Suppose a doctor somewhere is doing research on the effect of some substance on the membranes of blood cells. So, he needs some blood cells.
Could he conceivable just prick his own finger and use his own blood? Or is this perceived as unethical in some way, and he’d have to find a volunteer donor?
Not usually, but sometimes.
Recently, the nobel prize was awarded to a scientist who drank a sample of helicobacter pylori himself to prove that these organisms cause stomach ulcers.
It may not be done very often now, but it was certainly not unheard of in the past. Consider, for example, Albert Hoffman and his famous bicycle ride.
A veterinarian named Robert Lopez won an Ig Nobel prize for entomology in 1994 for infecting himself with cat ear mites.
The first guy to use local anesthesia supposedly did an operation on himself. Something big like open bowel surgery or something. Maybe to study the digestive tract?? I forget where I read it. I guess he did it because no one believed he could numb the pain.
It used to be done fairly often in the “good old days” of medical research. Development of the yellow fever vaccine included a few researchers and medical staff voluntarily subjecting themselves to the virus (and some of them died).
I don’t think there’s anything unethical about using yourself as a source of cells for research, considering that you’d be fairly informed about the risks involved.
I’m pretty sure that whether or not a researcher used herself as a guinea pig, she’d still need to have a research plan that was approved by her Institutional Review Board. It matters less that you use yourself if that doesn’t screw up your variables, than whether you have permission to conduct that research at all. If not, a) you may not be able to publish results; and b) may lose your funding.
A history of the practice is *Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine * by Lawrence K. Altman, the longtime medical writer for the New York Times.
The most hair-raising self-experiment I know of is the first cardiac catheterization. “Everyone knew” that shoving a catheter into a beating heart would stop the heart and kill the subject, so the doctor who did the first such catheterization not only did it on himself, he did it completely alone, because everyone he asked refused to help him. He set up an x-ray machine to take a picture of the inserted catheter so he could prove he’d succeeded.
Louis Pasteur proposed self-testing his rabies vaccine: he would have himself vaccinated, then have himself inoculated with a viable rabies culture. He couldn’t do the inoculations himself though (as a chemist, he lacked the training, and was reportedly a little squeamish about invasive procedures anyway), and his medical collaborator, Emile Roux, refused to help him or even discuss the matter. So they had to wait until a suitable rabid-dogbite victim was available.
And when Craig Venter decided to map the human genome in competition with the official program, the human that he chose to map was … Craig Venter’s.
When I worked in a research lab, when we ran experiments involving red blood cells we would draw blood from one of the people in the lab and use that. On that job, I would frequently be called upon to draw blood as I was the only person in the lab besides the physicians who had phlebotomy experience.
This was only a little over a year ago, so it does still happen.
The first human on which the polio vaccine was tested was Dr Jonas Salk - the developer of that vaccine.
I think you’ve been misled on this. None of the claimants for ‘first’ use of anesthesia (Long, Well, Jackson, Morton) are recorded as having operated on themselves. In fact, it was public demonstrations of surgery under anesthesia that convinced the medical profession that it worked.
Besides, the first anesthetics used (ether and chloroform) are general, not local anesthetics. A major bowel resection would normally use a general anesthetic, not local (at least until recently).
There is an interesting (unsourced) story about this in the Linux fortune files:
This confirms by name the essentials of the story, but not the dramatic elements. Ditto this site. It appears nobody wants to talk about future Nobel Prize winners tying women to tables.
On preview, advancing a catheter from a vein in your arm into the right atrium must feel really funky.
That’s why we need a Nobel in Perv Arts.
If you DON’T use yourself as a subject, then some other jerk is going to wind up with the resulting superpowers.
Echoing Hirundo82’s post, as a grad student in a hematology research lab I regularly had the MD fellows punch holes in me and take out 50 ml or so of blood or bone marrow for our mine and other lab member’s experiments. Twas no big deal.
I heard the best story of this self-experimentation during the retirement “roast” of my one-time boss, Dr. Roger Guillemin, 1977 Nobel prize winner in medicine and (co-)discoverer of the hypothalamic releasing factors and endorphins. After he and his colleague had purified a significant quantity of one of these hormones (and sorry, I don’t remember which it was), they injected some into themselves and then went home to their wives. Apparently, both their wives were very pleased by the results as it had a long-lasting stimulatory effect in the gonadal region.
Another answer would be Colonel John Stapp, who had the idea that experiments on human acceleration tolerance could enable the Air Force to devise better procedures, in the event of a crash, to allow more pilots to survive. Stapp wouldn’t allow anyone else to risk the tests, so it was he himself who was strapped into the rocket sleds. These experiments may be better known for the work of one of the other researchers, by the name of Murphy, who observed (after a run where all the diagnostic instruments were wired incorrectly) that if there’s a right way and a wrong way to do something, some fool will invariably choose the wrong way.
I think I love you.