# A Leap of Faith From the Eiffel Tower

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 23 Sep 2022, 33 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/63eb777c-2dd3-436c-9b04-af1400a34a9a/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

Inventor Franz Reichelt wants to test his novel "parachute suit" from as tall a structure as possible - and the Eiffel Tower seems ideal. Previous trial runs used a mannequin strapped to the chute and have not ended well. Despite this, his plan is to make the Eiffel Tower jump himself. Can he be persuaded to see sense? Self-experimentation - particularly in the field of medicine - has a long and checkered history. Can we learn anything useful from such unorthodox experiments, or are they reckless acts of egotism and hubris? For a full list of sources go to timharford.com. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, almost two
[0:26] Speaker 1: hundred feet above the ground. Next to the railings a table.
[0:30] Speaker 1: On top of the table a wooden chair, and standing
[0:34] Speaker 1: on the wooden chair a man, Franz Reichelt. He places
[0:39] Speaker 1: a foot on the railing, he leans forward and peers
[0:44] Speaker 1: over the edge. The year is nineteen twelve and Franz
[0:51] Speaker 1: Reichelt is a tailor, thirty three years old. Born in Austria,
[0:55] Speaker 1: he moved to Paris as a teenager and built a
[0:58] Speaker 1: modestly successful business in ladies fashion. But ladies fashion is
[1:03] Speaker 1: not what excites Franz Reichelt. He's fascinated by flight, and
[1:09] Speaker 1: Reichelt has invented a parachute suit. Rychelt looks briefly up
[1:15] Speaker 1: to the heavens early in the morning on the first
[1:18] Speaker 1: Sunday in February. His breath forms in the air. By
[1:23] Speaker 1: nineteen twelve, parachutes are hardly a new idea Leonardo da
[1:27] Speaker 1: Vinci drew on centuries earlier. What is new is the
[1:32] Speaker 1: fast growing market for them. Airplanes have only just been
[1:35] Speaker 1: invented and not yet very reliable. Ryechelt is convinced that
[1:40] Speaker 1: his wearable parachute can save aviators lives with his tailoring skills.
[1:46] Speaker 1: He's made well. I'll let a journalist describe it. This
[1:50] Speaker 1: all silk garment, very well designed, was provided with a
[1:54] Speaker 1: kind of very wide hood which by means of zippers,
[1:58] Speaker 1: would automatically expand when called upon and form above the
[2:03] Speaker 1: head a vast umbrella. Down on the ground nearly two
[2:09] Speaker 1: hundred feet below. A few dozen people have got up
[2:13] Speaker 1: early to watch the demonstration. There are aviation enthusiasts, curious
[2:18] Speaker 1: members of the public, and journalists from all the Paris newspapers.
[2:23] Speaker 1: Reichelt has even drawn a film crew from the path,
[2:26] Speaker 1: a journal cinema newsreel. One camera is on the ground
[2:31] Speaker 1: pointed upwards at him, waiting. Another camera is with Reichelt
[2:36] Speaker 1: on the first floor filming him. He's still standing there,
[2:41] Speaker 1: one foot on the railing, one on the wooden chair.
[2:45] Speaker 1: But is he really going to jump himself? He's told
[2:48] Speaker 1: the Paris authorities that he's going to put the parachute
[2:51] Speaker 1: suit on a tailor's dummy and throw that off the
[2:54] Speaker 1: Eiffel Tower. They would never have given him permission to
[2:57] Speaker 1: jump off the Eiffel Tower himself. And yet there he stands.
[3:03] Speaker 1: Reichelt cautiously shifts his weight onto the foot on the railing.
[3:08] Speaker 1: Then he shifted back. Is he having second thoughts? It
[3:12] Speaker 1: is very windy. He sways gently forward and backward. He
[3:18] Speaker 1: looks over the edge again. Twenty seconds go by, thirty forty.
[3:24] Speaker 1: It's not too late to use the dummy. I'm Tim
[3:29] Speaker 1: Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales. In nineteen fifty one,
[4:01] Speaker 1: in a gold mining town in Western Australia, a nineteen
[4:04] Speaker 1: year old apprentice engineer and an eighteen year old training
[4:08] Speaker 1: nurse had a baby. They called him Barry. Barry Marshall
[4:13] Speaker 1: would grow up to be tempted to test a pet
[4:15] Speaker 1: theory on himself, much like the flying tailor Franz Reichelt
[4:19] Speaker 1: was tempted all those years ago. Growing up in Australia's
[4:24] Speaker 1: Back of Beyond, young Barry Marshall liked to read his
[4:27] Speaker 1: mum's medical textbooks and muck around with his dad's tools.
[4:31] Speaker 1: He made firecrackers and guns, and a device for pressurizing
[4:35] Speaker 1: domestic cooking gas to make balloons that were light of
[4:39] Speaker 1: an air. Do you want to be careful with those balloons?
[4:42] Speaker 1: Son said? Barry's dad might be dangerous if they meet
[4:47] Speaker 1: an open flame. Let's see, shall we. He drew on
[4:51] Speaker 1: his cigarette and touched the lighted end against the balloon.
[4:56] Speaker 1: Marshall recalls he was enveloped in a ball of flame
[5:00] Speaker 1: and his eyebrows were singed off. This didn't worry us
[5:03] Speaker 1: very much because we had seen him in this state before.
[5:07] Speaker 1: In the gold mining town, there was money to be made,
[5:10] Speaker 1: but not much choice of career path. Boys left school
[5:15] Speaker 1: and they mined for gold. The Marshals wanted their kids
[5:18] Speaker 1: to have options, so they moved their growing family three
[5:22] Speaker 1: hundred miles to Perth, the nearest city. Barry went to
[5:26] Speaker 1: medical school and became a doctor. Every six months, he
[5:30] Speaker 1: trained in a different speciality. When he moved to gastro enterology,
[5:35] Speaker 1: Marshall quickly realized that stomach problems could be hard to treat.
[5:39] Speaker 1: One woman on Marshall's ward was in terrible pain from
[5:42] Speaker 1: gastritis inflammation of the stomach. Nothing helped. In desperation, they
[5:49] Speaker 1: sent her away with antidepressants. It wasn't uncommon to link
[5:54] Speaker 1: gastric problems to mental health. Stomach ulcers were widely assumed
[5:59] Speaker 1: to be caused by stress. Ulcer medicines worked sometimes, but
[6:03] Speaker 1: often not for long. After a couple of years, many
[6:06] Speaker 1: patients would be back with another old sir. When medicines
[6:10] Speaker 1: didn't work, patients would often have part of their stomach
[6:14] Speaker 1: surgically removed. But was the medical community missing something. One
[6:20] Speaker 1: of Marshall's colleagues, Robin Warren, had a half formed theory.
[6:25] Speaker 1: People who came into hospital with a stomach complaint sometimes
[6:28] Speaker 1: had a biopsy taken, and Warren had been looking at
[6:31] Speaker 1: these biopsies. When the sample was from a patient with
[6:34] Speaker 1: an inflamed stomach, he could see under the microscope that
[6:38] Speaker 1: it was rife with a kind of spiral shaped bacteria.
[6:41] Speaker 1: It looked like tiny corkscrews. Those bacteria weren't there with
[6:46] Speaker 1: the healthy stomachs. Warren had observed this spiral bacteria many times,
[6:52] Speaker 1: including on the biopsy of the woman Marshall had seen,
[6:55] Speaker 1: the one who got antidepressants. Marshall was intrigued. He felt
[7:00] Speaker 1: bad that they had failed that patient. Perhaps there was
[7:04] Speaker 1: something more they could have done. He volunteered to investigate
[7:08] Speaker 1: warren idea. The medical textbooks weren't much help, but in
[7:13] Speaker 1: a way that Marshall found paradoxically encouraging. Every single pathologist
[7:19] Speaker 1: in the whole world who wrote a book described gastritis
[7:22] Speaker 1: totally differently. That meant to me that they didn't understand it.
[7:27] Speaker 1: So I'm thinking maybe these bacteria play a role in there.
[7:31] Speaker 1: Marshall went to his hospital's library and played around with
[7:34] Speaker 1: the computer. This was nineteen eighty one, their internet yet,
[7:38] Speaker 1: but the library had just got a direct link to
[7:41] Speaker 1: Australia's National Library of Medicine, and Marshall liked tinkering with technology.
[7:46] Speaker 1: He spent months trawling through obscure literature. Had found suggestive
[7:51] Speaker 1: references to bacteria and stomach complaints that went back nearly
[7:55] Speaker 1: a hundred years. It seemed that the evidence of a
[7:59] Speaker 1: link was there that nobody had yet connected the dots.
[8:03] Speaker 1: Marshall wrote up his findings and sent them to the
[8:06] Speaker 1: organizers of a big gastroenterology conference in Australia. They weren't
[8:11] Speaker 1: as excited as he was. They said, dear doctor Marshall,
[8:15] Speaker 1: we're so sorry that we couldn't accept your abstract. It
[8:18] Speaker 1: was such a high standard. This year, we had sixty
[8:21] Speaker 1: seven applications and we could only accept sixty four. Marshall
[8:26] Speaker 1: tried to grow the bacteria to study it better. Every
[8:29] Speaker 1: time he got a specimen, he'd send it down to
[8:31] Speaker 1: the hospital lab to see if they could culture it in.
[8:34] Speaker 1: Every time he visited the lab to ask how it
[8:37] Speaker 1: was going, he got the same answer. Had the bacteria grown. No.
[8:42] Speaker 1: Until one day, the day after the Easter holidays, Marshall
[8:47] Speaker 1: received a phone call. Come down to the lab. The
[8:50] Speaker 1: technician said, we think we've cultured your bacteria. It turned
[8:55] Speaker 1: out that Marshall's bacteria helico back to pylori, or just H. Pylor,
[9:00] Speaker 1: require three or four days to start showing up. The
[9:04] Speaker 1: lab was used to culturing bacteria that grow more quickly,
[9:08] Speaker 1: such as he whole eye. When nothing had appeared in
[9:11] Speaker 1: the petri dish after a couple of days, the technicians
[9:14] Speaker 1: were throwing the samples out. They had succeeded this time
[9:18] Speaker 1: only because Marshall had happened to send the last sample
[9:21] Speaker 1: just before the four day easter break. Now that Marshall
[9:26] Speaker 1: knew how to grow H. Pylorie, his next step was
[9:29] Speaker 1: to prove that the bacteria was causing the stomach illness.
[9:33] Speaker 1: It could, after all, be a coincidence, or maybe causality
[9:37] Speaker 1: could run the other way. Perhaps the illness was enabling
[9:41] Speaker 1: the bacteria to colonize the stomach. Marshall fed his bacteria
[9:45] Speaker 1: to mice and rats to see if they developed stomach problems.
[9:49] Speaker 1: They didn't. He tried it on piglets. Every week he'd
[9:53] Speaker 1: feed them a portion of H. Pylori and do an endoscopy,
[9:57] Speaker 1: sticking a tube down their throat to look for stomach problems.
[10:01] Speaker 1: Weeks went by and nothing happened to the little pigs,
[10:05] Speaker 1: except they grew into bigger pigs. After three of this experiment,
[10:10] Speaker 1: I had seventy pound pigs that I was wrestling with
[10:13] Speaker 1: each week trying to do an edoscopy on and it
[10:15] Speaker 1: was a big mess and the bacteria didn't take. Marshall
[10:20] Speaker 1: was exasperated. Mice and rats and pigs, after all, aren't people,
[10:26] Speaker 1: and he was convinced that H. Pylori was giving people ulcers.
[10:31] Speaker 1: Some gastroenterologists were intrigued by the idea, but many others
[10:36] Speaker 1: were dismissive. To get their attention, Marshall decided he needed
[10:41] Speaker 1: to show that if a healthy person got infected with H. Pylori,
[10:45] Speaker 1: they'd develop a stomach ulcer. But which healthy person could
[10:49] Speaker 1: he ask to do that? There was one obvious answer himself,
[10:57] Speaker 1: like his dad poking a gas filled balloon with a
[11:00] Speaker 1: lit cigarette. Barry was about to satisfy his curiosity in
[11:05] Speaker 1: a rather reckless way, though he didn't think it was
[11:08] Speaker 1: too much of a risk. When I spoke to ulcer patients,
[11:12] Speaker 1: they couldn't tell me about any illness they had had.
[11:14] Speaker 1: They were perfectly fine, and then they developed an ulcer,
[11:18] Speaker 1: So I didn't think I'd become unwell. Marshall had been
[11:21] Speaker 1: feeding his pigs a small dose of bacteria every week,
[11:26] Speaker 1: but would he really be able to persevere with consuming H.
[11:29] Speaker 1: Pylori himself on a weekly basis. He wasn't sure he
[11:34] Speaker 1: could stomach it. Better to summon up his courage once,
[11:38] Speaker 1: he thought, and take one huge dose. Marshall and his
[11:43] Speaker 1: lab technician brewed up a beaker of the potion, a
[11:46] Speaker 1: couple of ounces of cloudy brown liquid. He hadn't told
[11:51] Speaker 1: the lab technician what he was about to do with it.
[11:54] Speaker 1: He hadn't told his bosses either, as he feared they'd
[11:57] Speaker 1: try to stop him. He raised the beaker in his hand. Well,
[12:03] Speaker 1: here he goes down the hatch. The lab technician was horrified.
[12:10] Speaker 1: We'll find out what happened after the break. Barry Marshall
[12:28] Speaker 1: didn't expect to get a stomach ulcer right away. Many people,
[12:32] Speaker 1: it seemed, can carry an H. Pylori infection without developing
[12:35] Speaker 1: any gastric complaints. If he's going to get an ulcer,
[12:39] Speaker 1: he thinks it might take years. He reassures his appalled
[12:43] Speaker 1: lab technician that he feels perfectly fine and goes off
[12:47] Speaker 1: to do his rounds on the ward as usual. It
[12:51] Speaker 1: takes just a few days before Marshall realizes that something
[12:55] Speaker 1: isn't right. He's having one of his favorite meals, Chinese noodles,
[12:59] Speaker 1: but the food is sitting on his stomach like a
[13:01] Speaker 1: lump of lead. Boy, I feel so full. In the morning,
[13:06] Speaker 1: he wakes up at the crack of dawn, I'm going
[13:09] Speaker 1: to be sick. He runs into the bathroom and throws up.
[13:13] Speaker 1: But it's not the Chinese food that comes back up again,
[13:16] Speaker 1: just a clear, slimy liquid about a pint of it. Well, gee,
[13:22] Speaker 1: that's weird. I don't do that very often. The next
[13:25] Speaker 1: morning he wakes up and vomits again, and the next
[13:30] Speaker 1: he visits his mother. He hasn't told her about swallowing
[13:33] Speaker 1: the bacteria. Barry, are you constipated? How come you've got
[13:38] Speaker 1: bad breath. Barry's work colleagues have also noticed his terrible breath,
[13:44] Speaker 1: but they don't want to be impolite enough to tell him.
[13:47] Speaker 1: Ten days after swallowing the h pylorie, he gets them
[13:50] Speaker 1: to give him an endoscopy. Usually I can tolerate the
[13:54] Speaker 1: tube pretty easily with just a little gagging, but it
[13:57] Speaker 1: was very uncomfortable. The endoscopy shows that the lining of
[14:02] Speaker 1: Marshall's stomach is severely inflamed. This is great, says Marshall.
[14:09] Speaker 1: Let's give it another few days and see how it develops.
[14:13] Speaker 1: Marshall hasn't told his wife what he's done either, Barry,
[14:17] Speaker 1: there's something wrong with you. All night, You're hot and cold.
[14:21] Speaker 1: You're breaking out in a sweat. You're not eating your meals.
[14:24] Speaker 1: You've got dark rings under your eyes. You look terrible. Well,
[14:29] Speaker 1: you know, I took this bacteria and now I've got
[14:31] Speaker 1: the infection. You did what? It's not like. Marshall hadn't
[14:37] Speaker 1: done any thinking ahead. He tested the bacteria he had
[14:40] Speaker 1: cultured to make sure that an antibiotic metro nidazole would
[14:44] Speaker 1: kill it. It did in the petri dish at least,
[14:48] Speaker 1: so he was fairly confident that he could cure himself
[14:51] Speaker 1: by taking metro nidazole if his illness got to worrying.
[14:56] Speaker 1: Barry Marshall was the latest in a long tradition of
[14:59] Speaker 1: doctors experimenting on themselves. Alas that long tradition is not
[15:05] Speaker 1: wholly reassuring. John Hunter was eighteenth century English surgeon, royal
[15:12] Speaker 1: doctor to King George the Third. He was also the
[15:15] Speaker 1: leading authority of his time on venereal disease, so much
[15:19] Speaker 1: so that, according to some accounts, he gave himself gonorrhea
[15:23] Speaker 1: to study it better. He extracted us from an infected
[15:27] Speaker 1: patient and injected it into his own penis. This turned
[15:32] Speaker 1: out to be a doubly bad idea. First of all,
[15:36] Speaker 1: none of Hunter's cures for gonorrhea actually worked were still
[15:40] Speaker 1: The patient also happened to have syphilis, and Hunter got
[15:44] Speaker 1: that too, setting up a lifetime of worsening health. Or
[15:49] Speaker 1: take the nineteenth century German chemist Max von Pettenkoffer. Like
[15:54] Speaker 1: Barry Marshall, he downed a potion teeming with bacteria, in
[15:58] Speaker 1: this case the bacteria that caused cholera. He was trying
[16:02] Speaker 1: to prove his theory that the bacteria didn't cause cholera.
[16:07] Speaker 1: He was wrong. They do, and cholera can kill you.
[16:12] Speaker 1: But von Pettenkoffer was lucky. He just got a mild
[16:15] Speaker 1: case of diarrhea. In the nineteen twenties, medical student Werna
[16:20] Speaker 1: Forceman learned from his physiology textbook about an experiment someone
[16:25] Speaker 1: had done on a horse. They inserted a tube in
[16:28] Speaker 1: a vein in the horse's neck, pushed the tube into
[16:31] Speaker 1: the horse's heart, and inflated a rubber balloon to measure
[16:35] Speaker 1: the changes in pressure as the horse's heart beat. The
[16:39] Speaker 1: horse survived. Forceman wandered if a human would too. If
[16:45] Speaker 1: you could insert a tube into a vein in a
[16:47] Speaker 1: patient's arm, he thought, and push it into the heart,
[16:52] Speaker 1: that might have some medical uses. Forceman went to the
[16:55] Speaker 1: boss at his hospital and said, can I try this
[16:58] Speaker 1: on myself? Absolutely not, said his boss. Imagine the scandal
[17:04] Speaker 1: for the hospital if you kill yourself. Forceman decided to
[17:08] Speaker 1: ignore him and do it anyway. He'd need a tube.
[17:12] Speaker 1: To get the tube, he'd need to sweet talk the
[17:14] Speaker 1: nurse who held the keys to the supply covered. The
[17:17] Speaker 1: nurse was forty five year old girder Ditson. The young
[17:22] Speaker 1: doctor took her out to dinner and tried to persuade
[17:25] Speaker 1: her of the importance of what he wanted to do.
[17:29] Speaker 1: Nurse Ditson was completely won over. Do it to me,
[17:33] Speaker 1: she said. They arranged a clandestine meeting. In the lunch break,
[17:38] Speaker 1: Nurse Ditson got out of thirty inch tube, a scalpel,
[17:42] Speaker 1: and a hollow needle. She lay down on the surgical
[17:45] Speaker 1: table and doctor Forceman tied down her arms and legs
[17:49] Speaker 1: to hold her still. Forceman then turned his back on
[17:52] Speaker 1: her as if to arrange the instruments, but instead he
[17:56] Speaker 1: performed the surgery on himself. He dabbed iodine on his
[18:00] Speaker 1: left elbow, injected himself with a local anesthetic, and used
[18:04] Speaker 1: the needle to feed the tube into his vein. He
[18:08] Speaker 1: went back to strap Nurse Ditson and tell her what
[18:11] Speaker 1: he had done. She was furious, but she agreed to
[18:16] Speaker 1: help Forceman do what he needed to do next, get
[18:20] Speaker 1: proof that he'd pushed the tube all the way into
[18:23] Speaker 1: his heart. Together, they went to the X ray department
[18:27] Speaker 1: and asked the technician to let them use the fluoroscope.
[18:31] Speaker 1: On the screen, they could see where the tube was. Gently,
[18:35] Speaker 1: Forceman pushed it further and further towards his heart. The
[18:40] Speaker 1: technician slipped out of the room to alert another doctor
[18:43] Speaker 1: to what was going on. That other doctor now burst in.
[18:47] Speaker 1: What are you doing? He yelled at Forceman, You're crazy.
[18:51] Speaker 1: He tried to pull the catheter out of Forceman's arm,
[18:54] Speaker 1: but Forceman fought him off, kicking his shins. Nine nine,
[18:58] Speaker 1: I must push it forward. At last, the tip of
[19:02] Speaker 1: the catheter entered his heart. Take up picture. He told
[19:07] Speaker 1: the technician had his proof. He wrote up his self
[19:11] Speaker 1: experiment and submitted it to a medical journal. It caused
[19:16] Speaker 1: a huge fuss Enforceman was fired. He struggled to find
[19:21] Speaker 1: a new job. Nobody wanted a heart surgeon who was
[19:24] Speaker 1: known as a risk taker but a rule breaker. He
[19:27] Speaker 1: retrained as a urologist, got a job in a small
[19:31] Speaker 1: town where nobody had heard of him, and joined the
[19:34] Speaker 1: Nazi Party. Meanwhile, two American cardiologists read his old journal
[19:44] Speaker 1: article and decided he was onto something. They turned cardiac
[19:48] Speaker 1: catheterization into a practical technique to investigate heart disease and
[19:53] Speaker 1: to treat it by widening blocked arteries. They received a
[19:58] Speaker 1: Nobel Prize for their efforts, and they shared that Nobel
[20:02] Speaker 1: prize with an obscure ex Nazi small town German neurologist.
[20:08] Speaker 1: Nearly three dec aides after he had tied up Nurse
[20:11] Speaker 1: ditson Verna, Forceman had been vindicated. Just how big is
[20:17] Speaker 1: this tradition of medical self experimentation. A doctor and researcher
[20:22] Speaker 1: called Alan Weiss set out to document every example he
[20:26] Speaker 1: could find from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He found
[20:30] Speaker 1: four hundred and sixty five. Then he looked at what
[20:34] Speaker 1: had happened to them. In seven cases, including Forceman, it
[20:39] Speaker 1: won them a Nobel prize. In eight it killed them.
[20:44] Speaker 1: The odds of death and glory were roughly equal. Barry
[20:52] Speaker 1: Marshall's wife was not happy. She was worried about his
[20:57] Speaker 1: health and worried that he might pass on the bacteria
[21:00] Speaker 1: to her and their children. Start taking antibiotics. She tells
[21:05] Speaker 1: him give me till the end of the week. Marshall pleads,
[21:09] Speaker 1: I want to have another endoscopy to see what's happening.
[21:12] Speaker 1: By this point, Marshall has stopped vomiting up colorless, slimy liquid.
[21:17] Speaker 1: To his surprise, the next endoscopy shows that the inflammation
[21:21] Speaker 1: is healing. He takes the antibiotics to be on the
[21:24] Speaker 1: safe side, but he seems to have fought off the
[21:27] Speaker 1: bacteria on his own. Marshall has dinner with Robin Warren,
[21:31] Speaker 1: the colleague Hauld first suggested that he looked into the
[21:34] Speaker 1: spiral shaped bacteria on stomach biopsies. He tells Warren all
[21:38] Speaker 1: about his self experiment The next morning, Warren is woken
[21:43] Speaker 1: up at five am by a call from an American journalist.
[21:46] Speaker 1: They've scheduled a routine interview to discuss Warren's ulcer theory,
[21:51] Speaker 1: but the journalist has got muddled about the time zone
[21:53] Speaker 1: in Perth because he's half asleep. Warren blurts out the
[21:57] Speaker 1: exciting news, Barry Marshall just infected himself and damn near died.
[22:03] Speaker 1: Marshall hasn't yet published his work in a medical journal,
[22:07] Speaker 1: so the first report about it in an American tabloid newspaper,
[22:12] Speaker 1: a sensational story about the Australian guinea pig doctor and
[22:16] Speaker 1: his cure for ulcers. That's not going to help my credibility,
[22:20] Speaker 1: Marshall thinks, But unlike some of his self experimenting predecessors,
[22:26] Speaker 1: at least he was still alive. The tailor Franz Reichelt
[22:34] Speaker 1: had kept his self experimentation plans to himself. The workers
[22:39] Speaker 1: he employed in his tailoring business thought he was planning
[22:43] Speaker 1: to put his parachute suit on a tailor's dummy and
[22:46] Speaker 1: throw the dummy off the Eiffel Tower. That's also what
[22:49] Speaker 1: he told the Paris authorities he wanted to do when
[22:52] Speaker 1: he asked for permission to use the Eiffel Tower for
[22:55] Speaker 1: his test. The wait for that permission was agonizing as
[22:59] Speaker 1: Reichelt tried to improve his designs. Bureaucrats waited a full
[23:04] Speaker 1: year before giving him the nod. By then, Reichelt's workers
[23:08] Speaker 1: were used to him throwing dummies off the fifth floor
[23:11] Speaker 1: balcony of the building where he worked. The first prototype
[23:14] Speaker 1: of his parachute suit had a canopy of just six
[23:17] Speaker 1: square yards. The dummy did not land softly enough. Reichelt
[23:23] Speaker 1: redesigned the suit, this time with a twelve square yard canopy.
[23:28] Speaker 1: He threw the dummy off his balcony and the results
[23:31] Speaker 1: were a little better. Reichelt made the canopies bigger and
[23:35] Speaker 1: bigger in the end over thirty square yards, and it
[23:40] Speaker 1: seemed to him that the falls got chentler. He found
[23:44] Speaker 1: a quiet spot in a village to try the suit himself,
[23:47] Speaker 1: jumping from thirty feet onto a bed of straw. But
[23:51] Speaker 1: he also thought he saw the problem. He wasn't jumping
[23:54] Speaker 1: from high enough. The parachute needed more time to slow
[23:59] Speaker 1: the speed of his descent. On the evening before his
[24:05] Speaker 1: date with the Eiffel Tower Saturday, February fourth, nineteen twelve,
[24:10] Speaker 1: Riichelt wanted to make sure the media would turn up.
[24:14] Speaker 1: He paid a visit to a journalist at a Paris newspaper.
[24:18] Speaker 1: I've told the authorities I'm going to use a dummy,
[24:20] Speaker 1: he says. Actually, I'm going to jump myself. You won't
[24:26] Speaker 1: take any precautions, not in the least. I want to
[24:30] Speaker 1: prove the value of my invention. Word got round, and
[24:35] Speaker 1: when morning came, the journalists were out in force, and
[24:39] Speaker 1: the path a film crew. One writer describes the inventor's
[24:43] Speaker 1: absolute calm and apparent good humor. Another says he's cheerful,
[24:49] Speaker 1: brimming with confidence. He had put on a sort of
[24:52] Speaker 1: brown jumpsuit, a little bulkier than ordinary clothing. The appearance
[24:57] Speaker 1: was elegant, and the inventor rightly pointed out to everyone
[25:00] Speaker 1: that his clothing did not hinder movement. Some people made
[25:05] Speaker 1: a last ditch attempt to dissuade Raichelt from making the
[25:09] Speaker 1: jump himself. It's not too late to use a mannequin,
[25:12] Speaker 1: they point out. Will you at least think about postponing
[25:16] Speaker 1: until the wind calms down. Reichelt is having none of it.
[25:20] Speaker 1: You will see how my seventy two kilos and my
[25:24] Speaker 1: parachute will give to your arguments. The most decisive of denials.
[25:32] Speaker 1: There are three hundred and forty seven steps up to
[25:35] Speaker 1: the first floor of the Eiffel Tower. Reichelt starts to
[25:39] Speaker 1: climb them, with one of the film crews in tow.
[25:43] Speaker 1: He turns to look back at the crowd. Abiento. He says,
[25:49] Speaker 1: see you soon. Franz Reichelt wasn't included in the research
[25:54] Speaker 1: that counted four hundred and sixty five cases of self experimentation.
[25:59] Speaker 1: That research looked at doctors, not tailors. That research found
[26:05] Speaker 1: the pace of self experimentation was slowing towards the end
[26:09] Speaker 1: of the twentieth century. The Golden Age passed a hundred
[26:13] Speaker 1: years ago. Another researcher, Brian Hanley, doubts that he thinks
[26:18] Speaker 1: those figures are just the tip of the iceberg. Hanley
[26:23] Speaker 1: has experimented on himself in gene therapy. He knows lots
[26:27] Speaker 1: of other academics who've done the same but kept it quiet.
[26:31] Speaker 1: They worry that their institutions won't support them. They might
[26:34] Speaker 1: be fired. Like Werner Forceman all those years ago. Hanley
[26:40] Speaker 1: decided to investigate why self experimenting has such a bad reputation.
[26:46] Speaker 1: He and his colleagues contacted the ethics departments of universities
[26:50] Speaker 1: to see if they had a policy on it. There
[26:52] Speaker 1: was no consistency, but they heard a common concern that
[26:56] Speaker 1: self experiments prove nothing. It's called the n of one problem.
[27:01] Speaker 1: If your research has only one subject, you can't learn
[27:05] Speaker 1: anything useful. You need bigger studies to draw wider conclude.
[27:09] Speaker 1: That's just not true, said Hanley. An n of one
[27:13] Speaker 1: experiment can show that something is possible and more research
[27:17] Speaker 1: is worthwhile. That's what happened with Werna Forceman and Barry Marshall.
[27:22] Speaker 1: The sensational tabloid story might not have helped Marshall's credibility,
[27:26] Speaker 1: but it got attention and led to bigger studies. We
[27:30] Speaker 1: now know that roughly half the world's population is infected
[27:33] Speaker 1: with H. Pylori, generally in childhood. For most people it
[27:37] Speaker 1: never becomes a problem, but for some it causes stomach
[27:41] Speaker 1: cultures later in life, and we now know how to
[27:44] Speaker 1: treat them. Barry Marshall joined the list of self experimenters
[27:49] Speaker 1: who won a Nobel prize. The tailor, Franz Reichelt, as
[27:54] Speaker 1: you might have guessed, was not so lucky the path.
[27:59] Speaker 1: A newsreel footage of Franz Reichelt's jump from the Eiffel
[28:03] Speaker 1: Tower is riveting and awful. The parachute never looks like unfurling.
[28:10] Speaker 1: Reichelt drops like a stone. The autopsy will later reveal
[28:15] Speaker 1: that as he falls, he's suffering a massive cardiac arrest.
[28:21] Speaker 1: He fell with a dull thud onto the ground, his
[28:25] Speaker 1: forehead bleeding, his eyes open, dilated with terror, his limbs broken.
[28:32] Speaker 1: The reckless inventor was dead. Reichelt had looked like a
[28:37] Speaker 1: mad genius equipped one journalist, but proved himself worthy of
[28:42] Speaker 1: only half the epithet. It's easy to snicker, but is
[28:47] Speaker 1: it fair? Wearable parachutes are not an intrinsically stupid idea
[28:53] Speaker 1: reichelt design failed, But today we have designs that work,
[28:57] Speaker 1: wingsuits that let you skydive like a flying squirrel. And
[29:01] Speaker 1: when a self experiment goes well, it's easy to forget
[29:05] Speaker 1: how much uncertainty it involved. Barry Marshall didn't expect to
[29:10] Speaker 1: get symptoms so quickly, and he didn't expect the symptoms
[29:14] Speaker 1: to self resolve. I was a bit overconfident in retrospect,
[29:18] Speaker 1: he later admitted. If we can't tell how big a
[29:22] Speaker 1: risk is, how can we tell whether to take it.
[29:26] Speaker 1: I think all we can do is examine our motives.
[29:29] Speaker 1: Are we thirsting for useful knowledge that there's no other
[29:33] Speaker 1: way to obtain, or trying to show off? Barry Marshall
[29:39] Speaker 1: admits with hindsight that he was a brash young man,
[29:42] Speaker 1: impatient to prove his older colleagues wrong. Asked if he'd
[29:46] Speaker 1: do the same again, he says, I'd definitely study all
[29:50] Speaker 1: the different angles of it further before I'd do it
[29:53] Speaker 1: on myself. Franz Reichelt looks like a classic case of hubris.
[29:59] Speaker 1: There was, after all, a risk free way to test
[30:02] Speaker 1: his idea. Use a Taylor's dummy to jump himself suggests
[30:07] Speaker 1: he was delusionally overconfident in his own idea. That seems
[30:12] Speaker 1: to be what most Parisian journalists assumed, but not all.
[30:17] Speaker 1: Joe took the trouble to track down one of Reichelt's
[30:20] Speaker 1: friends and ask what the inventor had been thinking. The
[30:24] Speaker 1: explanation is simple, said the friend. Intellectual property laws. Reichelt
[30:30] Speaker 1: had managed to secure a patent for his parachute suit idea,
[30:34] Speaker 1: but the legal fees had stretched his finances, and patents
[30:38] Speaker 1: lasted for only fifteen years. If he was going to
[30:42] Speaker 1: make money from his invention, he had to commercialize it quickly.
[30:47] Speaker 1: That meant he needed a wealthy sponsor, and his only
[30:51] Speaker 1: hope of getting a sponsor was a spectacular, attention grabbing success.
[30:57] Speaker 1: He'd waited a whole year for bureaucrats to give him
[31:00] Speaker 1: permission to use the Eiffel Tower. He might never get
[31:04] Speaker 1: another chance to make an impact death all glory. As
[31:11] Speaker 1: he hesitated with his foot on the railing for forty
[31:16] Speaker 1: long seconds, perhaps he'd already guessed the answer. Cautionary Tales
[31:41] Speaker 1: is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's
[31:44] Speaker 1: produced by Ryan Dilley with support from Courtney Guarino and
[31:48] Speaker 1: Emily Vaughan. The sound design and original music is the
[31:51] Speaker 1: work of Pascal Wise. It features the voice talents of
[31:55] Speaker 1: Ben Crow, Melanie Gutridge, Stella Harford, and Rufus Wright. The
[32:00] Speaker 1: show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of
[32:03] Speaker 1: Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnars, Julia Barton,
[32:08] Speaker 1: Carlie mc or, Eric Sandler, Royston Basserve, Maggie Taylor, Nicole Mrano,
[32:14] Speaker 1: Danielle Lakhan, and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a production
[32:19] Speaker 1: of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember
[32:22] Speaker 1: to share, rate and review, tell a friend, tell two friends,
[32:26] Speaker 1: and if you want to hear the show, adds free
[32:28] Speaker 1: and listen to four exclusive Cautionary Tales shorts. Then sign
[32:33] Speaker 1: up for Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple
[32:35] Speaker 1: Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm, slash plus

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