This is interesting because I’ve just been listening to an episode of a podcast by Tim Harford called Cautionary Tales, dealing with scientists who self-experiment.
He opens with the story of inventor Franz Reichelt who, in February 1912, wanted to test his novel "parachute suit" from a very tall structure and decided to use the Eiffel Tower. There is still a British Pathé newsreel film of the test available to view. Warning: it does not end well.
Other examples were a doctor who was treating gonorrhea sufferers. He took a sample of the infected pus from a patient and (look away now) injected it into his own penis. If that wasn’t bad enough, it turned out the patient also has syphilis so the doctor suffered a lifetime of worsening health.
Link to podcast:
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-leap-of-faith-from-the-eiffel-tower#play
aliquots
Thanks for the new word. Never heard of that before.
Somebody needs to update this systematic review.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC300808/
That is a gem - they've got the style perfectly in so many places.
Nothing as extreme as that but I do have a few containers of mine and my family's precious bodily fluids dotted around the lab. Our daughter was very excited to learn that we'd sent aliquots of her urine around the world.
Were you taking the p!ss?
This is interesting because I’ve just been listening to an episode of a podcast by Tim Harford called Cautionary Tales, dealing with scientists who self-experiment.
He opens with the story of inventor Franz Reichelt who, in February 1912, wanted to test his novel "parachute suit" from a very tall structure and decided to use the Eiffel Tower. There is still a British Pathé newsreel film of the test available to view. Warning: it does not end well.
Other examples were a doctor who was treating gonorrhea sufferers. He took a sample of the infected pus from a patient and (look away now) injected it into his own penis. If that wasn’t bad enough, it turned out the patient also has syphilis so the doctor suffered a lifetime of worsening health.
Link to podcast:
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/cautionary-tales/a-leap-of-faith-from-the-eiffel-tower#play