Free citizens take risks for better health.
Tim Friede let venomous snakes bite him roughly 200 times, suffering anaphylactic shocks, and spending four days hospitalized in a coma. But this wasn’t a suicide attempt. He was seeking immunity to all snake venom, so that his blood could be used to create a universal antitoxin. The Centivax startup reports promising results from an early version of an antitoxin based on Friede’s blood.
The FDA does not ban people from letting snakes bite them, so Friede had the freedom to be bitten. His choice was focused on the greater good, as was Jonas Salk’s choice to test his polio vaccine on himself and his family, and as was the choice of over 38,000 volunteers who signed up for Covid “human challenge trials,” which would have involved taking an experimental vaccine and then being deliberately exposed to Covid. If such trials had been allowed, we could have had safe and effective vaccines much sooner, saving many lives.
Covid was costly in many ways, but one good to come from it is an energized health freedom movement. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., exercised health freedom when he opted for stem cell therapy for the spasmodic dysphonia that makes his voice sound raspy. He found a Chicago stem cell doctor who had set up a satellite office in Antigua to avoid American regulations. Kennedy had the funds to go to Antigua and is happy with the treatment he received. Now he wants the less-wealthy in America also to be free to choose experimental therapies.
Berkeley evolutionary biologist and geneticist Noah Whiteman claims that at least 40% of today’s drugs—including, for example, aspirin—originated from traditional medicine, which would imply that they were first discovered long before the FDA existed. Aspirin was derived from the white willow tree’s bark and was used against inflammation and fever for millennia. Metformin, now widely prescribed as a treatment for diabetes, and being researched by some as a longevity drug, was derived from the French lilac plant which was used as a medicine since the Middle Ages. We do not know whether we owe aspirin and metformin’s discovery to some forgotten entrepreneur’s serendipitous alertness or to his persistence at trial-and-error search. But we do know that the FDA had nothing to do with either discovery, since the use of aspirin and metformin as medicines preceded the birth of the FDA.
We have somewhat better knowledge of the discovery of the smallpox vaccine—physician Edward Jenner usually receives credit. But a couple of decades before Jenner’s experiments, English farmer Benjamin Jesty observed a pattern. He saw that milkmaids who came down with cowpox (a disease similar to but milder than smallpox) later had smooth complexions because they never caught smallpox. Jesty deliberately inoculated his wife and children with cowpox and saved them from the smallpox that was spreading at the time. Jesty was an uncredentialed, adventuresome citizen who exercised his right to health freedom, but who was then vilified, forced to take his family and move, and was not given the credit that was his due.
Americans once flourished when they were allowed to judge for themselves whether a candidate cure or a new product was the fruit of an innovator or a charlatan. Their parents, and their trial-and-error experiences, had taught them to be informed and to beware. When British electrical engineer Sir William Preece visited America in 1884, he was surprised that electric lights were everywhere in New York, while London remained in the dark. Europe had adopted what we now call the “precautionary principle,” that an innovation should be banned unless it can be proven safe. But often the new cannot be proven safe until it is tried and improved, so Europeans remained in the dark until Americans lit the way.
Now some longevity experts such as Dr. Peter Attia are cautiously optimistic about a drug called rapamycin, which has received limited approval from the FDA to keep the immune system from rejecting transplanted organs (and for a few other unusual uses) but has not received approval for longevity. Attia argues that compared to other longevity drugs and supplements, such as metformin and resveratrol, only rapamycin has been robustly shown to extend the lives of a species of mammal.
Most impressively, in a study of old mice, published in the scientific journal Nature in 2009, rapamycin increased the remaining lifespan of males by 28% and of females by 38%. The mice results were successfully replicated in multiple labs, and ongoing studies are also testing rapamycin on dogs and marmosets. Mice, dogs, and marmosets are not humans. But in a meta-analysis reported last year in PLOS Biology, researchers found a “concordance” of 86% between the results of human studies and the results of animal studies.
The main roadblock to pursuit of rapamycin is its suppression of the immune system, which is a necessary feature for transplant patients but an undesirable side effect for those seeking longer life. The good news is that this side effect may be avoidable. A 2014 study showed that when an analog of rapamycin was taken weekly, rather than daily, the human immune system was actually strengthened. The authors concluded that rapamycin can be more of an immune modulator than an immune suppressor.
A government that allows Tim Friede to invite snakes to bite him 200 times should allow other adventuresome citizens to take rapamycin in the hope of a longer life. If the adventuresome flourish, the more cautious can gratefully follow. Everyone should have the health freedom to choose his or her own level of adventure. I might take rapamycin, but on snakes I am with Sallah who, standing beside Indiana Jones, gazed into the writhing pit and uttered, “Very dangerous—you go first!”
