Self-experimentation in medicine

Self-experimentation refers to the very special case of single-subject scientific experimentation in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on her- or himself. Usually this means that the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment are all the same. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present. Some of these experiments have been very valuable and shed new and often unexpected insights into different areas of medicine.

Notable examples of medical self-experimentation

ABO blood group system

Doctor Karl Landsteiner's discovery of the ABO blood group system in 1900 was based on an analysis of blood samples from six members of his laboratory staff, including himself.

Anesthesia

Lidocaine, the first amino amide–type local anesthetic, was first synthesized under the name xylocaine by Swedish chemist Nils Löfgren in 1943.[1][2][3] His colleague Bengt Lundqvist performed the first injection anesthesia experiments on himself.[1]

Asthma

Roger Altounyan developed the use of sodium cromoglycate as a remedy for asthma, based on khella, a traditional Middle Eastern remedy, with experiments on himself.

Bartonellosis

Daniel Alcides Carrión infected himself from the pus in the purple lesion in a bart No. 1 subspecies (bartonellosis) patient in 1885. He died from the disease several weeks later.

Cardiac catheterization

Clinical application of cardiac catheterization began with Werner Forssmann in the 1930s, who inserted a catheter into the brachial vein of his own forearm, guided it fluoroscopically into his right atrium, and took an X-ray picture of it.[4] Forssmann won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this achievement.

Cholera

Max von Pettenkofer drank cholera bacteria.

Disulfiram

Erik Jacobsen, with Jens Hald and Keneth Ferguson at the Danish drug company Medicinalco, demonstrated the effect of antabuse and alcohol on themselves.

Effect of forces on the body

John Paul Stapp sat in a rocket sled at almost the speed of sound, and then made an abrupt stop.

Heavy water

Klaus Hansen drank heavy water.[5]

Helicobacter pylori

In 1984 a Western Australian scientist, Dr Barry Marshall, discovered of the link between Helicobacter pylori and gastritis. This was based on a series of self experiments that involved gastroscopy and biopsy, ingestion of H. pylori, regastroscopy and biopsy and subsequent treatment with tinidazole. His only option was self-experimentation: ethical measures forbade him from administering H. pylori to any other person. In 2005, Marshall and his long-time collaborator Robin Warren were awarded Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, "for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease".

Ibuprofen

As part of the team who developed ibuprofen in the 1960s, Stewart Adams initially tested it on a hangover.

Neural implant

Kevin Warwick had an array of 100 electrodes fired into the median nerve fibres of his left arm. With this in place, over a 3-month period, he conducted a number of experiments linking his nervous system with the internet.[6]

Psychoactive drugs

Sensory deprivation

John C. Lilly developed the first sensory deprivation tanks and self-experimented them with the intention to study the origin of consciousness and its relation to the brain by creating an environment which isolates an individual from external stimulation.

Skin transplantation

Ole Jakob Malm transplanted foreign tissue onto his own skin in order to discern among different tissue types.

Snakebite

Tim Friede created his own vaccine against snakebite using pure venom injections from all four species of mambas, and four cobra species to achieve high immunity. He also survived IgE shock six times with mamba injections. Others have also injected venom to create immunity to snake venom; Bill Haast, Harold Mierkey, Ray Hunter, Joel La Rocque, Herschel Flowers, Martin Crimmins, and Charles Tanner.[9]

Synthetic gases

Humphry Davy self-experimented with breathing of several different gases, most notably nitrous oxide.

Thrombocytopenia

In the Harrington–Hollingsworth experiment in 1950, William J. Harrington performed an exchange blood transfusion between him and a thrombocytopenic patient, discovering the immune basis of idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura and providing evidence for the existence of autoimmunity.

Weight balance

Santorio Santorio spent a large portion of 30 years living on a platform meticulously measuring his daily weight combined with that of his intake and excretion in an effort to test Galen's theory that the respiration occurs through the skin as perspiratio insensibilis (insensible perspiration).[10] The result was the 1614 publication De Statica Medicina ("On Medical Measurements").[11]

Yellow fever

In Cuba, U.S. Army doctors from Walter Reed's research team infected themselves with yellow fever including James Carroll, Aristides Agramonte, and, most notably, Jesse Lazear, who died from yellow fever complications in 1900. These efforts ultimately resulted in proof of the mosquito-borne nature of yellow fever transmission and saved countless lives. Stubbins Ffirth had investigated the contagious nature of the disease at the end of the 18th Century.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Löfgren N (1948). Studies on local anesthetics: Xylocaine: a new synthetic drug (Inaugural dissertation). Stockholm, Sweden: Ivar Heggstroms. OCLC 646046738.
  2. ↑ Löfgren N, Lundqvist B (1946). "Studies on local anaesthetics II". Svensk Kemisk Tidskrift 58: 206–17.
  3. ↑ Wildsmith JAW (2011). "Lidocaine: A more complex story than 'simple' chemistry suggests". The Proceedings of the History of Anaesthesia Society 43: 9–16.
  4. ↑ Fontenot C, O'Leary J (1996). "Dr. Werner Forssman's self-experimentation.". Am Surg 62 (6): 514–5. PMID 8651541.
  5. ↑ "Experimenter Drinks 'Heavy Water' at $5,000 a Quart". Popular Science Monthly 126 (4) (New York: Popular Science Publishing). Apr 1935. p. 17. Retrieved 7 Jan 2011.
  6. ↑ Warwick, K, Gasson, M, Hutt, B, Goodhew, I, Kyberd, P, Andrews, B, Teddy, P and Shad, A:“The Application of Implant Technology for Cybernetic Systems”, Archives of Neurology, 60(10), pp1369-1373, 2003
  7. ↑ The high life of the self-experimenters New Scientist 12 August 2014.
  8. ↑ Excerpt from Arthur Heffters 1897 laboratory notebook detailing the discovery that mescaline was the centrally active compound found in the peyote cactus, Heffter.org, retrieved 2013-07-04
  9. ↑ http://sethroberts.net/self-experiment/2004-01%20Tim%20Friede%20abstract.PDF
  10. ↑ http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-researchers-who-experimented-on-themselves.php
  11. ↑ Eknoyan G. Santorio Sanctorius (1561-1636) - founding father of metabolic balance studies. Am J Nephrol. 1999;19(2):226-33.

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