Barry Marshall, the winner of this year's Nobel Prize in medicine, had a very hard time convincing the medical establishment that peptic ulcers were not caused by stress; it was bacteria that was doing it. He came to this conclusion early in his carreer but was unable to get funding. So, most of his research was done in off-hours. But he persisted. His most dramatic experiment was on himself; he drank a potion filled with bacteria. Lo and behold, he came down with a severe case of peptic ulcers.
He is an Australian and I wonder whether that had anything to do with the reception he received in the scientific community.
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