."

It was just like night and day after that. The whole thing just went ballistic.

So, why do we cling to conventional wisdom even in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary? Is embracing the truth not as important as being comfortable with the beliefs – regardless of whether they are right — of what we want to be the truth or what those we live with believe is true? 

The camera that shot this video is mounted on one of the solid rocket boosters for the Space Shuttle. The launch clock is in the upper left corner. The first couple of minutes is uneventful, but the rest of the seven minute video certainly is not. Enjoy!