Thursday Things: Treat Yourself Edition
21 November 2024. Vol 6 No 47. By Dan McGirt. #276
Thursday Things is here! This week we treat ourselves for what ails us and hope it doesn’t go horribly wrong.
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Well that didn’t go as planned. Photo by Linus Mimietz on Unsplash
Maybe it’s because I read so many comic books as a kid, but I love stories where scientists test a cure or treatment or formula on themselves.
In comics, scientists are always testing their secret formulas on themselves. Depending on the needs of the story, this either results in gaining superpowers or goes horribly wrong and requires superhero intervention.
Just off the top of my head, Spider-Man villains Green Goblin, the Lizard, and Morbius the Living Vampire1 all got their powers from drinking a formula of their own creation that, respectively, drove them mad or turned them into a lizard man or a vampire. The Batman foe Man-Bat has a similar origin. As does Marvel’s Man-Thing. There are many other examples.
To be fair, most of the characters I just named were scientists trying to treat themselves for some illness or injury. Dr. Curt Connors was attempting to regenerate his missing arm when he took the formula that transformed him into the terrible Lizard.
Even Spider-Man himself has suffered such a mishap. Once, in an effort to cure himself of his spider powers, Peter Parker took a formula he had concocted on his own. Rather than having the desired effect, it caused him to grow two extra arms, which caused all sorts of problems for the web slinger.2
This all could have been avoided by following proper experimental procedures! Image: Marvel Comics
Comic book science is almost completely lacking in regulation, oversight or safety protocols. But does this sort of thing ever happen in the real world?
It does.
The Australian physician Dr. Barry Marshall was convinced that stomach ulcers were caused by bacteria, not stress, which was the scientific and medical consensus back in the 1980s.
To prove his hypothesis he drank a big bottle of bacteria-infested goop and gave himself severe stomach ulcers:
The Doctor Who Drank Infectious Broth, Gave Himself an Ulcer, and Solved a Medical Mystery
In 1981 Marshall began working with Robin Warren, the Royal Perth Hospital pathologist who, two years earlier, discovered the gut could be overrun by hardy, corkscrew-shaped bacteria called Helicobacter pylori. Biopsying ulcer patients and culturing the organisms in the lab, Marshall traced not just ulcers but also stomach cancer to this gut infection. The cure, he realized, was readily available: antibiotics. But mainstream gastroenterologists were dismissive, holding on to the old idea that ulcers were caused by stress.
Unable to make his case in studies with lab mice (because H. pylori affects only primates) and prohibited from experimenting on people, Marshall grew desperate. Finally he ran an experiment on the only human patient he could ethically recruit: himself. He took some H. pylori from the gut of an ailing patient, stirred it into a broth, and drank it.
As the days passed, he developed gastritis, the precursor to an ulcer: He started vomiting, his breath began to stink, and he felt sick and exhausted. Back in the lab, he biopsied his own gut, culturing H. pylori and proving unequivocally that bacteria were the underlying cause of ulcers.
Marshall and Warren won the 2005 Nobel Prize for Medicine in recognition of their work. Ulcers are now routinely treated with antibiotics and stomach cancer has been almost eliminated in many countries.
And all without anyone turning into a lizard. Or a man-bat.
Which brings me to today’s item:
This scientist treated her own cancer with viruses she grew in the lab
A scientist who successfully treated her own breast cancer by injecting the tumour with lab-grown viruses has sparked discussion about the ethics of self-experimentation.
Beata Halassy discovered in 2020, aged 49, that she had breast cancer at the site of a previous mastectomy. It was the second recurrence there since her left breast had been removed, and she couldn’t face another bout of chemotherapy.
Halassy, a virologist at the University of Zagreb, studied the literature and decided to take matters into her own hands with an unproven treatment.
A case report published in Vaccines in August1 outlines how Halassy self-administered a treatment called oncolytic virotherapy (OVT) to help treat her own stage 3 cancer. She has now been cancer-free for four years.
After successfully treating her own cancer — again without being turned into a bat or swamp monster — Halassy sought to publish her results. Alas, the medical journals were resistant. She got more than a dozen rejections.
That journals had concerns doesn’t surprise Jacob Sherkow, a law and medicine researcher at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who has examined the ethics of researcher self-experimentation in relation to COVID-19 vaccines.
The problem is not that Halassy used self-experimentation as such, but that publishing her results could encourage others to reject conventional treatment and try something similar, says Sherkow. People with cancer can be particularly susceptible to trying unproven treatments.
On the other hand, it’s important that knowledge gained through self-experimentation not be lost.
There is certainly room to debate the ethics of self-experiments, but that’s too deep for Thursday Things. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, you might start here:
Review of Scientific Self-Experimentation: Ethics History, Regulation, Scenarios, and Views Among Ethics Committees and Prominent Scientists (Rejuvenation ResearchVol. 22, No. 1)
But for me, all of that is secondary to admiring the courage and self-confidence that it takes to concoct a formula in your own lab and knock it back in hopes that it will cure your illness — or just prove your point — without transmogrifying you into a rampaging lizard-vampire-bat hybrid. Beata Halassy, Barry Marshall, and their self-experimenting colleagues are true superheroes of science!
What could possibly go wrong, Peter? Image: The Amazing Spider-Man #100, Marvel Comics
Thank you for reading!
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Even worse for Morbius, he later turned into Jared Leto. Who Is Morbius the Living Vampire?
That Time Spider-Man Grew Four More Arms and Used Them To Beat Up a Vampire. This amazing blog post explains the whole Spider-Man with four arms saga in detail. It was the 70s, man. Just roll with it.