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Weird science and weird scientists throughout history

Electrified Sheep
& Elephants on Acid

My newest book, Electrified Sheep, which is packed full of mad scientists, is currently available in the UK. The US edition is coming out in 2012. My previous book, Elephants on Acid, is also still available everywhere. Click on either image for more info.





Categories

Self-Experiments
Topics from the archives of the Mad Science Museum related to self-experimentation. Arranged in descending chronological order.

48 Hours With Plants (September 2011)
Stewart
In 1771, Joseph Priestley conducted an experiment that demonstrated the symbiotic relationship between plants and animals. When he placed either a mouse or a plant alone in a sealed glass container, it soon died. But when he placed the mouse and plant together in the container, they survived. He noted that each somehow made the air breathable for the other. In September 2011, Iain Stewart, professor of geoscience at Plymouth University, conducted a scaled-up version of this famous experiment. Instead of a single plant he used 150 plants, and instead of a mouse he used a person — himself.
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The Quest for Bulletproof Skin (Aug 2011)
An August 2011 Associated Press story reported that Dutch artist Jalila Essaidi, in collaboration with Utah State researcher Randy Lewis, created "bulletproof skin". Or, at least, skin that's somewhat bulletproof. The material was able to stop a bullet fired at reduced speed from a .22 caliber rifle, though not one fired at normal speed.
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Human Deceleration (1947-1954)

Dr. Stapp decelerating
After World War II, the US Air Force needed to know if pilots could eject from supersonic jets without facing certain death because of the shock of rapidly decelerating from the speed of sound to a near standstill. The transition exposed pilots to forces of over 40 or 50 Gs. (One G equals the force of gravity at the surface of the earth; 40 Gs is like a 7000-pound elephant falling on top of you.) Many doctors believed that 18 Gs was the most a human body could endure, but no one knew for sure. Flight surgeon John Paul Stapp volunteered to serve as the guinea pig in a series of physically brutal experiments to find out.

At Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, Stapp designed a rocket-powered sled that blasted down a 3500-foot track at speeds up to 750 mph before slamming into a pool of water that brought it to an abrupt halt. It went from 750 mph to zero in one second. Strong restraints made sure that the passenger didn’t continue their forward trajectory, though the restraints didn’t always work. One test dummy came free of the harness and was catapulted 700 feet through the air.

For his inaugural rocket sled ride, in 1947, Stapp went at a gentle 90 mph. The next day he advanced to 200 mph. And subsequently he kept signing up for more rides, upping his speed, probing the limits of human endurance. Over a period of seven years he rode the sled twenty-nine times.
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Edwin Katskee: Death by Cocaine (1936)
Cocaine was the first local anesthetic used in medicine. Its use brought many benefits by allowing surgeons to avoid having to rely on more dangerous general anesthetics. Nevertheless, occasionally patients had bad reactions to the drug. In an effort to find out why this was the case, the Nebraska proctologist Edwin Katskee gave himself a large injection of cocaine on the night of 25 November 1936. He then recorded the clinical course of his symptoms in notes written on the wall of his office. As it turned out, the amount of cocaine he gave himself was so large it proved fatal. The media described his note-filled wall as his "death diary".
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The Sensitive Testes (1933)
In 1933, either Herbert Woollard or Edward Carmichael had weights stacked on his testicles for the sake of science. It's not possible to say exactly which one of these London-based doctors bore the unusual burden, because while both participated in the experiment, only one of them lay on a table and suffered the scrotal compression. The other one did the stacking. They never revealed who served in which capacity — nor how they chose who was to be the unlucky one.
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AW Blair: Effects of the Black Widow on Man (1933)

Dr. Allan Walker Blair
In November 1933, University of Alabama professor Allan Walker Blair used a pair of forceps to place a female black widow spider against the index finger of his left hand. Immediately the spider sunk its chitinous claws into his skin, twisting its body from side to side as if to drive them in deeper. Blair held the spider in this position for ten seconds, as its venom entered his body.

Blair later explained his actions as part of an experimental study of the effects of the bite of the female black widow on man. A curious aspect of this experiment was that the effects of the bite were already known. As Blair himself noted, a fellow entomologist, William Baerg, had conducted a similar self-experiment twelve years earlier. Baerg had been rushed to the hospital nine hours after being bitten, where he spent three days tossing and turning, wracked by nightmarish, feverish pain. Blair was not only aware of this, but decided to allow the spider to bite him for twice as long as Baerg had risked. As a result, his suffering was proportionately greater.
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Joseph Barcroft’s Borderland Excursions (1931)
Throughout his career, Cambridge physiologist Joseph Barcroft conducted self-experiments in which he pushed himself to the very edge of insanity and death. He referred to these as his "borderland excursions".

Some of Barcroft's early excursions included volunteering to be exposed to hydrocyanic acid gas (aka prussic acid) during World War I. A dog in the gas chamber with him died in ninety-five seconds, but Barcroft waited ten minutes before stumbling out with the dog in his arms.
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The Self-Surgery of Dr. Evan O’Neill Kane (1921 & 1932)

Dr. Evan O'Neill Kane
On 15 February 1921, as the American surgeon Evan O’Neill Kane lay on a table in a hospital waiting to have his appendix removed, he decided to conduct an impromptu experiment — to find out whether it would be possible to remove his own appendix. So he sat up and announced that everyone should step back because he was going to perform the operation himself. Since he was the chief surgeon at the hospital, the staff reluctantly obeyed his strange command.
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Frederick Hoelzel: The Glass-Eating Scientist (1889-1963)

Frederick Hoelzel (age 27)
following a 15-day fast
As a teenager, Frederick Hoelzel adopted a strange method of weight-loss. He curbed his appetite by eating non-caloric food substitutes such as corn cobs, sawdust, cork, feathers, asbestos, rayon, and banana stems. His favorite meal was surgical cotton cut up into small pieces, which became part of his daily diet.

Later in his life, during the 1920s, while working as a researcher at the University of Chicago, Hoelzel put this talent for eating unusual substances to scientific use by ingesting a variety of inert materials in order to measure how quickly they passed through his intestines.
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Dr. Minovici’s Hanging Experiments (1905)
During the first decade of the twentieth century, while employed as a professor of forensic science at the State School of Science in Bucharest, Nicolae Minovici undertook a comprehensive study of death by hanging. Inspired by his research, he decided to find out, first-hand, what it would feel like to die in this way.
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All text Copyright © 2011 by Alex Boese, except where otherwise indicated. All rights reserved.