Self-experimentation

Self-experimentation refers to the special case of single-subject research in which the experimenter conducts the experiment on himself or herself. Usually this means that a single person is the designer, operator, subject, analyst, and user or reporter of the experiment.

Human scientific self-experimentation principally (though not necessarily) falls into the fields of medicine and psychology. Self-experimentation has a long and well-documented history in medicine which continues to the present day.

For example, after failed attempts to infect piglets in 1984, Barry Marshall drank a petri dish of the Helicobacter pylori from a patient, and soon developed gastritis, achlorhydria, stomach discomfort, nausea, vomiting, and halitosis. The results were published in 1985 in the Medical Journal of Australia, and is among the most cited articles from the journal. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005.

There is an interesting evaluation in the context of clinical trials and program evaluations.

The self-experimental approach has long and often been applied to practical psychological problems. Benjamin Franklin recorded his self-experiment of successively devoting his attention for a week to one of thirteen "Virtues", "leaving the other Virtues to their ordinary Chance, only marking every Evening the Faults of the Day."

In psychology, the best known self-experiments are the memory studies of Hermann Ebbinghaus, which established many basic characteristics of human memory through tedious experiments involving nonsense syllables.

In Self-change: Strategies for solving personal problems, M. J. Mahoney suggested that self-experimentation be used as a method of psychological treatment, and recommended that clients be taught basic scientific methods, in order that the client become a "personal scientist."

Several popular and well-known sweeteners were discovered by deliberate or sometimes accidental tasting of reaction products. Sucralose was discovered by a scientist mishearing the instruction to "test" the compounds as to "taste" the compounds. Fahlberg noticed a sweet taste on his fingers and associated the taste with his work in the chemistry labs at Johns Hopkins; out of that taste test came Saccharin. Cyclamate was discovered when a chemist noticed a sweet taste on his cigarette that he had set down on his bench. Aspartame was also discovered accidentally when chemist Schlatter tasted a sweet substance that had stuck to his hand. Acesulfame potassium is another sweetener discovered when a chemist tasted what he had made.

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