An NIH scientist’s maverick approach reveals legal, ethical, moral, scientific and social challenges to developing potentially life-saving vaccines.

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.”

  • dgdft@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    12 hours ago

    Then he should definitely know better and know why what he’s doing will ruin any chance he has of rapid certification.

    Asking naively: In what way would this self-experiment have bearing on later trials done by other parties?

    Setting aside the dangers of self-experimentation, there’s a host of issues ranging from the individual psychological (doctors are as vulnerable to sunk-cost fallacy as anyone) to broader problems of replication issues (publishing one-off successes/failures can lead to misinformation regarding the viability of a given therapy).

    IMO the main issue I saw in this case was administering to family members, to put my cards on the table, but I think given the risk profile, it was acceptable in context if they were well-informed and had an epipen handy.

    All research involves risk, and a key pillar of bioethics is the requirement of informed consent. Generally speaking, no one is better informed than a principal investigator to give that consent, and no one has better-aligned incentives to ensure safety.

    I also think any doing serious biomed research is well-educated enough to understand standards of evidence and treat small-N case studies for what they are.

    Ginseng, Garlic, St. John’s Wort, and Acai Berries underwent the same fad promotions.

    This is going too far in my book; wishful thinking is the problem here, not self-experimentation in a clinical context. I agree these supplements are overhyped, but do you really think we should be barring people from trying out garlic and reporting what they experience?

    The ethical issue in the case of grifter supplements is trying to financially profit from a contrived narrative, not the inherent process of trying things on a small scale and reporting those findings.