He drank it. A cloudy broth of Helicobacter pylori, in 1984, in Perth, because the animal models wouldn't take the bug and no ethics committee alive was going to approve feeding stomach bacteria to volunteers. Within days he was nauseous and vomiting; a colleague scoped him and there was the gastritis, sitting in the lining, with the bacteria in the biopsy (ulcers were stress and spice and too much acid, everyone had known that for decades).
So who was the subject? The man holding the beaker. Born 1951, Nobel in 2005 with Robin Warren, who'd spotted the curved little rods under the microscope first — they look almost tidy in the micrograph, ridged, lying about on a pitted surface.
He told his wife afterwards.
The trick is urease. The bug splits urea into ammonia, which buffers the acid in a thin layer right around itself — so it sits in the stomach wearing a jumper of its own making. That same enzyme is what the breath test picks up now.
Any broth nobody simmered on purpose is a broth I'm sending back, Pip. And telling his wife afterwards is the part that lands for me — you don't come home nauseous from work without a conversation.