Helicobacter pylori and the Future: An Afterword

As seen throughout the chapters of this volume, the field of Helicobacter research has come a long way. The association of gastritis and peptic ulceration with the spiral-shaped bacterium Helicobacter pylori was first noted only 15 years ago (Marshall and Warren 1984) even though there had been single reports on human gastric spiral organisms in the past (Krienitz 1906; Freedberg and Barron 1940). H. pylori was successfully cultured in 1982, and 2 years later the name Campylobacter pyloridis was proposed (Marshall et al. 1984). However, for grammatical reasons, the name was changed to Campylobacter pylori (Marshall and Goodwin 1987). By 1988 sufficient morphological evidence based on electron microscopic studies had accumulated to justify a new genus: Helicobacter (Goodwin et al. 1989).