Have you ever had a curiosity so strong that you’ve considered staying awake for 180 hours, tapping your spinal column with cocaine, consuming deadly parasites or pumping 6L of hydrogen up your bum?

Probably not. And that is most likely because you are not an idiot.

But - there’s a fine line between idiocy and genius, particularly in medical science.

And so today we explore some of the most extreme stories of heroes and scientists who have experimented on themselves in the name of science (though some of these experiments will make you wonder - name of…science?).

These experiments are daring, shocking, hideously painful and, at times, absolutely the last thing you would want to do to yourself as a human.

(And it will come as perhaps deeply unshocking that just 12 of 465 cases of self-experimentation over the last 200 years were women).

These experiments weren’t all pain without glory, however. Seven documented self-experimenters went on to win Nobel Prizes for their self-experimentation work. And incredibly, in 89% of instances, the self-experimenters obtained positive results in support of a hypothesis or produced valuable data.

But not all of them. Some saw catastrophic levels of failure. Some died. And some held science back by decades by their work.

Is this kind of self-as-guinea-pig testing ethical? And how far is too far?

The heroes, the idiots and the sad stories are all here.

Previously mentioned episodes:

The Schmidt Pain Index!

Barry Marshall Drinks Something Weird!

Why We Forgot The Cure For Scurvy

Sources

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Episode description

The Heroes and Idiots of Scientific Self-Experimentation!

Episode description