• Question: Do you infect your self to find out the side effects of the virus?

    Asked by to Ian on 19 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Ian Hands-Portman

      Ian Hands-Portman answered on 19 Mar 2014:

      No! I’d loose my job and probably end up in jail – if I lived. I know Barry Marshall got away with infecting himself with the bacterium Helicobacter pylori to prove it caused stomach ulcers but it’s an incredibly dangerous and stupid thing to do – if it hadn’t worked he’d have probably lost his job and all his research teams job.

      We did once used to use our own blood – I used to let one group have a few syringes of mine every couple of weeks but that’s now banned.

      There was one idiot ( not anywhere I’ve worked ) who claimed that HIV did not cause AIDS and injected himself with the virus to prove it, he’s not alive anymore. I’ll give you three guesses as to what he died of.

      Mavericks can be very useful in science – we need them sometimes just to shake things up a bit but you have to remember that the press will only tell you about the sucessful ones – the failures probably outnumber them and either never admit what they’ve done or don’t get reported.

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