The 13th ‘A-Un’ special lecture of Professor Barry Marshall, 2005 Nobel laureate in Physiology and Medicine, titled ‘Road to the Nobel Prize and Beyond: Man versus Helicobacter pylori’ was held in the POSTECH Biotech Center on Nov. 2.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of establishing diplomatic relations between South Korea and Australia, POSTECH specially invited an Australian scientist.

Prof. Marshall, also famous to Koreans for his appearance in the commercial film of a yogurt product, confirmed the existence of virus in human stomach, and proved that the virus is the cause of gastric ulcer. This overturned previous theories, which claimed the cause is food or stress.

Like his own story of self-ingesting Helicobacter for his theory to be proven, he led his lecture to something challenging, vigorous, and funny. He is currently working at the University of Western Australia.

The lecture was named after Chung Hwan-tak, A-Un, who donated 100 million KRW to POSTECH in 1990 for the development of scientific technological research, and who also is the father of Prof. Emeritus Sung-Kee Chung of the Department of Chemistry.