18. Haldane repeatedly put himself in a Decompression Chamber to investigate the physiological effects of various levels of gases.
John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (J.B.S.H.) was an English scientist known for his research and works in physiology, genetics, evolutionary biology and mathematics. He accomplished great things to the fields of statistics and biostatistics. J.B.S.H. was the son of John Scott Haldane, a communist physiologist famous for intrepid self-experimentation, which led to many important discoveries about the human body and the nature of gases. It was his father’s physiological self-experimentation that inspired him more than anything. In one such experiment, J.B.S.H. repeatedly placed himself in a decompression chamber to investigate effects on divers, ultimately suffering oxygen poisoning that led to burst eardrums and regular seizures.
During other experiments, J.B.S.H. drank large doses of hydrochloric acid to examine its effects on muscle action and exercised to exhaustion while measuring carbon dioxide pressure in his lungs. He kept notes about his self-experimentation, titled On Being One’s Own Rabbit, with such choice observations as “to do the sorts of things to a dog as one does to the average medical student requires a license signed in triplicate by two archbishops, as far as I can remember.” Nobel laureate Peter Medawar described Haldane as one of the most intelligent men her ever met, and possibly one of the bravest.