Once Bitten…
If you have ever been stung by a bee, you probably called it “painful.” If you have been bitten by a bullet ant, you might call it a “pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.” Thankfully, you do not need to be bitten by a bullet ant, because biologist Justin Schmidt already has. Schmidt has let himself been stung and bitten by nearly a thousand painful creatures, taking careful notes along the way. He created the Schmidt Sting Pain Index, a way of quantifying and describing the pain that insects inflict, which is both elucidating and entertaining, in a schadenfreude kind of way. Schmidt ranked each insect sting on a rising scale of one to four and described each incident rather lyrically. The sting of the sweat bee registered a one on the pain scale and felt “Light and ephemeral. Almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” Garnering a score of two, a yellowjacket’s sting was described as being “hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” At a three, the sting of the Maricopa harvester ant was described as “after eight unrelenting hours of drilling into that ingrown toenail, you find the drill wedged into the toe.” The description of the warrior wasp sting, which scored a four and lasted for hours, showed Schmidt’s realization of the absurdity of his bodily sacrifice: “Torture. You are chained in the flow of an active volcano. Why did I start this list?” The stand-out entry is the tarantula hawk, widely regarded as the most painful sting yet discovered by man: “Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair dryer has been dropped into your bubble bath. A bolt out of the heavens. Lie down and scream.”
The tarantula hawk. Stay away.
In the late 1990s, Kevin Warwick had a silicon chip transponder implanted into his forearm. According to his website, the neural interface allowed him to “operate doors, lights, heaters and other computers without lifting a finger.” The experiment was called Project Cyborg.
Negative Findings
Not everyone got a shiny medal or professional acclaim for their self-experimentation. Some merely got maimed or killed. Scottish inventor, scientist, and writer Sir David Brewster, had a particular interest in optics and light polarization, a field of study which requires good eyesight. Unfortunately for Brewster, he performed a chemical experiment in 1831 which nearly blinded him. His vision returned, but he was plagued with eye troubles for the rest of his life. His legacy in vision did not result from any experiment, but from his invention, the kaleidoscope. Also in the sacrificing-sight-for-science club was Robert Bunsen, best known giving his name to the Bunsen burner (and an under-appreciated Muppet). He began his scientific career in organic chemistry, but nearly died twice of arsenic poisoning. Soon thereafter, he lost the sight in his right eye to an explosion of cacodyl cyanide. These being excellent reasons to change fields, Bunsen moved to inorganic chemistry, where he developed the field of spectroscopy, which measures and examines light and radiation.
See Right Through You
Elizabeth Fleischman Ascheim was not a doctor herself, but worked in the office of her brother-in-law, Dr. Michael J.H. Woolf. Woolf was intrigued by the new discovery of Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen: x-rays. Ascheim became equally interested and, with Woolf’s encouragement, gave up her job as a bookkeeper to study electrical science. In 1897, she bought an x-ray machine, the first in San Francisco, which she moved into the office. The duo spent nine years experimenting with the machine, using themselves as subjects. The effects of long-term exposure to x-rays was not understood at the time, and their protective measures in place were inadequate. Ascheim died of widespread, aggressive cancer.
New Blood
It may have been the quest for eternal youth that led Russian physician, economist, and science fiction writer, Alexander Bogdanov to experiment with blood transfusion in 1924. After performing eleven transfusions on himself, he declared that his balding had stopped and his eyesight had improved. Unfortunately, Boganov had not screened the blood he was using for infectious diseases, leading him to transfuse himself with blood infected with malaria and tuberculosis, which killed him.
When you think of world-saving heroes, obvious answers come to mind: Superman, Captain America, Randy Quaid’s character from Independence Day, the usual. But there are real life people who have saved thousands, millions, and arguably a billion lives in the real world, within living memory, and you probably never heard their names.
Maurice Hilleman
As someone who did not die as a child from a preventable disease, it is the author’s considered opinion that vaccines are the bee’s knees. Most of the vaccines that have kept us alive for the past two generations were created by one man, who did not even want credit for it. Eradicating childhood diseases through vaccination was the life work of virologist Maurice Hilleman. By the time of his death in 2005 at age eighty-five, he had developed vaccines for measles-mumps-rubella, chickenpox, meningitis, pneumonia, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, and dozens more.
The fragility of life was with Maurice Hilleman from the day he was born in 1919, when both his twin sister and mother died. This was the same year the Spanish flu killed around 5 percent of the world’s population. After high school, Hilleman earned a full scholarship to Montana State University. Majoring in chemistry and microbiology, he graduated first in his class, going on to graduate school to earn his doctorate in microbiology from the University of Chicago in 1944.
When Hilleman started his first job at the pharmaceutical company E. R. Squibb & Sons in 1944, American soldiers deployed in Japan had been contracting Japanese encephalitis-B from infected mosquitoes. As chief of what is today the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Hilleman studied pandemics. He was able to recognize patterns in the type and severity of pandemics and could predict with stunning accuracy when they would hit. When Hilleman and a colleague saw signs of an impending flu pandemic spreading through Hong Kong in 1957, they raced against the clock to produce and distribute forty million vaccines. About 69,000 Americans died from that flu, but the toll would have been far worse without the vaccine.
American Samoa was one of the only places not to see a single Spanish flu death, because the governor took the reports he was hearing seriously and blocked all incoming ships from making port.
Can we all go to American Samoa now?
Hilleman moved to the Merck pharmaceutical company and continued his laser-focused attention on the prevention of other diseases. Some hit close to home. When his daughter Jeryl Lynn came down with the mumps in 1967, he swabbed her throat and collected the virus specimens to take back to his lab. His other daughter, one-year-old Kirsten, was among the first to take the experimental vaccine. “There was a baby being protected by a virus from her sister, and this has been unique in the history of medicine, I think,” Hilleman remembered in an interview. The strain that Hilleman collected from his daughter reduced the incidence of mumps from 186,000 cases a year to fewer than 1,000 cases. For perspective, that’s equivalent of reducing the capacity of Rose Bowl Stadium twice-over to half the capacity of a suburban high school.
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