Self-experimenter: Nobel Laureate Barry Marshall Credit: Reuters/Stringer Australia

Sometimes they are depicted as crackpots, sometimes as maverick geniuses, but scientists have always experimented on themselves. Now a British biotech entrepreneur named William Bains is proposing that self-experimenters should form collectives, pooling resources to make their findings more acceptable to the mainstream scientific community.

Bains, who also lectures on the business of biotechnology at the University of Cambridge, UK, believes that the high costs and red tape associated with clinical trials have forced pharmaceutical companies to become increasingly conservative in the treatments they will test—leaving radical but potentially effective therapies out in the cold. “From a European biotechnology standpoint, the interest from commercial enterprises in funding anything really new has just completely dried up,” he says.

A radical alternative to conventional clinical trials, which he proposed in a paper published in April, is to have people who are willing to experiment on themselves band together and form what he calls 'biomedical mutual organizations' (BMOs) (Med. Hypotheses 70, 719–723; 2008). These collectives would pool resources to provide their members with more test subjects (each other), greater analytic capacity and access to more novel therapies, Bains claims.

He believes that the bête noire of individual self-experimenters—the placebo effect—would be less of a problem in a group, which could in theory mount a properly controlled trial. However, John Saunders, who chairs the UK's Royal College of Physicians' committee on ethical issues in medicine, is doubtful. “I'm not convinced that [the BMO members] would be happy to randomize themselves between treatment and placebo conditions,” he says. “They would be motivated toward taking the new agent; that's almost the reason for joining the BMO.”

There are other potential obstacles, too, though Bains doesn't consider them insurmountable.

For example, he says, “if you are using this approach for really radical therapy, what do you do if it goes wrong, and who picks up the tab for the consequent costs?” He hopes that the discussion stimulated by his paper will throw up some possible solutions.