HELPING HUMANITY

Hokitika Guardian, 26 February 1931, Page 2

HELPING HUMANITY

LIVES RISKED FOR SCIENCE. Members of Parliament seemed surprised to learn from Mr Tom Shaw, the War Minister, that soldiers are willing, for a little extra leave ami perhaps Is 6d, to be made the subjects of practical experiments in skin burns and gas protection. Inquiries I. made in London (writes Mr A. E. MacGregor in the “Daily Mail”) show that such experiments are regarded by medical workers as an almost, common-place part of the progress of their science. “In many cases,” said an official or the Research Defence Society, “the research workers are their own subjects.” There* are men in London now who, to study problems about parasites, allow themselves to he bitten by lice and bugs, and even swallow the eggs of internal parasites. Many of the experiments are dangerous. Professor Joseph Barcroffc, of Cambridge, risked his life hv going into a chamber of prussic arid gas without a mask. The finest record in the matter of nersonnl experiment is apparently held by Professor J. S. Haldane, of Oxford, and his son, Professor J. B. S. Haldane, of Cambridge Professor 5. Haldane has conducted innumerable exnorimcnts on himself. The nio-t recent was when lie shut himself in a steel chamber with a Mount Everest explorer to Study the effect of carbon monoxide poisoning. Ho obtained irnporfant results, and expressed regret only that the observations could not he continued to the point of unconsciousness. Professor J. B. S. Haldane has frequently performed on himself experiments which the law will not allow him to perform on dogs. He gave himself convulsions during His research into tetany, and says that Ho- holds the endurance record of H hours’ continuous spasm of Hands and face. The most courageous experiment was nrobably that of Miss Mary Davis, who in 1915 in Paris gave herself gangrene so as to prove a cure for gas gangrene. At the time of Miss Davies’s experiment, eases of gangrene were coming from all parts of the front. Dr. Kenneth Taylor, pathologist to the French Army Hospital, determined to try the effect of quinine hvdrochlorido. By the time the solution had been prepared. Miss Davies, who was assisting Dr Taylor, announced that slip had innoculated herself with the deadly germs of gas gangrene, and was prepared for the first injection of quinine solution. This Dr Taylor gave her. At the end of a fortnight Miss Davies was declared free from any gas gangrene bacilli. Dr Taylor’s method had proved successful.