Self-experimentation in medicine

Notable examples of self-researchers occur in many fields; infectious disease (Jesse Lazear: yellow fever, Max von Pettenkofer: cholera), vaccine research and development (Daniel Zagury: AIDS, Tim Friede: Snakebite), cancer (Nicholas Senn, Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert), blood (Karl Landsteiner, William J. Harrington), and pharmacology (Albert Hofmann, and many many others).

According to S. C. Gandevia of the University of New South Wales, who was looking at the question from the perspective of ethics, it is only self-experiment if the would-be self-experimenter would be named as an author on any subsequent published paper.

Point five of the Nuremberg Code requires that no experiment should be conducted that is dangerous to the subjects unless the experimenters themselves also take part.

[3]: xiii  Some scientists have resorted to self-experiment to avoid the "red tape" of seeking permission from the relevant ethics committee of their institution.

[3]: xv, xx Self-experimentation is also criticised for the risk of over-enthusiastic researchers, eager to prove a point, not accurately noting the results.

Max von Pettenkofer, after ingesting cholera bacteria said:Even if I had deceived myself and the experiment endangered my life, I would have looked Death quietly in the eye for mine would have been no foolish or cowardly suicide; I would have died in the service of science like a soldier on the field of honor.

[3]: 25 According to Ian Kerridge, professor of bioethics at the University of Sydney, the most common reason for undertaking self-experimentation is not so much anything noble, but rather "an insatiable scientific curiosity and a need to participate closely in their own research".

It is an ethical principle that volunteers must stand to gain some benefit from the research, even if that is only a remote future possibility of treatment being found for a disease that they only have a small chance of contracting.

Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard, whose own self-experiments led him to the concept of what are now called hormones, was a nineteenth century proponent of the practice:[3]: 314–315 I will suggest that you should study upon yourselves the effects of the most valuable remedies.

I well believe that you will never know fully the action of certain remedies, if you have not ascertained, on your own person, what effects they produce on the brain, the eye, the ear, the nerves, the muscles, and the principal viscera.

Psychological issues such as confirmation bias and the placebo effect are unavoidable in a single-person self-experiment where it is not possible to put scientific controls in place.

[3]: 314 [4]: 206 Dentist Horace Wells made multiple experiments with nitrous oxide, diethyl ether, and chloroform while trying to determine their uses as anaesthetics.

[3]: 287–288 In 2024, Beata Halassy, a 50-year-old virologist with a history of recurrent triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), conducted a self-experiment using intratumoral injections of research-grade viruses she prepared in her own laboratory.

This unconventional and experimental neoadjuvant oncolytic virotherapy led to significant tumor reduction, enabling a less invasive surgical resection.

In February 2020, Huang Jinhai, an immunologist at Tianjin University, claimed that he had taken four doses of a COVID-19 vaccine developed in his lab even before it had been tested in animals.

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".

This cleared the way for the development of antibiotic treatments for gastritis and peptic ulcers and a new line of research into the likely role of H. pylori in stomach cancer.

[29][30] Gail Monroe Dack (1901–1976), a former president of the American Society for Microbiology,[31] gave himself food poisoning by eating cake tainted with Staphylococcus.

[citation needed] William Bosworth Castle, in 1926, ate minced raw beef every morning, regurgitated it an hour later, and then fed it to his patients suffering from pernicious anaemia.

[3]: 258–263 [33][34] Elliott Cutler (1888–1947) took sufficient thyroid extract to give himself hyperthyroidism and enable him to study the effect of the condition on kidney function.

[37]: 313–325 In 1945, during the German occupation of Denmark, Erik Jacobsen and Jens Hald at the Danish drug company Medicinalco (which had a group of enthusiastic self-experimenters that called itself the "Death Battalion") were exploring the possible use of disulfiram to treat intestinal parasites, and in the course of testing it on themselves, accidentally discovered its effects (Disulfiram-alcohol reaction) when alcohol is ingested, which led several years later to the drug called Antabuse.

[3]: 98–105 [38][39] Chauncey D. Leake, in 1930, took furan as a possible substitute for aspirin but it just gave him a splitting headache and painful urination that lasted three days.

[medical citation needed] Examples of potential risks for some gene therapies include tissue damage and an immune response to foreign DNA,[53] among many others.

In 2017, biohacker Jo Zayner publicly injected themselves with CRISPR, a gene-editing technology, during a biotechnology conference in San Francisco.

[70] [71] 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.

[74][75] In 2023, Michael Raduga, a Russian lucid dreaming researcher, performed self-neurosurgery that included trepanation, electrode implantation, and electrical stimulation of the motor cortex.

[76][77][78][79] 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.

[citation needed] Joseph Barcroft, in 1920, spent six days in a sealed glass chamber to investigate respiration at altitude.

[80] Nico Dosenbach wore a pink cast over his (unbroken) right arm for two weeks in order to examine how brain circuits controlling movement are impacted by immobilizing illnesses or injuries.

He did a 30-minute resting state fMRI study daily and identified an undiscovered pattern of pulses of rs-fMRI signal in motor regions controlling the disused anatomy.