Non-Fiction Book Review

Non- Fiction Book Review

                        Guinea Pig Scientists: Bold Self-Experimenters in Science and Medicine

Dendy, Leslie and Mel Boring. Guinea Pig Scientists: Bold Self-Experimenters in Science            and Medicine. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005.

ISBN: 978-0-8050-7316-4

213 p.

Reading Level: 8.2

Interest Level: 5-9

Lexile: 1100L

What seems like crazy to one person seems like commonsense to another.  In the book, Guinea Pig Scientists, the author details ten cases of medical/scientific experimentation that an individual or individuals pursued in their quest for answers to scientific inquiry. What makes these stories so extraordinary is that the named scientists experimented on themselves to obtain answers to their questions.  Information was always gained but the experiments did not always end happily for the scientist/doctor. The book chronicles just a few of the following tales:

Dr. Jesse Lazear dies after deliberately infecting himself with yellow fever from the bite of a mosquito.  He has shown that mosquitoes carried this deadly fever.

Thousands of lives are saved because of this connection being made.

 Madame Marie Curie while becoming the “mother of modern radiation therapy” suffers radiation burns all over her hands and dies from leukemia.

Lazzaro Spallanzani wants to find out how digestion works. Is our food ground up in our stomachs?  By swallowing a variety of objects in different states, he figures out how digestion takes place.

            The author cautions the reader in his introduction that experimentation on one’s self is not taken lightly. Most times, the experimenter is a trained professional with an understanding of the risks they are taking.  It is almost always done under strict guidelines and procedures.  There is risk however anytime self-experimentation is done.  It is not

something to be played out or treated as a whim. It is a regulated scientific study.

            This book was quite unusual in its content in that some of the people chronicled lived hundreds of years ago. Each chapter in the book ends with a section titled “Now We Know” which tells what we now know about the area of experimentation. The documentation in the book in relating the facts is amazing. There literally is an entire section devoted to resources used in writing the book.  The author also includes a timeline telling about other self-experimenters. Each chapter in the book ends with a section titled “Now We Know” which tells what we now know about the area of experimentation.

            In drawing comparisons to other books that approach how we gain practical scientific knowledge, I would list the book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach which deals with the knowledge gained by using human cadavers in various scenarios. Another book, Forty Years of Medical Racism: The Tuskeegee Experiments by Michael V. Uschan tells the opposite story of unethical medical studies/experiments when people being used are totally unaware of their participation.