Research Findings

A parent brings a child to the doctor for a cut that requires stitches. The doctor will not stitch the cut until the parent agrees to a tetanus shot. The parents begrudgingly approve. Is the consent voluntary given the type of inducement the doctor uses?

One noticeable hindrance for self-experimenters conducting scientific research has been the challenge of whether and how to report the results from their experiments so that the obtained – and at times personally expensive – scientific insights would in fact bear benefit.

It is difficult to predict if institutional recognition would serve to incentivize more undue risk-taking and increase the prevalence of biased science. If instead universities and scientific journals would uniformly require ethics committee approval, could ‘rogue’ scientists be deterred and disincentivized?

Attempts to provide support or oversight could result in legal challenges and institutional liability in cases of serious harm. Self-experimentations conducted this century are largely undocumented in the scientific literature, based on the shared experiences of the surveyed practitioners.

Without a high likelihood that the pursued benefit can actualize, the ethically important harm-benefit ratio is negatively affected. Decreasing the odds of successful publication might therefore shift the overall outcome of a risky experiment towards greater harm as unpublished data decreases the potential for social good. However, alternative unregulated publishing channels are already emerging.

Should results from a self-experimentation leading to a death of a researcher be published if they carry scientific value?

In many countries, safety testing with animals is no longer deemed necessary for specific cosmetics but is still used for chemicals found in these products. This dilemma is about a new chemical ingredient that is not expected to cause severe harm. Yet, all animal subjects are killed afterwards so that their tissues can be examined. A risk for a more serious reaction of course exists – which is the reason and justification for the toxicology experiment. Specially bred hairless laboratory mice are used because they best mimic human skin. The studied ingredient has some available alternatives but it could lower manufacturing costs for many chemical cosmetics, supplements, or even pharmaceuticals.

Assuming there are no feasible alternatives to animal testing, would you still vote to prevent the experiment? Or is optimising the safe manufacture of everyday products by the chemical industry worth these mammalian lives?