blog

As you’ve gathered, Faculty of 1000 is running an experiment in ranking journals based on our evaluations of articles. You might think this is crazy, or stupid, and we’ve already had a great deal of feedback–negative and positive. All I’m going to say about it today is that it’s at least as rational as the journal impact factor…

Anyway, I’m reminded that experimenting on oneself has a long and noble (if not Nobel) history. There’s a lovely list of ten scientists here, famed for doing experiments on themselves when they couldn’t see any other way of getting the answers they wanted (or were just plain crazy. Difficult to tell sometimes).

There’s some great stories there. Unfortunately one that’s missing is that of Barry Marshall (Nobel in Physiology or Medicine 2005), who, frustrated with the inability to develop an animal model of peptic ulcers, famously chugged a Helicobacter pylori culture.

Sometimes, I think I might know how he must have felt.