Dedicated, or crazy:
When Professor David Pritchard wanted to test the effects of parasites on humans, he had to apply to the Ethics Committee.They refused him the go-ahead because they weren’t confident it was safe. So there was only one thing for it: he volunteered himself.
This involved putting 50 hookworms on a plaster, then sticking it to his arm so they could burrow under his skin and travel to his gut. They would live in his body for five weeks.
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He could have just read this:
” This is my personal account of curing my asthma and hayfever by deliberately infesting myself with the intestinal parasite hookworm.
It isn’t for the faint hearted and for some should not be read while eating.
It involves a great deal of research, a trip to Cameroon and a lot of barefoot walking in open air latrines in west Africa.
If you have asthma, or know someone who has asthma (or for that matter Crohn’s disease, IBD or colitis) and are suffering badly you owe it to yourself to consider this approach. Because although it sounds strange and is repellant it is founded on sound science and it has one other virtue.
It worked.”
Heh.
They were not quite clear on whether the ethics committee approved the self experimentation.
To publish research, all human research must be cleared by an ethics committee before commencing work. No exception for self experimentation exists. His colleagues who also participated in the self-experiment would be the very ones the ethics committee would wish to protect because their subordinate work relationship to the principal investigator calls in question the whole voluntariness of it all.
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