Buck’s body made antibodies against several types of the virus after drinking the beer and he suffered no ill effects, he and his brother Andrew Buck reported December 17 at the data sharing platform Zenodo.org, along with colleagues from NIH and Vilnius University in Lithuania. Andrew and other family members have also consumed the beer with no ill effects, he says. The Buck brothers posted a method for making vaccine beer December 17 at Zenodo.org. Chris Buck announced both publications in his blog Viruses Must Die on the online publishing platform Substack, but neither has been peer-reviewed by other scientists.
A second ethics committee at the NIH objected to Buck posting the manuscripts to the preprint server bioRxiv.org because of the self-experiment. Buck wrote a rebuttal to the committee’s comments but was loathe to wait for its blessing before sharing the data. “The bureaucracy is inhibiting the science, and that’s unacceptable to me,” he says. “One week of people dying from not knowing about this is not trivial.”
I appreciate that there are ethics boards holding scientists to standards, but sometimes (not usually, I know – only in very specific cases!) it takes someone with initiative to “just do it”. And the guy isn’t some crank, he’s a virologist who’s discovered multiple viruses. Good for him, I say.
This is no different IMO from the scientist who proved that H.Pylori causes a common form of stomache ulcer.
The result is cool, assuming it’s real, but he did not go about this in a scientific way, so the “published” results are basically junk, and it doesn’t reflect well on him as a scientist, and it sounds like it might lose him his job, for good reason IMO.
But he did it on personal time, with personal resources, under the purview of a non-profit totally unrelated to his employer. He didn’t use their name/brand, so there’s no defamation here either is there?
I understand the fear of some rogue ‘mad scientist’ doing something stupid but this really doesn’t seem to be that situation here.
Running a study that’s unethical and scientifically rigorous and pushing the results, is a mark of a bad scientist.
This is rather similar to how the “vaccines cause autism” myth started.
You’re assuming the conclusion though – that it’s unethical. The argument here is that he tested it on himself specifically in order not to endanger others – as that would be unethical.
I’d respectfully disagree it is analagous to the “vaccines cause autism” situation. This is trying to claim a potential beneficial medical procedure, not to sow fear or distrust in a long-standing, proven medical practice. And there’s nothing in the article that says he is resisting others attempting to confirm or refute his work.
In the spirit of the scientific method, hopefully other scientists try to reproduce the results then it’ll get corroboration, or be shot down.
If the brews contain only safe test viruses, it should ethically be a safe experiment. Test for antibodies before and after ingestion to the innocuous viruses and the mechanism is proven or disproven.
Again, he’s doing exactly the same thing that scientist that experimented on himself to test if H. Pylori was responsible for peptic ulcers. If he Darwin-Awards himself, that’s very unfortunate, but so long as mild, innocuous test viruses are being used, he’s not endangering anyone else (I certainly hope he did this with ‘safe’ test virus varieties, for his own sake as well as others!).