- What would you be ready to do for science?
Advancing scientific theories requires experimentation to see how the theory translates into practice. But what’s a scientist to do when the experiment they want to carry out is so dangerous, crazy, or weird that they can’t find any test subjects?
Well, one option is to experiment on themselves.
Over the years, many scientists have turned to self-experimentation because they haven’t found or trusted anyone else. Here are seven scientists who carried out insane experiments on their own bodies.
8. Werner Forssman
Werner Forssman was a German physician with a conviction — he believed it was possible to insert a catheter into the human heart to deliver medicine and carry out other procedures. Most doctors in his time, however, believed such an operation would surely kill the patient.
Forssman proved them wrong. In 1929, he anesthetized his arm and threaded a catheter through his veins into his heart using only his knowledge of the human circulatory system.
He then got up and walked to the X-ray machine so he would have pictures to prove that he really did get the catheter all the way into his heart.
It’s too bad Forssman decided to join the Nazi Party during WWII. He did still get a Nobel Prize for his discovery in 1956.
7. Henry Head
Henry Head, a 19th-century British neurologist, wanted to study the effects of nerve damage. However, he wasn’t satisfied with the wishy-washy descriptions his patients were giving him.
So, in 1903, Head had his surgeon friend W.H.R. Rivers sever the radial nerve on his own left arm. That’s the major nerve in your arm responsible for most of its movement and sensation.
Over the next three months, Head documented the sensations (and the lack thereof) in his arm as his nerves repaired themselves. At the end of the experiment, his arm was more or less completely healed.
So, of course, Head and Rivers continued to carry out various experiments on Head’s left arm over the next five years.
6. Allan Blair
Canadian-born entomologist Allan Blair was curious about the effect of black widow bites on people. Bite experiments had been done before but they lacked scientific validity — so Blair decided to carry out his own in 1933.
He allowed a thoroughly pissed black widow to bite him for 10 seconds. He then began chronicling the effects of envenomation, from the needle-like prick of the bite to the increasingly excruciating pain and redness at the bite location.
Two hours later, Blair was rushed to the hospital as his wound began to swell and he started having trouble breathing. His symptoms lasted for three days, but he survived.
Ironically, Blair’s experiment wasn’t completely scientifically valid either — because he refused to repeat it to verify the results.
5. Giovanni Grassi
Nobody wants roundworms. Except for Giovanni Grassi, a 19th-century Italian physician, who willingly infected himself with the parasites.
He wanted to study both the roundworm’s life cycle and to prove that they could be transmitted through fecal matter. Yet, before he could carry out his experiment, Grassi monitored his poop for a year to guarantee that he was initially roundworm-free.
Then, he ingested eggs he’d harvested during an autopsy and soon enough he was pulling wriggling worms and their eggs out of his stool. He ended his experiment by, in his terms, “easily flushing the worms out with herbal medicine.”
4. Herbert Woollard and Edward Carmichael
Herbert Woollard and Edward Carmichael were a pair of scientists studying referred pain, the sensation of pain in another part of the body than the one that’s actually damaged. They studied a phenomenon using another pair — namely, their testicles.
The researchers placed increasingly heavy weights on their balls and documented the pain they felt in delightfully dry academic language (“severe testicular pain on right side”). They proved that testicle damage causes referred pain when one of them felt back pain with two pounds of weight on his nutsack.
Funny enough, their research doesn’t specify whether it was Woollard or Carmicheal who bore the burden during the experiment. Technically, like Blair’s spider experiment, this research isn’t scientifically valid because Wollard, Carmichael, or any other researcher hasn’t felt the need to repeat it.
3. Jan Purkinje
Jan Purkinje was a Czechoslovak monk who became a doctor later in his life. He believed doctors in the early 19th century were administering insufficient doses of medication, so he began taking the drugs himself to find appropriate dosages.
By that, we mean that he intentionally overdosed himself on various plants, herbs, and chemicals to determine their effective dosages. Among others, he ingested foxglove (known to cause vision loss), deadly nightshade, turpentine, and camphor.
Yet, it’s his experiments on ipecac that were the most dramatic. By the end of his three-week ipecac binge, Purkinje would instantly vomit at the sight of any brownish powder, whether ipecac or cinnamon.
2. Evan O’Neill Kane
Evan O’Neill Kane was an established American surgeon who was concerned about some patients’ negative reactions to general anesthesia. He wondered if it would be possible to carry out major surgeries using only localized anesthetics.
So, in February 1921, Kane anesthetized himself with Novocain and cut out his own appendix, operating with the help of several mirrors. What, did you think he would risk subjecting others to the potentially fatal operation?
At one point, Kane’s intestine popped out due to the position he was sitting in. Yet, he was able to go home healthy the next day.
1. Joseph Barcroft
British physiologist Joseph Barcroft is potentially the most hardcore scientist to ever live. Dedicated to researching oxygenation and blood, Barcroft subjected himself to a series of completely mental experiments.
During WWI, Barcroft walked into a chamber filled with hydrogen cyanide gas to get data on how to treat soldiers injured in gas attacks. He walked out alive 10 minutes later. Sadly, his canine assistant wasn’t as lucky.
Later in his career, Barcroft lived for a week in an extremely low-oxygen chamber to study the minimum amount of oxygen human beings needed to survive. Once again, he lived — but his skin had turned blue at the end of the week.
And then there was the time when he locked himself in a freezer until he fainted from hypothermia and had to be dragged out. We could go on, but you probably get the idea that this guy didn’t take his research lightly.