I don’t remember <where> I read it, but I remember reading that the chemist who discovered burprenorphine a synthetic partial agonist opioid went through a traditional first dosing of a human at a local hospital and he reported vomiting a lot. He made it seem like this was standard among the culture of chemists.
Was this ever a thing, or is it still a thing among chemists? Seems outlandishly risky from a workplace safety or liability standpoint.
I don’t see how it could be standard. Some drugs are only effective for treating very specific conditions, that the chemist himself probably doesn’t have. Many of them are even dangerous for normal individuals. A drug which slows heart rate, for instance, might be perfectly safe and appropriate for someone suffering from rapid heart rate, but dangerous for someone whose rate is already normal.
I think that the standard first human patients are terminal sufferers of some disease, for whom there is very little other hope.
At a hospital—what a pussy. :rolleyes: Back when men were men, you self-administered an experimental ergot derivative and went for a bike ride. I’ve never read PIHKAL, only skimmed it, but I think Shulgin pretty much took the bull by the horns too and tried everything on himself first.
Now all drugs are first tested on healthy people. (after animal tests) That test is for safety of the drug. (phase I is the name of that test) So for example a blood pressure drug is tested on someone with normal blood pressure.
If it tests OK for healthy people then they move on to test on people who have the problem the drug is designed for.
Well Albert Hoffman the first chemist to synthesize LSD accidentally ingested the drug when it absorbed through his skin in the lab. What a great discovery and afterwards he ingested it multiple times on purpose to note its effects. I imagined it was quite a mind fuck on the first trip when you just think everything is normal and just start tripping balls.
Not sure I’d classify self-administration of phenethylamines as taking the bull by the horns - what’s the worst that can happen? Your head’s cabbaged for a few hours.
Self-administration of novel opioids though? More like taking the bull by the bollocks. Etorphine, for example, is a closely related compound to burprenorphine - 10 mg will tranquilise an elephant, and kill a human. So whilst old time chemists weren’t adverse to the old taste test, I reckon the respiratory-depression side-effects of opiates / opioids, known since antiquity, would cool this sort of cavalier approach. Or at least if the inventor did try it out, it would have been with the knowledge that a microgram dose was the starting point.
Not so much a new drug as a new disease mechanism, but Barry Marshall, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering the relationship between H. pylori and peptic ulcers, famously drank a petri dish of H. pylori to help prove his thesis.
I recall Barry Sharpless saying he likes to taste the natural products synthesized in his lab, assuming there’s enough to taste after characterization.
I’m not sure that many of them are orally active; he just wants to know what they taste like.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele had the bad habit of tasting all the substances he was working with, which predictably caused him to die in his 40s. Scheele discovered more elements than just about anyone (such as chlorine) but doesn’t get credit for any of them, and is arguably best known today for eating his work.
And not knowing the minuscule doses in which LSD can affect humans, he took what we know today to be truly heroic amounts. I’m impressed he was able to function afterwards. :eek:
Jonas Salk tested his polio vaccine onhimself and his family. Albert Sabin also tested his vaccine on himself.
Don’t know about the 20th Century, but my chemistry professor said that in the 18th and early 19th centuries, it was quite common for chemists to taste and smell whatever new elements and molecules they discovered in the lab. Just for science. “Lead – soft, dense metal. Color: dull gray. Smell: none. Taste: sweet.” He said a lot of chemists were poisoned or got debilitating ailments before this practice died out (I wonder who first took a whiff of chlorine gas). As for drugs specifically, I’m not sure how widespread it was, beyond the examples cited already in this thread.