Medical Field Has Long History of Self-Experimenters
The report that a Paris immunologist has injected himself with a potential AIDS vaccine marks the latest chapter in a long history of self-experimentation by researchers willing to risk their lives to expand medical science--and perhaps gain a measure of personal glory.
Over the centuries, hundreds of physicians have thrust themselves into the unknown.
They have tested vaccines, swallowed bacteria, taken hallucinatory agents, injected lethal doses of drugs, allowed themselves to be bitten by insects carrying deadly germs, and in dozens of other ways made themselves “guinea pigs” in the quest for knowledge.
Biomedical ethicists believe that self-experimentation may provide some researchers a self-serving rationale to justify subjecting others to such experimentation--a conviction that may not be in the best interest of other subjects. But today, institutional rules and oversight procedures make such unauthorized human experimentation unlikely.
Among the most prominent self-experimenters was Jonas Salk, developer of the first polio vaccine. In 1952, well before the vaccine had gained official approval, he inoculated himself before giving it to any other human. He said he had done so “because I knew that somebody would ask whether I had.”
What may be the classic self-experiment was conducted nearly 60 years ago by a young German physician named Werner Forssmann. He not only survived but also won a Nobel Prize for developing what is now a basic tool in cardiology.
As house officer at a German hospital in 1929, Forssmann opened a vein in his arm and threaded a thin, 2 1/2-foot-long tube into it and maneuvered the tube into the chambers of his heart.
His purpose was to find a better way to inject drugs into the heart without puncturing it.
After the insertion, Forssmann walked from the operating room up a flight of stairs and then down a long corridor until he came to the X-ray department. There, he took an X-ray picture showing the tip of the catheter in his heart chamber. The picture proved that he had, indeed, done what he had set out to do.
Today, cardiac catheterization is routinely used--with the guidance of X-rays--to diagnose a number of heart problems, ranging from congenital defects to the clogged coronary arteries.
Forssmann had been warned not to do the experiment by his supervisor, who reprimanded him afterward. But eventually all was forgiven.
The story of another self-experimenter, Dr. Jesse W. Lazear, did not have such a happy ending. Lazear was a member of the medical commission headed by U.S. Army Maj. Walter Reed sent to Cuba in 1900 to study the cause of yellow fever.
The commission ultimately learned that mosquitoes are essential for the human transmission of yellow fever. A key element in that discovery was an experiment in which Lazear and several others deliberately exposed themselves to mosquitoes. Lazear (but not the others) died as a result of the yellow fever he contracted. His daring gambit eliminated bacteria as a possible cause of the disease--a leading theory at the time.
Another unfortunate result from self-experimentation occurred in 1767 when John Hunter, a British surgeon, deliberately inoculated himself with what he believed to be gonorrhea in order to study venereal disease.
Hunter went on to develop both gonorrhea and syphilis, and he concluded that the two diseases are one and the same. That erroneous conclusion confused doctors for decades--and was not cleared up for 100 years. Today it is believed that Hunter must have unknowingly injected himself with two different organisms. He was said to have suffered the debilitating effects of venereal disease in his old age.
Another self-experimenter was Arthur Conan Doyle, the physician and author who created the literary character Sherlock Holmes. Suffering from neuralgia, a painful condition that affects the nerves, Doyle gave himself an experimental drug as a possible treatment. In a subsequent letter to Lancet, a leading British medical journal, Doyle reported that he experienced no side effects, but did not say if he benefited from the drug.
