This video is sponsored by Wondrium.
Brew: A hand, rendered into a claw
by an eastern diamondback rattlesnake.
An index finger, mauled by a Malayan pit viper.
Another finger turned black and agonizingly
snipped off with a pair of garden clippers from
an unlucky encounter with a Cottonmouth viper.
Most of us could probably list the number of snakes
we’ve encountered on one hand, and the amount
of snake bite cases is an even smaller number.
But over the course of his 100 years, amateur
herpetologist Bill Haast was bitten over 173 times by
dozens of venomous snakes from all parts of the world.
But how could one man survive so many snake bites?
Is it possible to train your body to
fight off the effects of snake venom?
What about other poisons?
Please do not try anything you see in this video at home.
Ingesting unknown substances, and handling snakes
is extremely dangerous, and can lead to death.
And with that out of the way,
Let’ssss get into it.
A low rattle in the darkness surrounds you.
The rustling of leaves harmonize with the sounds of the night.
Was that something moving in the underbrush?
Or is it just the imagination
conjuring up monsters in the dark?
The rattle returns, and there’s a sharp nip
at your ankle followed by a throbbing pain.
You look down, and to your horror, a rattlesnake coils
away, leaving only a lethal injection of its venom.
You’re immediately lightheaded.
Your face and fingers have lost all feeling.
You retch, nothing comes out.
You wipe away the sweat on your
forehead, and look down at your hands.
They’re out of focus, your vision is blurring.
Time is ticking.
If you don’t get to the hospital soon,
these symptoms will only worsen with time.
In just 2 days, you might find yourself on the
wrong side of the threshold between life and death.
That is, unless you’re Bill “The Snake Man” Haast,
who would probably feel just fine, and go on to
try to catch the snake to add to his collection.
Mixed from the venoms of 32 different snake species, Haast
managed to develop a defence against snake venom by spending
the latter 60 years of his life injecting himself with a
small dose of homemade venom cocktail every single day.
Born December 30th, 1910, in Paterson, New
Jersey, Haast’s love affair with our serpentine
friends began when he was only 7 years old.
He managed to snag and bag a small garter snake in his
backyard, though his first bite came when he was 12.
He was at a boy scout camp when he was bitten by
a timber rattlesnake and rushed to the hospital.
Later that same year, Haast encountered a Copperhead
which sent him to the hospital for a week.
Quiz: You’d think that two near-death experiences in
childhood would make him scared of snakes, not like them.
Brew: Right?
But shortly after Haast’s brush with that
copperhead, he brought his first venomous
snake home to his family’s apartment.
His mother refused to stay there for three days before she,
against her better judgment, agreed to let him keep it.
He bought his first exotic snake, a Diamondback Rattler,
from a catalog, and, he noticed, it had come from Florida.
It was at that point he knew that Florida was his destiny.
Grill: Florida was his destiny?
Brew: Florida is… fine…
Quiz: Yeah, if you never leave Magic Kingdom.
Grill: Well there’s alligators there too.
Quiz: Ugh, you’re right, there’s no saving them.
Brew: Haast dropped out of school after he turned 16
to join a roadside snake show that travelled through
Florida in the late 1920s, however the business flopped
shortly after the onset of the Great Depression.
By 1947, Haast’s lifelong dream of opening
his Miami Serpentarium came into fruition.
He would entertain guests by deftly snatching up snakes
by the backs of their heads, forcing their teeth to
sink into soft plastic to show how venom is extracted.
The Serpentarium was primarily a roadside attraction,
but it also served as a dual purpose snake lab.
All of the venom he extracted, not just from
his performances, but from his work out of the
limelight, went toward developing anti-venoms.
Just a gram of freeze-dried venom, needing at least
100 extractions, could cost upwards of 5,000 dollars.
Freeze-dried samples are necessary for the production
of anti-venoms, so Haast made a lot of his money
selling his supply to medical practitioners.
Haast developed a snake serum in 1980 alongside
a Miami doctor, which they used to treat over
6000 people, and even made the wild claim that it
could help with Multiple Sclerosis and Arthritis.
Although the FDA eventually did ban the serum's
use, he irrefutably saved lives by donating his
own blood, rich in antibodies to snake venom, to
21 different snakebite victims across the globe.
Venezuela even made him an honorary citizen after he
travelled deep into the South American jungle to deliver a
young boy a pint of his life saving, antibody rich blood.
Though even his ability to drink snake venom like it’s a
Capri Sun didn’t save him from the ravages of time, and he
died of old age after a long fulfilling life at age 100.
Now, it’s not recommended that anyone do what
Bill Haast did, but it will surprise you how many
toxins we regularly consume in our daily lives!
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Quiz: I’m still mindblown over how he could
survive being bitten by one snake, let alone 170!
Brew: Haast practiced a technique called “Mithridatism”
to build up his “immunity” to our slithery neighbors.
Mithridatism is the practice of administering non-lethal doses
of a poison in order to develop an immune response against it.
It was named after King Mithridates of Pontus,
that is, Mithridates the 6th of Pontus, because
his father, Mithridates the 5th, was assassinated.
Quiz: Let me guess, he was poisoned.
Brew: How did you know?
Quiz: I took a wiiiiild guess.
Grill: And I thought you were the smart one, Brew.
Brew: I’m choosing to take that as a compliment.
Unfortunately for his two sons, neither
of them were of age to take the throne.
Until then, their mother would act as regent of their kingdom.
The prospect of a spoonful of cyanide slipping surreptitiously
into one of their meals, understandably freaked them out, so
one of the sons, Mithridates the soon to be 6th, bounced into
the woods to hide and maybe possibly raise an army for a coup.
And while he wandered through the woods of Anatolia,
he decided that dying of poison is for losers.
So he started eating all of the
poisonous plants he could find.
Quiz: What a great way to avoid
being poisoned, just poison yourself!
Grill: Good riddance!
Brew: Well… it worked.
After 7 long years out in the hills, chomping down on
every dangerous plant, fungus, and creature he could
find, he returned to his home of Sinope to launch a coup.
Once he had his land, his crown, and his “immunity” he
did two things: Expand his territory, as kings do, and
find as much more poison as he could get his fingers on.
Now that he had coffers of a royal title behind him,
he decided to stop randomly eating all the dangerous
fauna he could stomach, and get scientific about it.
Yay science!
Mithridates ordered the construction of a series
of poison labs, which he used to obtain more
exotic ingredients, develop antidotes, find more
poison to eat, and test his new concoctions on...
unlucky prisoners… Umm, yay science?
Quiz: I wonder how many people actually tried to poison him?
Wouldn’t they try a different plan sooner or later?
Grill: Sneaking in like Snake into the castle?
Brew: It’s hard to pin down exactly how many times would-be
assassins attempted to kill him, because, believe it or not,
unsuccessful assassinations rarely make the history books.
Unfortunately, like many rulers in the Roman period,
Mithridates’ downfall came from the sad fact that he was
#NotRoman, and was in constant fear of becoming Roman.
And by that I mean, invaded and murdered.
Though not by poison presumably.
Mithridates fought a long and difficult campaign against Rome
in Anatolia in which he might have committed a couple war
crimes, but he was finally stomped by Roman General, Pompey,
who kicked Mithridates across the Black Sea into Crimea.
Mithridates attempted to raise a new army,
but the local nobles were having precisely
none of that, and rebelled against him.
The king thought “hm, it actually sounds better to just die,
rather than getting paraded around by Romans as a trophy to
their victory” so he pulled out the vial of poison he kept at
his side next to his sword, to finish what the Romans started.
EXCEPT it didn’t work, because he had spent the
latter 40 years of his life building up an immunity!
With no more options at his disposal, Mithridates asked
his bodyguard and friend, Bituitus, to just do him
a favour, and stab him real good, y’know, bro stuff.
Quiz: Wait, so Mithridatism actually works?
Brew: Certainly it works,
Grill: YES, HAHA.
Brew: —but it doesn’t offer a full
“immunity” in the way you might think.
Grill: Damn.
Brew: It’s kinda like immunotherapy
used to get rid of allergies.
Allergies are overactive immune
responses to various everyday substances.
Your body thinks something is poison, but it’s not.
Just like immunotherapy, Mithridatism slowly introduces larger
doses of a substance to generate a specific response, but the
goal of immunotherapy is to reduce an immune response, whereas
the goal of Mithridatism is to increase an immune response.
Or, in most cases, just to generate
any immune response at all.
For ingestible toxins, “immunity” involves the liver.
When you eat or drink something, it passes down
your esophagus, into your stomach where it is broken
down, moving into your intestines where nutrients
and chemicals are absorbed into your bloodstream.
But before that blood starts flowing around your
body, delivering nutrients to your organs, it needs to
make it through your body’s border patrol, the liver.
Composed of millions of cells called lobules separated by
small spaces, your liver acts like a sieve that filters
out toxins, selectively allowing certain substances
and nutrients to continue on to the rest of your body.
At that point, Kupffer cells arrive
like the proverbial cellular cavalry.
According to Dr. Michael Roizen, MD, they, “de-arm the toxins by converting
a dangerous chemical to a less harmful one or by packaging
them for easier disposal through our bile or urine”.
When your liver encounters a toxin that the Kupffer
cells cannot simply render inert or convert into a less
damaging substance, they’ll coat it in a water-soluble
chemical, and let it pass through your body via urine.
Mithridatism trains your liver’s ability to recognize certain
toxins and keep them from entering your bloodstream,
but Dr. Hayk Arakelyan, PhD., warns,
“mithridatism is not effective against all types
of poison” and “depending on the toxin, the practice can
lead to the lethal accumulation of a poison in the body”.
Your liver isn’t capable of adapting to recognize most
non-biological poisons so certain substances will build up
in your liver no matter how little of it you take at a time.
Quiz: So by consuming small non-lethal amounts
of a poison, you can train your body to more
efficiently target those poisons in your liver,
therefore reducing the impact of larger doses?
Brew: Yes, but as Arakelyan said, depending on the
rate that one consumes a toxin, your liver will
not be able to remove it as fast as it builds up.
While it can learn how to catch the bad stuff and
keep it from going into your bloodstream, it won’t be
able to remove it as quickly as you add more poison.
Grill: Oh, well it’s not really an “immunity” then.
It’s more like… a tolerance.
Just like me and YEET.
Brew: Tolerance is the perfect word for it!
No matter how much of a substance you consume, you
cannot become completely immune to its effects.
Just like when your liver builds up alcohol tolerance,
if you continue increasing your intake, you’ll
eventually reach a point where your liver can no
longer handle any toxins, aka alcohol poisoning.
Quiz: Well unless I have to survive eating tree
frogs in the Amazon rainforest, I can’t think of many
situations where I would need to be immune to poison.
Grill: Challenge accepted.
Quiz: Is this supposed to protect
me from poison, or is this poison?
Brew: It’s poison.
Unless you’re a king, or maybe a politician in a
particularly unstable place, maybe you might need
to think about surviving poison, but even in those
cases, a trip to the hospital is all the help we need.
Some have claimed that practicing
mithridatism can have more holistic benefits.
Bill Haast himself was suspicious that his inoculations
might have contributed to his unusually good health, but
before he reached 100 he was reluctant to make that claim.
Quiz: He did live to be 100.
Grill: Just like the evil Palpabean!
Brew: Mithridates himself lived to a ripe age of 72
according to some sources, and considering he lived
at a time when people thought diabetes was caused
by having too much blood, that’s pretty impressive.
But obviously mithridatism entails literally eating
poison, and just because you have a tolerance
to something, doesn’t mean it can’t hurt you.
Ask anyone with a hangover as they chug
gatorade, pop an aspirin, and rethink
their lives how their “tolerance” is going.
Unless you’re a licenced professional, it
is very easy to hurt yourself, or even die.
The health “benefits” of mithridatism are
dubious at best, and mortally dangerous at worst.
Quiz: Mithridatism?
More like mithri-dead-ism.