The Heroes and Idiots of Scientific Self-Experimentation!

Have you ever had a curiosity so strong that you’ve considered staying awake for 180 hours, tapping your spinal column with cocaine, consuming deadly parasites or pumping 6L of hydrogen up your bum?   Probably not. And that is most likely because you are not an idiot.   But - there’s a fine line between idiocy and genius, particularly in medical science.   And so today we explore some of the most extreme stories of heroes and scientists who have experimented on themselves in the name of science (though some of these experiments will make you wonder - name of…science?).   These experiments are daring, shocking, hideously painful and, at times, absolutely the last thing you would want to do to yourself as a human.   (And it will come as perhaps deeply unshocking that just 12 of 465 cases of self-experimentation over the last 200 years were women).   These experiments weren’t all pain without glory, however. Seven documented self-experimenters went on to win Nobel Prizes for their self-experimentation work. And incredibly, in 89% of instances, the self-experimenters obtained positive results in support of a hypothesis or produced valuable data.    But not all of them. Some saw catastrophic levels of failure. Some died. And some held science back by decades by their work.   Is this kind of self-as-guinea-pig testing ethical? And how far is too far?   The heroes, the idiots and the sad stories are all here.   Previously mentioned episodes:   The Schmidt Pain Index!   Barry Marshall Drinks Something Weird!   Why We Forgot The Cure For Scurvy   Sources Jason Bittel’s This Guy Got Himself Stung 1,000 Times For Science—Here’s What He Learned Dominic Bliss’s National Geographic article: This man gets bitten by deadly snakes in the name of science Alex Boese’s Electrified Sheep Jennifer Levine’s Notable examples of self-experimentation in science Stubbins Ffirth: An Inaugural Dissertation on Malignant Fever; with an attempt to prove its non-contagious nature from reason, observation, and experiment Laura Turner Garrison’s Mental Floss article 10 Scientists Who Experimented on Themselves Brian P Hanley, William Bains and George Church’s Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation: Ethics History, Regulation, Scenarios, and Views Among Ethics Committees and Prominent Scientists in Rejuvenation Research Healthline: From Metabolism to LSD: 7 Researchers Who Experimented on Themselves New Scientist’s The high life of the self-experimenters Wikipedia: Self-experimentation in medicine Wikipedia: The 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic Window Through Time: The vomit-drinking doctor, Stubbins Ffirth (1784 – 1820) Allen B Weisse’s Self-Experimentation and Its Role in Medical Research in Tex Heart Inst J See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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