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Self-experimentation refers to the very special case of single-subject scientific experimentation in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on her- or himself. Usually this means that the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment are all the same.
Human scientific self-experimentation principally (though not necessarily) falls into the fields of medicine and psychology, broadly conceived. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present. (See "Who Goes First? The Story of Self-Experimentation in Medicine".) In psychology, the best known self-experiments are the memory studies of Hermann Ebbinghaus, establishing many basic characteristics of human memory through tedious experiments involving nonsense syllables.
The self-experimental approach has long and often been applied to practical psychological problems. Benjamin Franklin recorded his self-experiment of successively devoting his attention for a week to one of thirteen 'Virtues', "leaving the other Virtues to their ordinary Chance, only marking every Evening the Faults of the Day." In "Self-change: Strategies for solving personal problems", M. J. Mahoney suggested that self-experimentation be used as a method of psychological treatment. He recommended that clients be taught basic scientific methods, in order that the client become a "personal scientist." "Self-Directed Behavior: Self-modification for Personal Adjustment", by David L. Watson and Roland G. Tharp, now in its 8th edition, is a widely adopted text that continues the tradition. Two pillars of Total Quality Management, Harry V. Roberts and Bernard F. Sergesketter, in "Quality is Personal", applied TQM's approach to single-subject experimentation to self-improvement.
Recently, Seth Roberts and Allen Neuringer have advocated the broader use of self-experimentation, arguing that its low-cost and ease (compared to traditional large-sample experiments with human subejcts) facilitate conducting a very large number of experiments, testing many treatments and measuring many things at once. This allows considerable trial and error and can lead to the generation and testing of many ideas. Self-experimentation provides superior evidence to mere anecdotal evidence, because the entire experimental is explicitly designed to test a hypothesis. Self-experimentation is best considered a useful adjunct to large-sample experiments in scientific research.
The difficulty of funding large-sample human- or even animal-subject studies, except in the case of patentable medical treatments and certain mandated safety testing, places some value in the application of self-experimentation to evaluate the effectiveness of unproven treatments and therapies. A sufficient number of impartially conducted self-experiments concerning a treatment could provide potential users of the treatment with information superior to what is now available.
In discovery chemistry
Until recently, it was common practice among synthetic chemists to taste newly prepared compounds. The purpose was to provide an additional characteristic for identification, taking advantage of the selective chemical receptors that form this sense. However, as one might guess, this practice also led to numerous fatalities and near-fatalities. Surprizingly, however, it was not recognition of the risk of this self-experimentation that led to its extinction, but rather the advent of instrumentation capable of exacting physical characterization of compounds (particlarly spectrometers with infrared, ultraviolet, NMR and mass selectivity). The routine tasting of new compounds by chemists of bygone times is, in fact, the main souce of knowledge of the human toxicity for certain chemicals.
Examples: Carl Wilhelm Scheele, Joseph Priestley
In fiction
Self-experimentation is a common trait amongst mad scientists and evil geniuses, and is part of the creation story of many comic book super villains, and some super heroes. For example, the Spider-Man villain, The Lizard, was Dr. Curt Connors, who lost his arm in a war, and experimented with reptilian DNA to try and grow it back; but the therapy caused him to mutate into a half-human-half-reptile creature. On the hero side, the Fantastic Four were created when they were testing Reed Richards new prototype rocket and were exposed to cosmic rays, giving them super powers. Other cases include the Ultra-Humanite, the Green Goblin, and the animated Justice League version of Cheetah.
See also
References
"Self-experimentation"