Investigators who experiment on themselves
Some investigators have tested an experimental factor on themselves before risking other people. Self-experimentation led to discoveries in cardiac catheterisation, anaesthesia and drug development, but modern review boards are unlikely to approve it.
What self-experimentation is
Self-experimentation is an investigator's deliberate experiment on himself or herself before risking other humans to the experimental factor. The word deliberate is in the definition so that it excludes treating physicians who are exposed to disease by accident.
Discoveries made by self-experimentation
In centuries past, scientists with the courage to experiment on themselves made many important discoveries in medicine. Some discoveries would not have been made had their researchers not acted as their own subjects, and some of those researchers won Nobel Prizes.
Werner Forssmann inserted a cannula and catheter into his own arm, walked from his laboratory to the radiology department in the hospital basement, and had to fight off a colleague physically to get the technician to x-ray the catheter in his right auricle. He repeated the self-experiment five times, and in 1956 he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on cardiac catheterisation.
Anaesthesiology developed from a long history of self-experimentation by surgeons, dentists and general physicians. In the mid-nineteenth century the social use of ether, known as ether frolics, was popular, and some physicians found bruises after an ether frolic that they could not remember getting. These events led to more self-experimentation and eventually to the use of ether and other inhalants to prevent pain during surgery.
Self-experimentation has also helped drug discovery. Disulfiram, originally developed by Medicinalco as an anti-parasitic agent, was first tested in rabbits, in which it was not found to cause adverse effects. The company's medical research director and a member of his research team conducted the first in-human safety study on themselves. While taking a daily dose of disulfiram, each had nausea, flushing and headaches after drinking alcohol, and when they compared notes they linked the symptoms to drinking alcohol while taking the drug. That began the development of Antabuse, a drug used to help alcoholics avoid alcohol. The discovery may never have been made if animals had been the test subjects.
Self-experimentation under review boards
Modern institutional review boards would be unlikely to approve self-experimentation, and the practice appears to be a thing of the past. Review boards should still ask researchers who request the use of human subjects whether they would be willing to enrol in their own studies. Researchers who are going to risk someone else's life for their research should be willing to take part first.