Not long ago, I let a colleague insert an IV line in my hand. He swished saline back and forth between two syringes to create bubbles, then he injected the foamy liquid into my vein. We wanted to know if a new gadget—a small Doppler ultrasound—could hear the bubbles in my bloodstream. We hoped the gadget might be useful in monitoring divers for decompression sickness, otherwise known as "the bends." When the bubbles passed the ultrasound, we happily heard a waterfall of clicks. Bubbles in the arteries can be deadly, but bubbles in the veins are usually harmless. I knew it was safe, and it was not my first time taking a needle for science.
I'm a biomedical engineer and researcher at Duke University School of Medicine, and I study ways for people to survive in extreme environments like underwater and outer space. I'm not alone in using my own body first in research; in fact—except in fields like chemotherapy and brain surgery—the practice is surprisingly common. One time, Dr. Sherri Ferguson, another diving researcher, needed a chamber that could pressurize the air around only a human subject's legs. She used her own body to help figure out a good design for such a thing. In the process she found herself popped out of the prototypes by the pressure and rocketed across the room, over and over again, until she made a seal that worked. She has also strapped on a mask and breathed in toxic gases so that she could properly inform and warn prospective test subjects of the symptoms they would experience—and so they couldn't fake any results.
Dr. Ferguson and I certainly aren't the only scientists to use ourselves as our first test subjects.
In my field of dive research, there's one story from eight decades ago that blows the rest of us out of the water. It concerns a group of scientists who conducted a series of tests on themselves so extreme, so dangerous, and so key to the outcome of the Second World War that it got buried under classification markings for generations. This groundbreaking research was so secret, in fact, that professionals in my field will learn about it here for the first time.—Rachel Lance
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