Complex systems like the internet might not be robust enough (Image: Alan Powdrill/Getty)

The darkest fears of the leading lights and rising stars of science, brought together by the Edge’s John Brockman, could keep us all awake at night

WARNING: read the subtitle of this book first. Its editor, cultural impresario John Brockman, may well have you struggling to get your shut-eye as he sets out to keep us on our toes.

The trick this time lies in the tone of a book of answers to questions that Brockman poses annually to science’s great and good on his Edge website. It’s really not all good news.

In 2007, Edge asked what we were optimistic about. Six years later, the tone sounds like a pessimistic rejoinder: what should we be worried about? But with Brockman it’s rarely simple. He invited people to share a scientific worry that might not be on the popular radar, or one they think should drop off the radar.

Some concerns read like dystopia mixed with moral panic, and they surface time and again. There’s the emergence of machines with superhuman intelligence (from physicist Max Tegmark and others), the dangers of relying on such fragile, complex systems as the internet (psychologist Randolph Nesse and others), and the impact of new tech on children (social scientist Sherry Turkle and others).

Other concerns seem more surprising, some expressed by rising stars who may live to do something about them. Take environmental economist Jennifer Jacquet. She fears that framing humans as the main drivers of environmental change – even though this is the case – will lead to further negative change, an idea she calls “the anthropocebo effect”. This psychological condition involves “a certain pessimism that makes us accept human destruction as inevitable”.

Then there is biologist Seirian Sumner, who worries about what happens when synthetic biology gets out of the lab. “Our children’s children could be getting Bio-Lego for Christmas to build their own synthetic pets!” she says, warning that we cannot control how evolution might rewire synthetic life, or predict how such beings might change the ecosystem.

And futurist Melanie Swan foresees concerns over privacy rights for neural data as streams from sleep-monitoring devices expand to include data from eye-tracking glasses, wearable EEGs and portable MRIs.

As for ditching worries, cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen nicely debunks the notion that children can be harmed by certain taboo words, for instance.

But this is where Brockman’s game can both confuse and entertain, as different essays put forward, dismiss and reinstate fears. One of the most striking examples is the “singularity” – when artificial superintelligence outpaces humans. Tegmark has “little doubt that this can happen”. But futurist Bruce Sterling says “the AI Rapture… [is] no more to be fretted about than a landing of Martian tripods”, and philosopher Andy Clark claims “we should not fear that our Artificial Intelligences will soon match and then rapidly outpace human understanding, turning us into their slaves, toys, pets or puppets”.

At the end of the exercise, Brockman’s crew has left us with a net balance of new fears. But they also introduce us to some big ideas. As psychologist Daniel Goleman puts it: “Effective worrying focuses our attention on a genuine threat and leads to anticipating solutions.” Or perhaps biologist Craig Venter is onto something when he writes, hopefully tongue in cheek: “As a scientist, an optimist, an atheist, and an alpha male, I don’t worry.”

“At the end of the exercise, Brockman’s crew has left us with a net balance of new fears”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Future shock”

The composer has written a “science oratorio” called Lifetime. See him perform two of the songs in these videos.

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Back to main article: David Haines: Love songs to science

The announcement followed a lively panel discussion, in which Holmes was asked who in his book would win a fight, as well as who his favourite character was. “Caroline Herschel is my heroine,” he said: like her brother William, she was an astronomer.

The other members of the panel included Jo Marchant and Ben Goldacre, authors of the shortlisted books Decoding the Heavens and Bad Science respectively, and judges Philip Ball and Deborah Cohen, with judge Maggie Aderin-Pocock chairing the event at the Royal Society in London.

The Age of Wonder also beat Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin, What the Nose Knows by Avery Gilbert and The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow. Read our review of the shortlist here.

Winning formula

So what, according to the judges, is a winning popular science book? For space scientist Aderin-Pocock it is based in reality and presents the people behind the equations that we learned at school, giving insight into the world around us.

For Cohen, a good science book has to have a good story in it: a lot are like textbooks, she said, with no narrative.

For Ball, it’s all about the structure of an argument: “What excites me are the ideas, but they have to be put forward in a structured way.” He noted that there is “no formula for writing a good science book, but you know when you’ve read one: it keeps you engaged, and you emerge excited and stimulated by it”.

żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ consultant Marchant explained that her ideal science book would be all about personal narratives and telling the science through the story, rather than picking an area of science and writing 10 chapters about it.

Holmes added that by telling stories about science it is possible to bring science alive. For Goldacre, what’s most important is the content of ideas.

Who needs books?

And what, in the age of the internet, is the role of books? Holmes pointed out that there is cutting-edge science to be found on the internet, where the material is quickly available and unfiltered, but that is only one level: “Books still very much have a role – and they need to be structured and clear.”

Marchant stressed that it was great books that inspired her to take up science, and that books – along with teachers – are essential to inspire more people to take up science.

After Royal Society president Martin Rees presented him with his prize, Holmes said, “I did a lot of hot-air ballooning for research for this book, but that is nothing compared with what I’m feeling now.”

Read the five winning entries in our books competition inspired by the Royal Society shortlist, which asked: what popular science books still need to be written?

Our recent article on scientists who became their own test subjects obviously piqued your imaginations – we had a flood of suggestions for other researchers we could have included that took their science well beyond the realms of personal safety.

It would be a shame to just leave it at that, so we’ve put together our pick of your suggestions, along with some of the ones we didn’t have space for the first time round. And please don’t try these experiments at home – the list includes a number who made the ultimate sacrifice in their pursuit of knowledge…

Crash test heroes

broke the world land-speed record in 1954 by riding a rocket sled that accelerated from 0 to 632 miles per hour in just five seconds – literally faster than a speeding bullet.

The sled then screeched to a halt in just 1.4 seconds, exposing Stapp to forces of up to 40 g. Stapp broke his wrist, fractured some ribs and sustained retinal haemorrhages. But it was in a good cause: his research led to improved safety gear for people travelling at speed.

(Thanks to commenter bart for the suggestion.)

Stapp’s story reminded us of Rusty Haight, director of the Collision Safety Institute in California and holder of the Guinness World Record for the “Most human subject Crash Tests”.

Haight has undergone more than 1000 high-speed crashes as part of his research into improving vehicle safety, routinely exposing himself to forces of 10 g or more – but has never suffered a serious injury.

Taste for knowledge

In our original article, we mentioned the German surgeon August Bier, whose pioneering experiment with spinal anaesthesia took its toll on both him and his hapless assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt.

Another bit of analgesic self-experimentation was carried out by British chemist , who in 1798 joined the “Pneumatic Institution” in Bristol. The institution was dedicated to finding gases with medicinal uses, and the most efficient way to do that, at the time, was to test the gases on human subjects.

Not all of these tests went well, and Davy is said to have suffered both injury and near-death experiences during his quest for useful chemicals. His efforts were rewarded when he tried out nitrous oxide – better known as laughing gas – on both himself and on friends including the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Davy realised that the gas alleviated physical pain and it later came into widespread use as an anaesthetic.

(Thanks to Christopher Pontac for reminding us of Davy’s derring-do.)

Plenty of chemists have tried to sate their curiosity about chemicals in the most direct manner possible. Commenter Dave suggested the prolific chemist Carl Scheele, one of the discoverers of oxygen.

Scheele is said to have had a propensity for tasting the chemicals with which he worked, including mercury and molybdenum, which may have precipitated his relatively early demise.

The tradition lives on today: Andrea Sella, a chemist at University College London, started his experiments in chemical gastronomy by tasting hydrochloric acid before spicing up a term paper on periodic trends of the elements with descriptions of the tastes of various chemicals (lead acetate, he reported, was sweet.) His most recent taste test was on gallium metal, which he says left an astringent taste for a few hours.

Eye on the prize

Commenter Christopher Pontac also reminded us that Isaac Newton wasn’t just content to ponder apples falling to the ground. Consumed by curiosity about how light, optics and vision work, he during the mid-1660s in which he spent long spells staring at the sun and poking his own eyeball with a bodkin – a small dagger – to see how it affected his vision.

Amazingly, he didn’t go blind and went on to produce a revolutionary theory of light and its behaviour, though it’s not clear how much (if at all) his self-experimentation contributed to his understanding.

Newton wasn’t alone in experimenting with his own eyeballs: commenter Scott pointed out that Thomas Young was just as gung-ho when he investigated the – how eyes adjust to see varying distances.

Young attached a small metal hook to the back of his eyeball while looking at his nose. This resulted in a bright spot in his vision, which didn’t move when his eyes focused on the far distance, thus proving that the accommodation process did not involve elongation of the eye.

Disease catchers

Commenter David Machuca suggested the Peruvian medical student Daniel Alcides Carrión, who wanted to know if “Oroya fever” – a lethal and hitherto unknown disease sweeping across his country – was linked to an increase in the incidence of growths wart-like eruptions known as “verruga peruana”.

He found out by injecting himself with serum taken from the wart of a small boy – – and soon developed the fever and anaemia characteristic of the disease.

Carrión’s friends helped him to keep notes as his condition deteriorated, until he finally succumbed just over a month later, having demonstrated that Oroya fever and verruga peruana were both phases of the same disease – a finding confirmed by 20th-century bacteriologists.

Others have died in the search for the causes of disease. Commenter Jerry proposed Ippolit Deminsky, who was certain that the plague was indigenous to Russia, despite the authorities’ assertions that it was brought in by foreigners.

In 1912, Deminsky found a suslik, a rodent native to the Russian steppes, that had died of plague – evidence that the disease was endemic in the native wildlife rather than a foreign import. Unfortunately, Deminsky picked up the disease from handling the dead rodent.

The infection wasn’t intentional, so Deminsky wasn’t really a self-experimenter, but he did leave careful instructions for the use of his corpse as evidence that people could contract plague from Russia’s own wildlife.

Aching heart

Not all medical self-experimentation is about diseases: MurphDog tipped us off to the work of Werner Forssmann, who in 1929 used himself as the first human subject for cardiac catheterisation, inserting a tube into his own heart via a vein in his arm.

He monitored the tube’s position by using a mirror and a fluoroscope screen. While the procedure was successful, and went on to play an important role in cardiology, Forssmann was fiercely criticised by his peers for having taken such a risk and switched careers to become a urologist.

Dead or alive?

We didn’t have a category for this self-experimenter when we wrote our first list, and we still don’t.

Physicist Ettore Majorana was interested in quantum superposition – the phenomenon whereby a particle can simultaneously exist in two mutually exclusive quantum states. The logical problems this produces when scaled up to the macroscopic world were exemplified by Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment in which a cat seemingly hangs between life and death.

Most of us are content to simply scratch our heads at this, but Majorana may have decided on a demonstration, as described in this classic żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ feature. He disappeared under mysterious circumstances during a boat trip between Palermo and Naples in 1938; his body was never found and his fate remains unknown.

But before vanishing, he sent two messages to his family and a colleague, one suggesting that he was suicidal and the other that he was not – and then another, suggesting that he hoped that both the previous messages had arrived simultaneously.

This, says Ukrainian physicist Oleg Zaslavskii, suggests that Majorana had decided to turn Schrödinger’s thought experiment into a real-life demonstration. He had become a man who could not be known to be alive, or dead – but somewhere in-between.

Olivier Ameisen, a French cardiologist, found his own cure for alcoholism through a bout of pharmacological self-experimentation – a story related in his book, The End of My Addiction. While editing our review of Ameisen’s book, I started thinking about other scientists who’ve become their own test subjects – and my colleagues were quick to chime in.

Many of the stories we turned up proved hard to verify, and others too scurrilous to publish – but here are eight extraordinary (and occasionally disgusting) stories of medical self-experimentation.

Experimenting on yourself very rarely leads to scientific glory – it’s much more likely to result in swift admission to the casualty ward, or even to the morgue. So żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ doesn’t recommend you try these experiments on yourself, or anyone else for that matter.

The vomit sauna

A special place must be reserved in the annals of self-experimentation for medical student , who conducted in the early 19th century to prove that yellow fever was not contagious.

Ffirth started off by pouring “fresh black vomit” from a patient with yellow fever into cuts in his arm. He didn’t get yellow fever.

Emboldened by this success, Ffirth graduated to dribbling the vomit into his eyes and smearing assorted other bodily fluids from yellow-fever sufferers over his person – including blood, spit, sweat and urine (see Top 10 bizarre experiments, if you really want to). He even sat in a “vomit sauna” full of heated regurgitation vapours, which caused him “great pain in [his] head”, but left him in rude health.

Finally, he took to actually ingesting the vomit – first in pill form, then straight from a patient’s mouth. Since he still didn’t get ill, he considered the case proven. Presumably others did too, since he was in due course awarded his medical doctorate.

But they were wrong: yellow fever is contagious, albeit only if directly transmitted into the bloodstream. That was proven by another self-experimenter, US army surgeon Jesse Lazear, who allowed himself to be bitten by yellow fever-infected mosquitoes in the early 1900s.

Ironically, the mosquito whose bite proved fatal to Lazear was , but a wild specimen.

August Bier’s leaking spine

In 1898, German surgeon invented spinal anaesthesia, which involved a small dose of cocaine being injected into the cerebrospinal fluid surrounding the spinal cord. That was a great improvement on existing methods of general anaesthesia, but how effective was it?

To find out, Bier decided to be anaesthetised himself. But things didn’t go as planned for Bier – or for his hapless assistant, Augustus Hildebrandt.

Hildebrandt was supposed to administer the cocaine but, thanks to a mix-up with the equipment, Bier was left with a hole in his neck from which cerebrospinal fluid began to flow.

Rather than abandon the effort, however, the two men switched places. Once Hildebrandt had been anaesthetized, Bier stabbed, hammered and burned his assistant, pulled out his pubic hairs and – presumably eager to leave no stone unturned in testing the new method’s efficiency – squashed his testicles.

Once the cocaine had worn off, the pair went out for a boozy dinner, despite their injuries. Both suffered terribly in subsequent days but, while Bier took it easy as he recovered, Hildebrandt had to stand in for his boss at work.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he subsequently fell out with Bier, becoming one of his fiercest critics and denying his discovery of – which rapidly caught on.

Pierre Curie’s arm

In June 1903, physicist rolled up his sleeve and revealed a burn-like wound on his arm to a packed audience at the UK’s . The wound had been caused by a sample of radium salts, which he had taped to the skin of his arm for just 10 hours, more than 50 days earlier.

During the course of his demonstration, Curie dropped some on the desk. The resulting contamination was still detectable, and in need of cleaning up, half a century later.

Curie and his wife, Marie, hoped that radium’s burning effect might prove useful in the treatment of cancer. But ironically, the radiation that the sample gave off – which was also emitted by various other chemicals to which the Curies routinely exposed themselves in the course of their work – were actually having a catastrophic effect on their health.

Both Pierre and Marie were constantly ill, tired and in pain, but their experiments did pave the way for the use of radium in medicine. Later in 1903, they shared for their research on radiation.

JBS Haldane’s smoking ear

One self-experimenter whose work had long-term personal consequences was the polymath .

Haldane wanted to build on work done by his father, , on the physiology of working Navy divers in the early 20th century. But whereas Haldane senior restricted himself to observation and measurement, his son took a more direct approach, repeatedly putting himself in a decompression chamber to investigate the physiological effects of various levels of gases.

Haldane was motivated by concern , and his work led to a greatly improved understanding of nitrogen narcosis, as well as the safe use of various gases in breathing equipment. But he paid a high price, regularly experiencing seizures as a result of oxygen poisoning – one resulting in several crushed vertebrae.

He also suffered from , but he was sanguine about the damage. “The drum generally heals up,” he said, adding, “if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.”

Nathaniel Kleitman’s cave

In 1938, the eminent sleep researcher , accompanied by his research assistant Bruce Richardson, moved into Mammoth Cave, Kentucky.

Kleitman wanted to find out if humans could adapt to a longer, 28-hour day. The cave, 120 feet underground, offered : there was no natural light and the temperature remained constant, so there were no clues as to when it was day and night.

It was not a comfortable environment, however: as well as being isolated and claustrophobic, the researchers found themselves sharing their beds with rats.

A month later, they emerged, having discovered that while Kleitman had struggled to change his sleeping patterns, Richardson had adapted to the 28-hour cycle. Their studies , and spawned practical recommendations for shift-workers.

Kleitman didn’t confine himself to caves: he later spent two weeks on board a submarine and a spell in the Arctic, with its long periods of darkness and daylight, in both cases studying sleep patterns.

Albert Hofmann’s bicycle ride

Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who while looking for medically useful derivatives of the ergot fungus, is also credited as the first to .

Hofmann took his first trip, in 1943, by accident, apparently as a result of accidentally spilling the chemical on his fingertips in his Basel laboratory. He went home and “sank into a not-unpleasant condition”, a dreamy state in which he saw psychedelic images.

His second experience was less agreeable: he deliberately took a dose that he believed to be light, but which led to intense effects while riding home on his bicycle – an episode that has become notorious in recreational pharmaceutical circles.

While the chemical may have uses in psychiatry, its impact to date has arguably been more cultural than medical. Hofmann himself continued to take LSD, and advocate its careful use, for the rest of his life.

Hofmann wasn’t alone in testing out psychedelic drugs on himself: US chemist Alexander Shulgin ingested many chemicals, including MDMA (ecstasy), leading to , and Harvard psychologist Timothy Leary experimented with LSD on himself, to test, among other things, whether it could be used to treat alcoholism.

Leary eventually lost his job after he began touting psychedelics as a .

Barry Marshall’s bad breath

Junior doctor Barry Marshall was sure the medical establishment was wrong about the cause of stomach ulcers. The received wisdom was that they were caused primarily by lifestyle factors, but Marshall and pathologist Robin Warren were sure that the bacterium was to blame.

To prove their hypothesis, they needed to examine how the bacteria affected a healthy human volunteer – but as Marshall explained to żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ in a 2006 interview, “I was the only person informed enough to consent”.

Marshall didn’t tell the hospital’s ethics committee what he had in mind, for fear of being turned down, or even his own wife, until after he had swallowed the bacteria.

He was fine for three days, but then began vomiting; his wife complained that he had “putrid breath”. A biopsy taken 10 days later confirmed the bacteria had infected his stomach and that he had , which can eventually lead to ulcers.

It still took another eight years for Marshall and Warren’s theory to be widely accepted, but their work eventually earned them the .

David Pritchard’s itchy skin

Various researchers have infected themselves with parasites. One such is biologist , who in 2004 allowed fifty hookworm larvae to burrow through his skin.

Hookworms seem able to modify the body’s immune response in ways that may be useful in treating immune system disorders, such as asthma and Crohn’s disease. Such disorders are comparatively rare in places where hookworm infestation is common.

Other members of Pritchard’s lab also infected themselves with the hookworms, which can survive for up to a decade but are easy to kill off with drugs. “They itch quite a bit when they go through the skin,” , but become really troublesome only when they reached his stomach.

Fifty turned out to be too many: ten was a safer number. Trials are continuing to evaluate the treatment, including a test to see if the hookworms can help multiple sclerosis sufferers.

Are there any notable medical self-experimenters you think we should have included? Tell us about them in the comments.

We (editors and our reviewers) have done the hard work for you and have read, mostly with enjoyment, the books put out there: here is our guide.

First up, a radical new explanation of the force that drove Darwin: the abolition of slavery.

Reviews

Darwin’s Sacred Cause by Adrian Desmond and James Moore

Darwin’s Island by Steve Jones

Remarkable Creatures by Sean B Carroll

On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (150th anniversary edition, with jacket designed by Damien Hirst)

Evolutionary Writings by Charles Darwin, edited by James A Secord

Darwin’s Lost World by Martin Brasier

Evolution: The first four billion years edited by Michael Ruse and Joseph Travis

Angels and Ages by Adam Gopnik

The Young Charles Darwin by Keith Thomson

Evolution Revolution by Robert Winston

Why Us? How science rediscovered the mystery of ourselves by James Le Fanu

Plus

Darwin in his own words – he wasn’t great at soundbites, but his letters reveal much about his life and mind

A new collection by acclaimed poet and Darwin’s great-great-granddaughter tells the story of the great man’s life and work through a series of vivid poems.

It was a difficult task narrowing down our choice, but here is our selection of Padel’s poems.