admin tim
03-11-2009, 05:09 PM
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16735-eight-scientists-who-became-their-own-guinea-pigs.html?full=true
Now these bonafide scientific experiments are truly bizarre, as seen in the excerpts below. Were the Whitechapel Murders nothing more than a similarly bizarre experiment, one involving human lab rats? Not bloody likely, but whoever thought a US President would one day have the middle name of Hussein?
Emboldened by this success, Ffirth graduated to dribbling the vomit into his eyes and smearing assorted other bodily fluids from yellow-fever sufferers over his person - including blood, spit, sweat and urine. He even sat in a "vomit sauna" full of heated regurgitation vapours, which caused him "great pain in [his] head", but left him in rude health. Finally, he took to actually ingesting the vomit - first in pill form, then straight from a patient's mouth. Since he still didn't get ill, he considered the case proven. Presumably others did too, since he was in due course awarded his medical doctorate.
In 1898, German surgeon August Bier (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0952-8180%2800%2900220-8) invented spinal anaesthesia, which involved a small dose of cocaine being injected into the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding the spinal cord. That was a great improvement on existing methods of general anaesthesia, but how effective was it? To find out, Bier decided to be anaesthetised himself. But things didn't go as planned (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17323304.900-this-wont-hurt-a-bit.html) for Bier - or for his hapless assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt. Hildebrandt was supposed to administer the cocaine but, thanks to a mix-up with the equipment, Bier was left with a hole in his neck from which cerebrospinal fluid began to flow. Rather than abandon the effort, however, the two men switched places. Once Hildebrandt had been anaesthetized, Bier stabbed, hammered and burned his assistant, pulled out his pubic hairs and - presumably eager to leave no stone unturned in testing the new method's efficiency - squashed his testicles.
Various researchers have infected themselves with parasites. One such is biologist David Pritchard (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pharmacy/stafflookup/staff-by-role.php?id=MDA3MjUw&page_var=personal), who in 2004 allowed fifty hookworm larvae to burrow through his skin (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725164.200-dose-of-worms-may-ease-asthma.html). Other members of Pritchard's lab also infected themselves with the hookworms, which can survive for up to a decade but are easy to kill off with drugs. "They itch quite a bit when they go through the skin," said Pritchard (http://research.nottingham.ac.uk/Vision/display.aspx?id=1177&pid=213), but become really troublesome only when they reached his stomach.
Now these bonafide scientific experiments are truly bizarre, as seen in the excerpts below. Were the Whitechapel Murders nothing more than a similarly bizarre experiment, one involving human lab rats? Not bloody likely, but whoever thought a US President would one day have the middle name of Hussein?
Emboldened by this success, Ffirth graduated to dribbling the vomit into his eyes and smearing assorted other bodily fluids from yellow-fever sufferers over his person - including blood, spit, sweat and urine. He even sat in a "vomit sauna" full of heated regurgitation vapours, which caused him "great pain in [his] head", but left him in rude health. Finally, he took to actually ingesting the vomit - first in pill form, then straight from a patient's mouth. Since he still didn't get ill, he considered the case proven. Presumably others did too, since he was in due course awarded his medical doctorate.
In 1898, German surgeon August Bier (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0952-8180%2800%2900220-8) invented spinal anaesthesia, which involved a small dose of cocaine being injected into the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding the spinal cord. That was a great improvement on existing methods of general anaesthesia, but how effective was it? To find out, Bier decided to be anaesthetised himself. But things didn't go as planned (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17323304.900-this-wont-hurt-a-bit.html) for Bier - or for his hapless assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt. Hildebrandt was supposed to administer the cocaine but, thanks to a mix-up with the equipment, Bier was left with a hole in his neck from which cerebrospinal fluid began to flow. Rather than abandon the effort, however, the two men switched places. Once Hildebrandt had been anaesthetized, Bier stabbed, hammered and burned his assistant, pulled out his pubic hairs and - presumably eager to leave no stone unturned in testing the new method's efficiency - squashed his testicles.
Various researchers have infected themselves with parasites. One such is biologist David Pritchard (http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pharmacy/stafflookup/staff-by-role.php?id=MDA3MjUw&page_var=personal), who in 2004 allowed fifty hookworm larvae to burrow through his skin (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18725164.200-dose-of-worms-may-ease-asthma.html). Other members of Pritchard's lab also infected themselves with the hookworms, which can survive for up to a decade but are easy to kill off with drugs. "They itch quite a bit when they go through the skin," said Pritchard (http://research.nottingham.ac.uk/Vision/display.aspx?id=1177&pid=213), but become really troublesome only when they reached his stomach.