Newton's needle

After Irvine's Foot and  Galileo's finger we have . .  Newton's needle

Ireland had its first really cold snap since Storm Emma in March 2018. The logistical difficulties weren't helped by us having a power-cut from 01:30hrs to 17:00hrs on Epiphaneve [05 Jan 25]. That background is probably irrelevant to the fact I managed to give myself thumb-poke in eye while turning in the bed. In any case, I 'saw' a bright light which couldn't be external / electrical. The following night, I woke up [screaming] with a connexion and got out of bed at 01:00 to capture the meander: much easier having had power restored. Newton jiggled a bodkin behind his own eyeball to see what he could see about how changing the shape of the orbit affected his perception.

That Newton was some man for one man - optics, cat-flaps, gravity, Warden of the Royal Mint, astrology. But he wasn't the only scientist up for auto-experimentation. Barry Marshall chugged down a glass of Helicobacter pylori, for one. And JBS Haldane went to absurd lengths in trying to increase the titre of CO₂ in his blood. Actually, those gaseous self-experiments were first visited upon young JBS by his father physiologist J.S. Haldane before Haldane Jr was old enough to vote and def'n'y before informed consent!

There are several other examples of adults doing sketchy things to children in the name of science. Bloboprev: In May 1796 Jenner inoculated 8 y.o. James Phipps, without informed consent, but with cowpox ‘matter’ from the hands of Sarah Nelmes, who had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom. There really is TMI in that sentence but you get my drift. More recently, in 1990, UK Agriculture Minister John Gummer tried forcing his 4 year old daughter Cordelia to tuck into a beefburger not contaminated with BSE [whc bloboprev].

St Googler of Search reveals that self-experimentation is A Thing . . .

Or at the very least a book  by Lawrence Altman, The New York Times medical columnist: Who Goes First?: The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine (1998). Allen Weisse assembled the profit and loss in 2012 Tex Heart Inst J, 39(1):51–54. Self-Experimentation and its Role in Medical Research [free full text]. 465 examples culled from 200 years of medical investigation . . . resulting in 8 deaths and 13 Nobel Prizes. Four of the latter, as well as Marshall, have been Blobbed: Ramsay - Landsteiner - Banting - Metchnikoff.  

Don't try any of this at home kids!