Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [49]
I tooke a bodkine & put it betwixt my eye & [the] bone as neare to backside of my eye as I could: & pressing my eye [with the] end of it (soe as to make curvature in my eye) there appeared severall white darke & coloured circles. Which circles were plainest when I continued to rub my eye [with] point of bodkine, but if I held my eye & bodkin still, though I continued to presse my eye [with] it yet circles would grow faint & often disappeare untill I removed [them] by moving my eye or bodkin.
If [the] experiment were done in a light roome so [that] though my eyes were shut some light would get through their lidds there appeared a greate broade blewish darke circle outmost, & [within] that another light spot whose colour was much like [that] in rest of [my] eye. Within [which] spot appeared still another blew spot espetially if I pressed my eye hard & [with] a small pointed bodkin. & outmost appeared a verge of light.
Newton drew an annotated diagram of this strange and potentially dangerous experience (I have removed his references to the figure). He reports it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The chances are that many of his contemporaries were self-experimenting in a similar manner.
Two centuries later, little had changed, it seems. The nineteenth-century pioneers of anaesthesia were their own experimental subjects. The American dentist Horace Wells made himself the first patient to have a tooth extracted under the influence of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. Wells had noticed the gas’s effects at travelling fairs, where it was demonstrated to great acclaim; he saw that people who had inhaled the gas felt nothing when they bumped their shins on returning to their seats.
Other anaesthetics were also self-tested. The Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson was a particularly fervent self-experimenter, sitting with his friends in the late evening, sniffing compounds from saucers and tumblers spread across his dinner table. A good breath of a ‘ponderous material’ known as chloroform knocked Simpson out for the night; when he woke up the next morning he knew he had found something remarkable and quickly tried it out on his niece to confirm the effect. A few years later, Queen Victoria used chloroform to enjoy a painless childbirth, and the field of anaesthesia had come of age.
At the turn of the twentieth century, American surgeons William Halstead and Richard Hall, the pioneers of opiate anaesthesia, tried everything out on themselves – and ended up as cocaine and morphine addicts. The German physicians August Bier and August Hildebrandt also enjoyed the benefits of cocaine when they performed experimental spinal anaesthesia on each other. According to reports, they celebrated their success in rendering the lower body impervious to pain with wine, cigars and vigorous kicking of each other’s shins.
Then came the Nuremberg Code. But even that didn’t put an end to recklessness. That’s because the code offers a way out for those wanting to perform dangerous or life-threatening research. Though Part 7 of the code says that no experiment should be conducted where there is an a priori reason to believe that death or disabling injury will occur, it also makes an exception. If the researchers are themselves willing to become subjects, as Forssmann did, the risk becomes acceptable.
An interesting common thread runs between Barry Marshall, whose anarchic science uncovered the cause of stomach ulcers, and Kary Mullis, the LSD-using inventor of gene-copying technology. Both these Nobel laureates describe childhoods characterised by unbridled enthusiasm for playing with the tools of the scientific trade.
Mullis spent his childhood building rockets in his backyard in Columbia, South Carolina. He was, in his own words, ‘a little scientist guy’. He and his brother developed a chemical propulsion system that would launch a rocket into the sky – carrying the family’s pet frog. They knew it wasn’t quite the