The Gut Foundation has announced that its founder, Associate Professor Terry Bolin OAM, has died at the age of 86.
Associate Professor Bolin, former Head of Gastroenterology at the Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, founded the Gut Foundation in 1983 to promote greater public awareness and GP education around bowel diseases, particularly in relation to healthy diet.
He had clinical and research interests in lumenal gastroenterology in terms of acid reflux, malabsorption, colorectal cancer and Helicobacter pylori.
Famously, he was once likened to the manager who turned down the Beatles, because Associate Professor Bolin was secretary of the Gastroenterological Society of Australia in 1982 when he rejected a meeting abstract from a young Dr Barry Marshall who was proposing the revolutionary hypothesis that the bacterium H. pylori was the underlying cause of duodenal ulcers.
However as Associate Professor Bolin later told the ABC Science Show, the abstract was initially rejected because it contained no data and had missed the submission deadline.
He soon saw the significance of the results, not just for peptic ulcers, but also for the principle that gut bacteria could be a significant factor in many diseases.
“Barry was very stubborn but he had this enormous self-belief that what he’d found was right, so he beavered away here and in the US,” Associate Professor Bolin explained.
“It took 10 years and there was a lot of opposition. There were meetings that became shouting matches.”
According to a tribute written by Dr Ross Walker for the Gut Foundation, Associate Professor Bolin had a distinguished 60-year career as a clinician, researcher and high profile advocate for gut health.