There's a long tradition among scientists of using themselves as subjects in their experiments if they can't find anyone else to volunteer — or if they feel it would be unethical to ask another to take the risk. Self-experimentation can be extremely heroic, but at times may also appear slightly mad. The following self-experiments display more of the latter quality than the former. The accounts are condensed and adapted from my new book, Electrified Sheep, which is currently available in the UK. An American edition is coming out in 2012. ~ Alex

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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.

Each time he rode the sled, the force of the deceleration hammered his body. He repeatedly endured blackouts, concussions, splitting headaches, cracked ribs, dislocated shoulders, and broken bones. One time, in a show of bravado, he set a broken wrist himself as he waited for medics to arrive. The greatest danger was to his eyes. Rapid deceleration causes the blood to pool with great force in the eyes, bursting capillaries and potentially tearing retinas. Even more disturbingly, when a human body comes to a stop that abruptly, there's a real possibility the eyeballs will simply keep going — popping out of the skull and flying onwards.


On Stapp's final ride on 10 December 1954, this almost happened. Nine rockets propelled him to 632 mph, faster than a .45 calibre bullet. He outran a jet flying overhead. And when the sled hit the water, Stapp experienced a record-breaking 46.2 Gs of force.

Stapp survived, but he later wrote of the experience, "It felt as though my eyes were being pulled out of my head... I lifted my eyelids with my fingers, but I couldn't see a thing." He feared he'd permanently lost his vision, but thankfully his eyesight gradually returned over the next few days. However, on account of that final ride, he suffered vision problems for the rest of his life.



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.

Kane propped himself up with pillows in order to get a good view of his abdomen. He injected cocaine and adrenalin into his abdominal wall, and then he swiftly cut through the superficial tissue, found the swollen appendix, and excised it.

The entire procedure took thirty minutes. There was only one slight moment of panic when part of his intestines unexpectedly popped out of his stomach as he leaned too far forward, but he calmly shoved his guts back inside his body and continued working. Kane noted he probably could have completed the operation even more quickly if it hadn't been for the air of chaos in the operating room as the hospital staff milled around, unsure of what they were supposed to do.

Kane enjoyed a full and swift recovery. Fourteen days later he was back in the hospital operating on other patients. He later explained that he had performed the self-experiment both to know how a patient feels when being operated upon, and to better understand how to use local anaesthesia to best advantage.


Emboldened by his success, when he needed a hernia operation eleven years later, at the age of seventy-one, he decided to self-operate again. Unfortunately, this second surgery proved more problematic. He never fully regained his strength, came down with pneumonia, and died three months later.



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.

Minovici began his self-hanging experiments by constructing an auto-asphyxiation device — a hangman's knot tied in a rope that ran through a pulley attached to the ceiling. He lay down on a cot, placed his head through the noose, and firmly tugged the other end of the rope. The noose tightened, his face turned a purple-red, his vision blurred, and he heard a whistling. He lasted only six seconds before consciousness began to slip away, forcing him to stop.


For the next stage of his research, Minovici brought in assistants. He placed the noose around his neck, then the assistants pulled the other end of the rope with all their might, lifting him several metres off the ground. Immediately his eyes squeezed shut and his respiratory tract pinched close. He signalled frantically to be let down.

In this first effort, Minovici lasted only a few seconds in the air before having to signal to be let down, but with repeated practice he eventually managed to endure twenty-five seconds of swinging by his neck.


But one final experiment remained — hanging from the ceiling by a constricting hangman's knot. Minovici tied the knot, again placed his head through the noose, and gave his assistants the signal. They pulled. Instantly a burning pain ripped through his neck. The constriction was so intense that he frantically waved the men to stop. He had only endured four seconds, and his feet hadn't even left the ground. Nevertheless, the trauma to his neck made it painful for him to swallow for an entire month.

Minovici’s later career wasn’t as masochistic. He developed an interest in Romanian folk art and founded a museum that exists to this day.



In 1800, Alessandro Volta announced his invention of the Voltaic pile — the world’s first electric battery that allowed for a continuous, steady, and strong flow of electric current. A young German physicist named Johann Wilhelm Ritter (most famous for his discovery of ultraviolet light) took advantage of this discovery to apply the poles of a Voltaic pile systematically to every part of his body.

Ritter applied current to his tongue where it produced an acidic flavor. Shoving the wires up his nose made him sneeze. Touching them to his eyeballs caused strange colors to swim in his vision. Ritter also applied the current to his genitals.

The latter experiment proved rather pleasurable. He wrapped his reproductive organ in a cloth moistened with lukewarm milk, then applied the current. Swelling soon occurred, followed by climax. He had become a pioneer of electro-orgasm. This experiment was made stranger by the fact that Ritter would occasionally tell people he was marrying his Voltaic pile, such as when he wrote to his publisher, "Tomorrow I marry — i.e., my battery!"

If this were the entirety of Ritter's electrical self-experimentation, it might have been considered only slightly odd. But Ritter kept pushing onward — increasing the current to dangerous levels, forcing himself to endure longer periods of time, and using opium to dull the pain. As a result, his health suffered. Repeated electrocution caused his eyes to grow infected. He endured frequent headaches, muscle spasms, numbness, and stomach cramps. His lungs filled with mucus. He temporarily lost much of the sensation in his tongue. Dizzy spells overcame him, causing him to collapse. A feeling of crushing fatigue, sometimes lasting for weeks, often made it difficult for him to get out of bed. At one time, the current paralysed his arm for a week. And yet he continued on, boasting, "I have not shrunk from thoroughly assuring myself of the invariability of their results through frequent repetition."

His bizarre self-experiments shocked his colleagues. One reviewer of his work commented, "Never has a physicist experimented so carelessly with his body." Eventually the abuse took its toll. His weakened condition is believed to have contributed to his death from tuberculosis at the age of thirty-three.



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.

He scooped up gravel from the walkway outside the lab, swallowed it down, and recorded that it rattled out into his toilet fifty-two hours later. Steel ball bearings and bent pieces of silver wire each took approximately eighty hours to pass through him. Gold pellets moved at a leisurely pace through his intestines, only emerging after twenty-two days. Glass beads proved far quicker, speeding through his alimentary canal in a mere forty hours. His intestinal speed record was set by a piece of knotted twine that zipped through him in a mere one-and-a-half hours, aided along by a violent bout of diarrhea.

Hoelzel continued these unappetizing experiments daily for many years, well into the 1930s. In fact, Christmas was the only day of the year he took a break from this grim fare, to allow himself a small, but plain meal of entirely digestible food.


The extreme diet left him skeletally thin. An unnamed reporter who visited the lab in 1933 wrote, "His hands are like those of an invalid, white, blue-linen and bony, his Adam's apple stands out from a scrawny neck, and his skin is colourless except for a network of fine blue lines, especially under his eyes."

Hoelzel never became a full professor, only attaining the rank of "Assistant in Physiology" at the University of Chicago. He was more widely known by the nickname the press gave him: The Human Billy Goat.