(funky music)
- Let's say you're a scientist
and you want your studies to be taken seriously.
One thing you probably shouldn't do
is perform the experiment on yourself.
But, regardless, there are scientists who have done that.
And here are five cases throughout the centuries
of scientists who, for better or worse,
decided to be their own guinea pigs.
(techno music)
Okay, have you ever wondered what would happen
if you, oh I don't know, weighed all of your excrement?
I know, we all have, but
assuming you don't gain or lose any weight,
would the weight of your excrement
be the exact same as the weight
of all the total food and drink you consume?
Interesting thought.
Well, in the 16th century, there was
a Venetian physician named Santorio Santorio.
And he wondered the same thing.
So he decided to experiment on himself.
Santorio Santorio created a test that lasted for 30 years,
in which he would constantly weigh himself,
all of the incoming food and drink,
and then all of his outgoing pee and poo.
And at the end, he would see if there was
an actual difference in the tally.
It turns out there was.
The ingoing combination of food and drink
actually weighs more than the combined mass
of our feces, our urine, and our net weight gain.
So, where does that extra mass go?
Santorio Santorio explained this
with his hypothesis of insensible perspiration,
where waste is basically expelled through our skin.
(shudders)
His work really isn't used anymore,
but it did help lay the groundwork for a
modern understanding of metabolism.
(techno music)
Dr. Elsie Widdowson was an English nutritionist
who did truly self-sacrificing experimentation
to add to our knowledge of human nutrition.
During World War II, food rationing in Great Britain
led Widdowson and her collaborator,
Dr. R.A. McCance to experiment on themselves.
Widdowson underwent starvation diets
to test ideas about what types of foods
humans could survive on when resources were really scarce.
They eventually demonstrated that a human could get along
on a diet of only potatoes, bread, and cabbage.
And they used these findings to set
recommendations for the British government.
To show how the body could perform
under various nutritional conditions,
Widdowson and McCance would hike in the mountains
for dozens of miles at a time,
burning up to 4,700 calories in one day.
(techno music)
Did you know that when an image enters your eye
and splashes against your retina,
it is originally projected upside-down?
Your brain has to mentally flip the image
for you to see it right side up.
It's pretty crazy, right?
But what if you were to flip the image a second time?
Over time, would your brain adapt
just as easily to this new condition?
Good question.
In the 1890s, a psychologist
from the University of California
named George Stratton tried to answer this question
by experimenting on his own face.
Stratton got his hands on some inverted lenses,
which flip the images passing through them upside-down.
In one eight day-long trial,
Stratton blindfolded one of his eyes
and put the inverted lens in front of the other one,
so he could only see the world
through the one eye upside-down.
Stratton reported that at first,
he was unable to manage normal activities very well.
Go figure.
He wrote that things seemed
to be misplaced, false, or illusory.
But after several days of his experiment,
Stratton reported that he began
to see things right side up again.
And eventually, he was able to move around his house
even with the insanity glasses on.
This was taken as evidence that
the brain can eventually adapt to process information
no matter how it's presented.
Pretty cool.
(techno music)
By the 19th century, opium was old news.
People had been using opium since ancient times
as medicine or sometimes just for fun.
Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner was a chemist
living in 19th century Westphalia
when he became the very first person
to chemically isolate crystals of
alkaloid morphine from that opium.
He used a 52-step process involving ammonia
to isolate the morphine alkaloid
from the rest of the opium.
And here's where it gets a little mean.
He experimented on dogs.
The morphine put the dogs to sleep.
Like, really asleep. Because the dogs eventually died.
So boo on him.
Obviously, the next step was to try it on humans, right?
Sertürner conducted the first
human trials of the morphine alkaloid
on himself and three of his friends.
Of course, his friends were like
17 years old at the time, by the way.
Surprisingly, they took way, way too much.
They started with a 30 milligram dose,
then another dose a half an hour later,
then another one 15 minutes after that.
Oy.
When Sertürner started to feel sick,
he realized "maybe we're partying a little bit too hard".
So he made all of his friends
chug vinegar to induce vomiting.
Yeesh.
They all lived, thankfully, and of course,
his discovery had huge implications
for the medicine in the following centuries.
Since then, it's been used for the treatment of pain,
so, hats off to you, sir.
(techno music)
The Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman
discovered the effects of LSD-25 by accident.
He was working as a researcher at the time
for Sandoz Pharmaceuticals in 1943.
And so, of course he tried it on himself a few times, right?
In previous years, Hoffman had successfully synthesized
the active ingredient in ergot,
a fungus that grows on rye and other grains.
And that active ingredient is
lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.
In 1943, while handling a sample of the preparation,
Hoffman started to feel a little bit strange.
He went home sick, but decided
the effects of the drug were worth revisiting.
On April 19th of that same year,
Hoffman intentionally dosed himself
with 250 micrograms of LSD,
took a ride on his bicycle home,
and he was tripping pretty hard.
Hoffman wrote about his experiences, saying
"I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures,
"extraordinary shapes, an intense
"kaleidoscopic play of colors."
Later on, he wrote a book about it,
and it was called LSD: My Problem Child.
So what's the weirdest experiment
you've ever tested on your own mind and/or body?
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