Taipei, June 29 (CNA) One cannot always be a winner, but sometimes one works harder when he or she gets rejected by others, Australian 2005 Nobel Prize for medicine laureate Barry Marshall told hundreds of Taiwanese high school students in a speech Friday.
Marshall, who concluded a four-day visit to Taiwan Friday, was awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine in 2005 along with his longtime collaborator Robin Warren for their discovery of the helicobacter pyroli bacterium and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.
In the one-hour speech, titled "Journey of a Nobel Scientist" and sponsored by the University of Western Australia, National Taiwan University and Australian Education International (AEI) , Marshall told the audience how he was "always interested in shortcuts" during the days when he developed his interest in science and "not very humble in college" in pointing out professors' mistakes.
Quoting historian Daniel Boorstin, he said, "The greatest obstacle to knowledge is not ignorance, it's the illusion of knowledge."
Marshall's discovery identified the great majority of gastritis and peptic ulcer cases, which were previously thought to be chronic infections caused by stress and dietary factors, as being caused by helicobacter pyroli and curable with antibiotics.
His findings were dismissed at first and to prove his theory, he experimented on himself, ingesting a turbid, foul-tasting solution of helicobacter pyroli.
"Taiwan is very much like me, " he said, referring to what President Chen Shui-bian told him in a meeting the previous day that Taiwan was also rejected in its World Health Organization (WHO) full membership bid, which was similar to what happened to Marshall's bold hypothesis.
In a 30-minute question-and-answer session after the speech, Marshall interacted with high school students who mostly came from Taipei City and encouraged them to always be curious about new things and work hard at "things that interest you."