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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.

Contents 1 History 2 Psychology 3 Chemistry 4 In fiction 5 See also 6 References

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. 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.

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, but is subject to extreme observer bias. Self-experimentation is best considered a useful adjunct to large-sample experiments in scientific research.

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." And with achieving an experiment, he/she may continue to do so with pride.

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. Surprisingly, 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 (particularly spectrometers with infrared, ultraviolet, NMR and mass selectivity). The routine tasting of new compounds by chemists of bygone times is, in fact, the main source of knowledge of the human toxicity for certain chemicals.

This practice had positive and negative aspects. It probably contributed to the death of Carl Wilhelm Scheele from apparent mercury poisoning. Joseph Priestley discovered soda water while experimenting with carbon dioxide and tasting the results.

Self-experimentation is a common trait amongst mad scientists and evil geniuses, and is part of the creation story of many comic book supervillains, and some superheroes. 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.

Examples in older fiction include the tales of The Invisible Man and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, both cases in which the scientists' unorthodox theories lead them to permanently change and ultimately destroy themselves.

• Self-experimentation in medicine

• Principal source: Self-Experimentation, by Seth Roberts and Allen Neuringer, in Handbook of Research Methods in Human Operant Behavior [1]
• Other sources: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Part 2 [2]