The result is cool, assuming it’s real, but he did not go about this in a scientific way, so the “published” results are basically junk, and it doesn’t reflect well on him as a scientist, and it sounds like it might lose him his job, for good reason IMO.
Comment on He made beer that’s also a vaccine. Now controversy is brewing
Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
I appreciate that there are ethics boards holding scientists to standards, but sometimes (not usually, I know – only in very specific cases!) it takes someone with initiative to “just do it”. And the guy isn’t some crank, he’s a virologist who’s discovered multiple viruses. Good for him, I say.
A research ethics committee at the National Institutes of Health told Buck he couldn’t experiment on himself by drinking the beer.
Buck says the committee has the right to determine what he can and can’t do at work but can’t govern what he does in his private life. So today he is Chef Gusteau, the founder and sole employee of Gusteau Research Corporation, a nonprofit organization Buck established so he could make and drink his vaccine beer as a private citizen.
This is no different IMO from the scientist who proved that H.Pylori causes a common form of stomache ulcer.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
But he did it on personal time, with personal resources, under the purview of a non-profit totally unrelated to his employer. He didn’t use their name/brand, so there’s no defamation here either is there?
I understand the fear of some rogue ‘mad scientist’ doing something stupid but this really doesn’t seem to be that situation here.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Every institution has strict rules for research ethics on any human, and this would not pass ethics.
Let’s state the fucking obvious: some researcher injects himself with a virus or bacteria to make a vaccine and the strain mutates to be more infectious and virulent. Stupid. Full stop.
WolfLink@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
Running a study that’s unethical and scientifically rigorous and pushing the results, is a mark of a bad scientist.
This is rather similar to how the “vaccines cause autism” myth started.
Arghblarg@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Running a study that’s unethical
You’re assuming the conclusion though – that it’s unethical. The argument here is that he tested it on himself specifically in order not to endanger others – as that would be unethical.
If, as some would hope, other scientists try to reproduce the results then it’ll get corroboration, or be shot down.
If the brews contain only safe test viruses, it should ethically be a safe experiment. Test for antibodies to the innocuous viruses and thee mechanism is proven or disproven.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Funny how you only hear about the successful self-experiments.
Any biomedical experiment with an N=1 is meaningless. Buck should know this. Many self-experimenters proved drugs “safe” only to have others repeat the experiment and die.
Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis sought to prove body fluids cause sepsis on himself. He was right, and he died of sepsis. In your face, doubters!
In 1936, Edwin Katskee took a very large dose of cocaine. He attempted to write notes on his office wall, but these became increasingly illegible as the experiment proceeded. Katskee was found dead the next morning.
Around 1886, Nicholas Senn pumped nearly six litres of hydrogen through his anus. Senn used a rubber balloon holding four US gallons connected to a rubber tube inserted in the anus. An assistant sealed the tube by squeezing the anus against it. The hydrogen was inserted by squeezing the balloon while monitoring the pressure on a manometer. The experiment was to detect intestinal leaks by lighting the hydrogen gas.
Carrión described the disease in the course of what proved to be a fatal experiment upon himself in 1885, in order to demonstrate definitively the cause of the illness. He was inoculated by close friends with blood which had been taken from a wart of a 14-year-old patient. Carrión’s aim was to prove a link between the acute blood stage of Oroya fever with that of the later chronic form of the disease, called verruga peruana, typified by numerous red, wart-like dermal nodules.
Jesse William Lazear (May 2, 1866 – September 25, 1900) was an American physician. In 1900, he deliberately allowed a mosquito to bite him to test the hypothesis that mosquitoes were the vector for yellow fever transmission. He contracted the disease but did not recover and died on September 25, 1900.
en.wikipedia.org/…/Self-experimentation_in_medici…