Emeritus Professor of Medicine, University of Western Australia
AC, Nobel Laureate, MD, MBBS (Adel), HonMD (WA), HonDUniv (Toyoma), HonDUniv (Otto von Guericke), HonDSci (UTS), FAA, FRCPA
Emeritus Professor J Robin Warren addressed graduated from the Faculty of Science at the Great Hall, City campus, Tuesday 12 May 2009, 10.30am.
At the ceremony, Professor Warren received the UTS honorary award, Doctor of Science(honoris causa).
Citation
This award is made to Dr John Robin Warren in recognition of his outstanding contribution to society and medicine.
John Robin Warren was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 11 June 1937. He was educated at St Peters College in Adelaide, one of Australia's oldest and most prominent independent boys' school with an outstanding academic reputation, including educating three Nobel Laureates, one of them being Robin Warren. In 1955 he attended the University of Adelaide School of Medicine where he graduated in 1961 with a Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery.
He moved to Melbourne to do his training at the Royal Melbourne Hospital and was admitted to the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia in 1967. In 1968 he moved from Melbourne to the Royal Perth Hospital to take up an appointment as a senior consultant pathologist. His longstanding relationship with the Royal Perth Hospital and the University of Western Australia earned him the titles of Emeritus Consultant Pathologist from the Royal Perth Hospital and Emeritus Professor from the University.
While working at the Royal Perth Hospital, Dr Warren first observed the presence of small curved bacteria, resembling Campylobacter, on a biopsy of the gastric mucosa in 1979. During the next two years, Dr Warren found many more examples of the bacteria on gastric biopsies, always on gastric-type epithelium and closely linked to a specific variety of gastritis.
Then in 1981, Dr Warren met Dr Barry Marshall, registrar in the gastroenterology department. They met in the basement area of the Royal Perth Hospital where the Pathology Department was located and over strong black coffee and 'cigarillos' (small cigars) Robin showed Dr Marshall slides of the curved bacteria and explained the histopathology of the gastric mucosa.
From this first meeting a fruitful partnership followed that demonstrated the clinical significance of the bacteria. They cultured the organisms and identified a new species, now called Helicobacter pylori. A clear association was found between Helicobacter pylori and peptic ulcers. Healed ulcers remained healed, without further medication after eradicating the bacteria.
In 2000, Dr Warren submitted this work as a thesis to the Adelaide University and was awarded a Doctor of Medicine.
Dr Warren has received numerous awards throughout his career in recognition of his outstanding humanitarian work, including the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 and the Companion of the Order of Australia in 2007.
Thanks to the work of Dr Warren the frequently chronic and disabling condition of peptic ulcer disease can be cured by antibiotics. As noted by the Nobel Assembly Dr Warren's 'pioneering work has also stimulated research all around the world to better understand the link between chronic infections and diseases such as cancer'.
It is a great honour for the University of Technology, Sydney to award John Robin Warren the degree Doctor of Science (honoris causa) in recognition of his outstanding contribution to society and medicine.
Speech
Chancellor — Professor Vicki Sara, Vice Chancellor — Professor Ross Milbourne, Dean — Professor Bruce Milthorpe, Staff, Distinguished Guests, Graduates, families and friends.
This is really the graduate's day. I am greatly honoured to be one of you today. It takes my mind back almost fifty years to my first time as a graduate. My memory of that event is that we were all rather too excited at having reached this important point in our lives to be too worried what occasional speakers said, which is just as well, because I am not much of a speaker.
I am often asked, sometimes quite seriously, how to win a Nobel Prize. I doubt if I can tell you that, but let us try. My career was a bit different from the mainstream of prize winners, if there is such a thing. I was a practicing doctor, and not a research worker in any sense you probably understand it. I just noticed something unusual and interesting in the course of my routine work, and when I followed it up, it turned out to be something common, important and previously unrecognised by the profession.
For those aspiring Nobel Prize winners amongst you, I suppose that gives you a basis to start from. The prizes are given for new discoveries that are ground-breaking and important. You don't have to be a research worker, although most winners are. Practicing clinicians rarely win the prize in Medicine. They told us it had not happened for fifty years. But it is obviously possible, because we did it. How you discover something both important and new is another matter.
New things are particularly hard to find. Not, I suspect, because they are rare, they are probably not rare, but because they are new and so we don't see them. Our eyes and brains are hard wired to see what we know is there. When something is not supposed to be there it can be very difficult to see it, especially when you don't even know what you are looking for. This can be a solid object, as in my case — I saw bacteria growing in the stomach when there were not supposed to be any. It can of course be an idea, such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity — it took a while to get experimental evidence for that and it is not what he got a Nobel Prize for! Or it could be something both straightforward and magnificent, such as the discovery of the structure of DNA by Watson and Crick. They actually set out to discover this, so they were looking for a specific thing, rather than something they did not know was there. DNA obviously did have a structure. They succeeded in finding it, thereby laying the foundations for our molecular genetics.
I have now met many Nobel Prize winners. Most of them were laboratory workers, but often a little unusual. Most research workers are a little like Watson and Crick, in that they work on given problems and try to solve them. However, it is not usually ground-breaking work on previously unrecognised problems. Rather, it solves specific difficulties in a larger project. The Nobel Prize winners were different. They were research workers, but they tended to play with things, wondering "What if we did this or that" — what effect would it have on something else? In other words, they played with things like children whose brains were not yet hard wired, who were still flexible, learning and open to new ideas. They played with apparently unimportant things and made important new discoveries, which in their cases won them a Nobel Prize.
Thus I don't think you can win a Nobel Prize because you want to. But if you find a really new idea or thing, and you can produce convincing evidence for it, evidence that you can show other people, maybe you could be a winner. Remember that new ideas may be unacceptable to other people. You must be both convinced and convincing and happy to accept disbelief. Don't expect an easy path.