Scientists Who Experimented On Themselves

Scientists Who Experimented On Themselves: Self experimentation is a long tradition in which researchers used their own bodies as test subjects, sometimes to prove a hunch nobody believed and sometimes to avoid risking others, leading to Nobel Prizes, medical breakthroughs and a few tragic deaths.

Barry Marshall: To prove bacteria cause ulcers, he drank a broth of Helicobacter pylori in 1984, developed gastritis within days and later shared the 2005 Nobel Prize.

Werner Forssmann: In 1929 the young German doctor threaded a catheter through a vein in his arm into his own heart, then walked to the X-ray room to prove it, winning a Nobel Prize 27 years later.

John Paul Stapp: The Air Force doctor rode rocket sleds to test human limits, surviving a 1954 stop of about 46 G that briefly left him with burst blood vessels in his eyes.

Jonas Salk: Before mass trials, he injected his experimental polio vaccine into himself, his wife and their three sons in 1953.

Albert Hofmann: On April 19, 1943 he deliberately swallowed 250 micrograms of LSD and rode his bicycle home in a hallucinatory haze, a date fans now call Bicycle Day.

Daniel Alcides Carrión: The Peruvian medical student injected himself with blood from a patient in 1885 to study a mysterious disease, died weeks later and is honored with Peru's national Day of Medicine.

Jesse Lazear: A member of Walter Reed's yellow fever team in Cuba, he died in 1900 after an infected mosquito bite, helping prove mosquitoes spread the disease.

Max von Pettenkofer: To disprove Robert Koch's germ theory, he drank a culture of cholera bacteria in 1892 and suffered only mild diarrhea, a lucky escape that proved nothing.

Stubbins Ffirth: In the early 1800s he drank the black vomit of yellow fever patients and rubbed it into cuts to prove the disease wasn't contagious; he stayed healthy only because mosquitoes are the real carrier.

John Hunter: Legend says the famous 18th century surgeon inoculated himself with gonorrhea pus to study venereal disease, though historians still debate whether he was the subject.

Isaac Newton: While studying optics in 1666 he slid a blunt needle called a bodkin between his eyeball and the bone of his eye socket to see how pressure changed his vision.

Humphry Davy: He inhaled huge amounts of nitrous oxide in 1799, recording its euphoric effects and even suggesting it could be used to dull pain during surgery.

Horace Wells: In 1844 the Connecticut dentist breathed laughing gas and had a colleague pull one of his own teeth, an early proof of surgical anesthesia.

August Bier: To test spinal anesthesia in 1898 he and his assistant injected each other, then tested the numbness with pinpricks and a hammer blow to the shin.

J. B. S. Haldane: His decompression chamber experiments burst his eardrums, which he shrugged off by noting the drum generally heals and a hole in it lets you blow smoke out of your ear.

Elsie Widdowson: During WWII she and Robert McCance lived on a bare bones bread and vegetable diet while cycling and hiking hard, proving Britain could survive on wartime rations.

David Pritchard: The British immunologist deliberately infected himself with 50 hookworms in 2004 to test whether the parasites could calm allergies and asthma.

Kevin Warwick: In 1998 he had a microchip implanted in his arm so his building could recognize him, and later wired one into his nerves to control a robotic hand.

Santorio Santorio: The Renaissance physician spent some 30 years weighing himself, his food and his waste on a giant scale chair, discovering the body loses weight through invisible perspiration.

Henry Head: In 1903 the neurologist had a nerve in his own forearm surgically cut so he could map, over several years, how sensation returned as it healed.

Alexander Shulgin: The chemist synthesized hundreds of new psychoactive compounds and tested them on himself and a close circle of friends, documenting the results in the book PiHKAL.

Nicholas Senn: In 1888 the surgeon pumped about six liters of hydrogen gas into his own rectum to develop a test for detecting gunshot wounds in the bowel.

Joseph Goldberger: To prove pellagra wasn't infectious, he and volunteers swallowed pills made from patients' scabs and excretions in 1916, then showed the real cause was poor diet.

Pierre Curie: He strapped a sample of radium to his arm for 10 hours in 1900 and carefully tracked the burn and slow healing, an early hint that radiation could treat cancer.