Road kill

A peculiar complacency overcomes many scientists after a time. Lab safety is drummed into us from the beginning. There are basic things, like don't pipette deadly pathogens by mouth, don't add water to concentrated acids. Most of us pay close attention to hazards that might affect our reproductive success while we are still of the age when it matters, but otherwise a subconscious slackness slides in, as if we have been exposed to certain dangers so often that we are now immune. One of my colleagues swims in the slimiest water imaginable and has no hesitation about harvesting dead animals from the side of the autobahn for his evening meal. As a microbiologist, perhaps he expects that the passion he feels for the natural world will prevent it from attacking him. The same man watches birds as he drives along winding roads and alongside cliffs, confident that because he loves nature, crashing into a tree or into a lake full of fish would be impossible.

A cloud of regulations surrounds labs so that workers aren't exposed to explosions, noxious gases cannot escape to threaten the general public and toxins do not ooze into the environment. Ethical protocols ensure that humans and other animals are treated compassionately when they are the involved in research. To get around these awkward restrictions, some scientists experiment on themselves. When I was a grad student, one prof who clearly had no hesitation about investigating the effects of certain botanicals on his nervous system, extended these prosaic tendencies into his research on light-activated compounds with potential for cancer therapy. He scratched his arms with novel chemicals and climbed onto the roof of the biology building, holding his arms up towards the sun as if he was on a crucifix. He recorded the rashes and itches and boils in his lab book, along with happier results where he had no adverse reaction at all.

These memories returned as I listened to a radio interview last week with a graduate student at Cornell, who experimented on himself to find out which parts of the body hurt the most when stung by a bee (it is the tissue dividing the two nostrils). The interviewer (in common with most of the scientific press) was most interested in discussing why this man allowed a bee to sting his genitals, apparently unaware of the proud, if loopy, scientific tradition of self-experimentation. Sir Humphry Davy, for example, the man who gave us what eventually became the first medical anaesthetic, nitrous oxide or laughing gas, was systematic in studying the effects of breathing in various gases on his own body. He almost killed himself trying to establish the toxic dose of carbon monoxide.

Undoubtedly, many scientists have done themselves in or doomed themselves to disability in the pursuit of knowledge, out of sheer laziness, or in attempts to bypass bureaucracy. As for me, I've had a few accidental pokes in the skin that I'd have better avoided, and probably inhaled a bit too much benzene in my student years. But I haven't had much interest in using my own body as an experimental apparatus. This might label me a coward, but I'd rather be safe on the narrow path of science than road kill in the ditch.