---
title: "Self-experimentation in medicine"
chunk: 1/7
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:45:59.502626+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Self-experimentation refers to scientific experimentation in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on themself. Often this means that the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment are all the same. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present. Some of these experiments have been very valuable and shed new and often unexpected insights into different areas of medicine.
There are many motivations for self-experiment. These include the wish to get results quickly and avoid the need for a formal organisational structure, to take the ethical stance of taking the same risk as volunteers, or just a desire to do good for humanity.  Other ethical issues include whether a researcher should self-experiment because another volunteer would not get the same benefit as the researcher will get, and the question of whether informed consent of a volunteer can truly be given by those outside a research program.
A number of distinguished scientists have undertaken self-experimentation, including at least five Nobel laureates; in several cases, the prize was awarded for findings the self-experimentation made possible. Many experiments were dangerous; various people exposed themselves to pathogenic, toxic or radioactive materials. Some self-experimenters, like Jesse Lazear and Daniel Alcides Carrión, died in the course of their research. Notable examples of self-researchers occur in many fields; infectious disease (Jesse Lazear: yellow fever, Max von Pettenkofer: cholera), vaccine research and development (Daniel Zagury: AIDS, Tim Friede: Snakebite), cancer (Nicholas Senn, Jean-Louis-Marc Alibert), blood (Karl Landsteiner, William J. Harrington), and pharmacology (Albert Hofmann, and many many others).  Research has not been limited to disease and drugs. John Stapp tested the limits of human deceleration, Humphry Davy breathed nitrous oxide, and Nicholas Senn pumped hydrogen into his gastrointestinal tract to test the utility of the method for diagnosing perforations.

== Definition ==
There is no formal definition of what constitutes self-experimentation.  A strict definition might limit it to cases where there is a single-subject experiment and the experimenter performs the procedure on himself.  A looser definition might include cases where the experimenters put themselves amongst the volunteers for the experiment.  According to S. C. Gandevia of the University of New South Wales, who was looking at the question from the perspective of ethics, it is only self-experiment if the would-be self-experimenter would be named as an author on any subsequent published paper.  That is, the person who would receive the academic credit for the experiment must also be the subject of it.

== Motivations ==

There are many reasons experimenters decide to self-test, but amongst the most fundamental is the ethical principle that the experimenter should not subject the participants in the experiment to any procedure they would not be willing to undertake themselves.  This idea was first codified in the Nuremberg Code in 1947, which was a result of the trials of Nazi doctors at the Nuremberg trials accused of murdering and torturing victims in valueless experiments.  Several of these doctors were hanged.  Point five of the Nuremberg Code requires that no experiment should be conducted that is dangerous to the subjects unless the experimenters themselves also take part.  The Nuremberg Code has influenced medical experiment codes of practice around the world, as has the exposure of experiments that have since failed to follow it such as the notorious Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
Critics of self-experimenters point to other less savoury motivations such as simple self-aggrandisement.  Some scientists have resorted to self-experiment to avoid the "red tape" of seeking permission from the relevant ethics committee of their institution. Werner Forssmann was so determined to proceed with his self-experiment that he continued with it even after permission had been denied.  He was twice dismissed for this activity, but the importance of his work was eventually recognised in a Nobel Prize.  Some researchers believe that self-experimentation is not permitted.  However, this is not true, at least in the United States where the same rules apply regardless of who the subject of the experiment is.
Self-experimentation is also criticised for the risk of over-enthusiastic researchers, eager to prove a point, not accurately noting the results.  Against this it is argued by those supporting self-experiment that medically trained persons are in a better position to understand and record symptoms, and self-experiment is usually at the very early stage of a program before volunteers have been recruited.
A wish to commit suicide is sometimes offered as a reason for self-experimentation.  However, Lawrence K. Altman, author of Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-experimentation in Medicine, while acknowledging that this may sometimes occur, after extensive research could find only one verified case of attempted suicide by self-experimentation.  This was Nobel Prize winner Élie Metchnikoff, who, in 1881, suffering from depression, injected himself with relapsing fever.  This was his second suicide attempt, but according to his wife, Olga, he chose this method of death so that it would be of benefit to medicine.  However, Metchnikoff survived and in 1892 also self-experimented with cholera, but this is not thought to have been a suicide attempt.

Perhaps the noblest motivation is the simple altruistic desire to do something of benefit to humanity regardless of the risks.  There most certainly are risks, as Jesse Lazear found to his cost when he died of yellow fever after deliberately infecting himself. Max von Pettenkofer, after ingesting cholera bacteria said:Even if I had deceived myself and the experiment endangered my life, I would have looked Death quietly in the eye for mine would have been no foolish or cowardly suicide; I would have died in the service of science like a soldier on the field of honor.
According to Ian Kerridge, professor of bioethics at the University of Sydney, the most common reason for undertaking self-experimentation is not so much anything noble, but rather "an insatiable scientific curiosity and a need to participate closely in their own research".