The Drum Generally Heals Up

J.B.S. Haldane was one of the three founders of modern population genetics, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the man who first proposed that life began in a primordial soup. He was also, from a young age, an experimental subject. Usually his own.

His father was a physiologist, and at thirteen he was lowered from HMS Spanker off Rothesay in an adult-sized diving suit that promptly flooded. He spent half an hour on the seafloor in eleven-degree water. They revived him with whisky.

He never really came back up.

By the Second World War he was sealing himself into hyperbaric chambers at Siebe Gorman's London works on Admiralty contracts, testing submarine-escape limits on his own body. He drank measured doses of hydrochloric acid to study blood acidification. He sat inside a seven-percent carbon dioxide atmosphere and recorded "a rather violent headache." An oxygen-toxicity fit seized him so hard it crushed several vertebrae; he had pain sitting down for the rest of his life. He asked colleagues to prod him awake if he stopped breathing.

The decompression burst his eardrums. In a 1949 book he noted that the drum generally heals up, and that if a hole remains one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment.