Self-experimenting scientists on themselves

Once there was a time when the scientific world considered itself self-experimenting to be normal, they assumed that no one was better than himself to describe the effect of a drug, or the progress of disease.

Sir Henry Head

Sir Henry Head, an English neurologist in the 19th century, studied the process of recovering a patient's sensation after suffering a peripheral nerve injury. But because the patients do not have professional knowledge, nor are they trained properly, it is not possible to reasonably explain this phenomenon. This led Head to a rather bold decision, cutting his nerves to experiment.

With the help of another doctor, Head cut off some peripheral nerves in his left arm and hand. Three months later, Head gradually recovered his ability to feel pain in his arms. He and his partner continued the tests and observations for the next four years. They have discovered many new knowledge about human cognitive activities.

Thanks to Head's preliminary research, we have more knowledge about how the human brain possesses different sensations and touches.

Friedrich Sertürner

One of his self-experimenting 'crazy' scientists is Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner, who isolated the first alkaloid from opium, through a 52-step process. After a few experiments with dogs and mice, Sertürner called the newly isolated alkaloid 'morphine', based on the god of dreams in Greek mythology, Morpheus, the reason for this name is morphine can be easy. put the object to sleep, even forever.

Confident with the results from live animal experiments, he decided to experiment on humans. Sertürner, along with three other friends, each ate about 30 mg of pure morphine, after another 30 minutes to take another dose, and another after 15 minutes. In total, they ate 90 mg for nearly 1 hour, 10 times more than the current dose requirement.

The results showed that in the first dose he and his friends reached a state of 'fun and lightheadedness', however after the second dose there was a sign of drowsiness and fatigue, and the third dose was worse when wild. deep sleep and sleep, finally nausea and headache when you wake up. And of course, his friends would never dare to participate in any of his experiments.

Thanks to this crazy experiment, Sertürner found the right dose to use morphine as an analgesic, which is still in use today.

Santorio Santorio

Living at Renaissance Padua, Italya, scientist Santorio is interested in many areas, including physiology. He doubts whether what we eat in the form of food and water is equal to the number of people we throw out in the form of feces and urine. To test this out, Santorio decided to spend 30 years weighing his weight, as well as everything he ate and 'emptied', then reviewed and calculated the difference.

He built a chair that is especially convenient for weighing body weight, food and waste. He spends most of his time working, eating, cleaning, sleeping and measuring differences.

He finally came to the conclusion that the amount of food we eat is greater than the amount of excretion, on average, every 3.5 kg we eat has 1.3 kg excretion. To explain this phenomenon, he proposes the theory of "emotionless sweat", saying that we always consume energy continuously through the skin.

Although there is little scientific value, Santorio's research is fundamental in the study of metabolic processes. The special chair he invented also became famous later.

Albert Hofmann

In 1943, Hofmann worked at the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, his main job was to research and manufacture drugs. While isolating a fungus in rice, he began to feel a strange feeling. He thought that he had exposed a substance related to LSD-25. He ate about 250 micrograms of this substance. Then he felt weird and left the lab, got on his bike and went back. When he got home, Hofmann recorded the effect of the drug he had experimented on that day, 'I saw beautiful images, along with extraordinary shapes, kaleidoscopic colors that dramatically changed' .

The drug Hofmann used that day was LSD, one of the strongest hallucinations. Although LSD was originally used in psychotherapy and by the CIA for brainwashing, this substance has been banned since 1967.

Jan Purkinje

Jan Purkinje, a Czech monk who entered the pharmacist field in 1819. This scientist always had an attitude of discontent with the way the pharmacist's dose of medicine was then. Therefore, he proceeded to find the appropriate dose by eating the drug himself, while paying attention to the effect of the drug on the mental and physical side.

Purkinje tried a variety of medicinal plants, such as digitalis plants, a plant that reduced heart rate and made vision blur. In order to study the effects of this plant's vision blur, he actively used the dose and recorded the problems he suffered and experienced.

Years later, Purkinje experimented with many different drugs. These experiments help people gain more knowledge about appropriate dosages and interactions of many drugs.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

From 1879 to 1880, German psychologist, Ebbinghaus performed experiments with his own memory, by inventing 2,300 meaningless syllables, each syllable consisting of three consonant letters - vowel - consonants, and he memorized them all by himself.

He concluded that the greater the amount of information, the more time it took to learn; once the information has been learned and forgotten, it takes less time to re-learn than the first time, and learning is more effective when the brain has time to absorb information.

Ebbinghaus has provided a lot of data as well as methodologies in the study of human mind that are still valid today.

Karl Landsteiner

Australian doctor, Landsteiner uses his own blood to verify the hypothesis that different people have different types of blood.

Landsteiner thinks that humans have different types of antibodies in their blood. Some antibodies attack blood cells that contain other antibodies. When antibodies attack other types, causing the transfusion process to be interrupted, often leading to death. In 1901, Landsteiner found four types of blood with his blood tests, namely: A, B, O and AB.

Through self-experimentation, Landsteiner found the principle of blood group compatibility, a finding useful for blood transfusion and organ donation and saved many human lives.

Jack Goldstein

In 1981, following the experiment of Karl Landsteiner, another self-experimental doctor named Jack Goldstein expanded his research into the field of blood.

Goldstein discovered an enzyme in coffee that could alter blood type B to be harmless. This chemical reaction converts blood group B, which makes it function like blood type O, thus expanding the ability of blood B to adapt to other blood groups.

Goldstein has blood type O. He has undergone a process of transfusion using an enzyme-treated type B blood type, to turn into O type. After undergoing this blood transfusion process and does not cause reactions. harmful effects, Goldstein has proven that this technique is really effective.

George Stratton

To test the theory of human cognitive adaptation, Stratton brought in an inverted pair of glasses, making the world in his eyes completely reversed. He wore a special glasses on his right eye and covered his left eye, then began experimenting on himself for 8 consecutive days, with an unusual vision.

The first day he moved very hard and the reverse space made him feel unreal. But the second day, only the body position is different. By the seventh day, everything became normal and he could move freely. His experiments showed that people can build links between vision, skin contact by learning, and adapting for a certain period of time.

Elsie Widdowson

In World War II, the British government fell into food shortages. Elsie Widdowson, a nutritionist with 60 years of experience, is determined to find the right diet for the current situation.

Widdowson and his longtime partner, McCance, performed the experiment on themselves, using a very poor diet that included bread, cabbage, and potatoes for several months in a row. Their aim was to find a suitable diet during the war with little meat, milk and calcium. They demonstrate that with a harsh diet, people can still maintain good health if given adequate calcium supplements.

Their work began in 1940, when calcium was added to bread. They also took responsibility for dealing with Britain's wartime ration during the Second World War.

Today, self-experimentation is limited in the field of science because of its dangerous and ambiguous nature. But for centuries, scientists have ventured to give people a vast, important source of knowledge, and this is the foundation for today's modern science to develop.