GREAT ARTICLE
Subjects Close to Their Hearts
For Medical Advances, Some Docs Experiment on Themselves
The notion of doctors who experiment on themselves may conjure up memories of the late Dr. Jekyll, the creation of writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who, in an attempt to distill his evil and good natures, ends up turning himself into the monstrous Mr. Hyde.
But self-experimentation has always had a place in science. Self-experimenters count among their ranks luminaries like Isaac Newton and Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall. Whether done for convenience or for the sake of convincing others to participate in their trials for new treatments, self-experimentation has been both a successful tactic and a fatal error in judgment.
There is no complete index of who has used themselves as parts of their experiments, so it's difficult to give it a batting average, but self-experimentation has had some excellent yields, such as cures for illnesses, like yellow fever and peptic ulcers, as well as the artificial sweetener Splenda.
These doctors and innovators went beyond the norm and literally put themselves into their work -- and produced results... [READ ON]
But self-experimentation has always had a place in science. Self-experimenters count among their ranks luminaries like Isaac Newton and Nobel Prize winner Barry Marshall. Whether done for convenience or for the sake of convincing others to participate in their trials for new treatments, self-experimentation has been both a successful tactic and a fatal error in judgment.
There is no complete index of who has used themselves as parts of their experiments, so it's difficult to give it a batting average, but self-experimentation has had some excellent yields, such as cures for illnesses, like yellow fever and peptic ulcers, as well as the artificial sweetener Splenda.
These doctors and innovators went beyond the norm and literally put themselves into their work -- and produced results... [READ ON]
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