The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #173361 Message #4203677
Posted By: Stilly River Sage
09-Jun-24 - 12:46 PM
Thread Name: Obit: Dr. Michael Mosley - UK physician/journalist
Subject: RE: Obit: Dr. Michael Mosley - UK physician/journalist
For most people the Guardian won't be behind a paywall:
Dr Michael Mosley obituary Popular celebrity medic who offered health advice to millions through his TV and radio roles, most notably on fasting
One part of this obit:
He opted instead to exert influence through the medium of television, joining the BBC training scheme as an assistant producer in 1985, and going on to produce documentaries based mostly in science, mathematics and history.
His most glorious moment arguably came with the Horizon programme Ulcer Wars, which he made in 1994 about the work of Barry Marshall of the University of Western Australia, who was convinced that the bacteria he had identified called Helicobacter pylori was responsible for most gastric cancers and ulcers.
The story appealed to Mosley and inspired his own self-experimentation: Marshall had drunk a solution of H pylori from a beaker in the 1980s and his stomach had been colonised by the bacteria, which disappeared when he took antibiotics.
Marshall was right and later, with his colleague Robin Warren, won a Nobel prize. Mosley received more than 20,000 letters from people cured of their ulcer pain by antibiotics. The film brought him awards. “I probably did, in a funny way, more good with that one programme than if I had stayed in medicine for 30 years,” said Mosley in the BMJ.