Professor Guinea Pig

Now, let's see if I got the measurements right...

"September 13th, 11:56 PM. I have started this alone, and I must finish it... alone.
I know now that I must use... myself... as the subject of the experiment."

— Dr. Henry Jekyll, Jekyll & Hyde

So you're a bona fide scientific genius, and you've come up with a wonder drug that will allow people to live forever. So now you'll apply for approval from the FDA, right? Begin animal testing, assessing major organ toxicity in rats and small primates, then monitoring the subjects for carcinogenic effects and reproductive complications; who knows, if the drug behaves as predicted you could be doing Phase One clinical trials inside of five years.

Or, you could just mix up a batch of the stuff in your basement and drink it...

That's just what scientists do in fiction. They might go as far as trying out their incredibly experimental drug/strength ray/time-altering device/etc. on a squirrel or something first, but the point is that they move onto human testing quickly, usually without any safeguards or anyone observing, and they use themselves as a test subject. They might have their reasoning — they needed to get it done quickly because the invention is needed for some time-sensitive purpose (e.g., a dying loved one, a company about to go under); the story's setting (such as After the End) inherently limits the options in terms of test subjects; they're a discredited scientist, forced to work under the radar; the invention is being created not for public consumption but for the scientist's own (usually evil) ends; or the scientist is just plain crazy. But none of those are decent reasons, save possibly the insanity; it's just a dumbass thing to do. Hence the fact that half the time something Goes Horribly Wrong; and for the other half (which is far worse) something Goes Horribly Right.

On the other hand, these characters usually retain the audience's sympathy since they are risking only their own lives, not those of some poor Innocent Bystanders or their own children. This puts them in favorable contrast to the Obviously Evil Mad Scientists, who test their Phlebotinum on any innocent humans they can strap down to the table.

Testing things on themselves is actually terrible scientific procedure. Since the scientist has pre-conceived notions on what might happen, the results are unreliable and are likely to be discarded. There's also the issue that there can't be a control group due to the testee/tester knowing what they are doing. Many experiments don't tell the testees what they are trying to find out or lie to them in order to find out something different from what the scientists are claiming to find.

The more cartoonish the show, and the crazier the scientist, the more blatant this trope becomes. A Zany Cartoon might very well feature a scientist who, suddenly needing to be giant, just steps over to his array of beakers and retorts, mixes a bunch of funny-colored liquids together, and drinks it.

Believe it or not, this was actually standard procedure in many fields of science. Even as late as the 1950's, chemists would create a new compound and ingest it to see what it did. It was not the healthiest of occupations; quite a few scientists did end up killing themselves via experimentation. The Nuremberg Code of 1946, which codified the ethical requirements for human experimentation, forbids any experiment that is highly likely to or will certainly cause death or serious harm to the subjects. However, the ban is explicitly waived if the researcher is experimenting on themself. It still happens; see the real-life example section.

See also Guinea Pig Family and No Control Group. May overlap with Self-Made Superpowers, if the purpose (and result) of the experiment was the character gaining superpowers. May also overlap with Getting Sick Deliberately, if the character decides to test something by getting themselves ill first.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: The Yakuzens routinely test experimental drugs on themselves. Of particular note is Kusuri's immortality drug, which de-aged everyone in her family into eight-year-olds, with their Magic Antidote only countering it temporarily. (Or not at all in the case of her grandmother, for whom Kusuri sought to make the immortality drug in the first place.) Among the side effects of this practice is the Yakuzens being Unaffected by Spice and having Acquired Poison Immunity.
• Kiriko resorts to this with the last vaccine in 20th Century Boys, since she is in a hurry and no longer has as many resources as before.
• Aaron Newt from +Anima performed many experiments regarding the titular +Anima phenomenon (children gaining animal superpowers after experiencing a near-death experience). He apparently performed a lot of these experiments on himself, which led to him becoming a strange-looking Beast Man.
• Lampshaded in, of all places, the H-manga Asuka And Shizuru. The main villain, a sorcerer of some sort, is defeated in the first chapter and goes on to become the Big Bad of the series by performing experiments on himself. The lampshading comes soon after, wherein it is acknowledged that doing so was an absolutely moronic move on his part because it carried an enormous risk. This comes into play very soon after when a sex demon eats him alive and enslaves the two girls. Don't worry, they escape the mind control and kick its ass, sending it back to recuperate. It ends with a more optimistic variant of the Bolivian Army Ending, with them preparing to face the enemy again confident that they won't fall for the same tricks twice.
• One of the subjects of Hikawa's experiments in the Birdy the Mighty OVA series was himself, giving himself telekinesis and Super-Strength, as well as reverting him to his physical prime. He's also willing to ignore any side-effects of his experiments, including, again, to himself.
• Bleach:
  • Kurotsuchi Mayuri is obviously his own favorite test subject (he's given himself such bizarre abilities as being able to rip out his own ear and transform it into a kusarigama, and to launch his right arm as a grappling hook)... although based on what is known of his personality, most of his "improvements" were probably perfected on the unwilling first.
  • Mayuri's predecessor as the chief scientist of the Gotei 13, Urahara Kisuke, has also been known to do this. He invented a device that allows a Shinigami to achieve bankai (the final stage of their zanpakuto), which normally takes decades if not centuries, in no more than three days. "No more" because if bankai isn't achieved within that time, the user of the device will die. Urahara immediately used it himself.
• Downplayed with Dr. Gero in Dragon Ball Z: he turned himself into a Cyborg, but as his number shows, he was the last one instead of the first.
• Averted in Franken Fran: the eponymous character doesn't test a treatment she developed for aging on herself because, as she herself puts it, "It's just too scary~". For good reason: she based it on telomerase... and cells that have too much of it turn cancerous. Her client, who ordered her killed so she could keep all the research to herself, ends up testing it by self-injection... and is ultimately turned into a huge cancerous blob.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Shou Tucker experiments on his own body, becoming a monstrous canine chimera, in his attempts to resurrect his daughter Nina.
• For Bondrewd in Made in Abyss, everyone and everything is fair game for his experiments, he himself is no exception.
• Despite using plenty a test subject before and after defecting, this happens to one of the Big Bads in Naruto.
  Sasuke: So your true body... is a scaly, white serpent... You wanted to take over other peoples' bodies so badly, you experimented on your own...
• Justified in Neon Genesis Evangelion: Yui Ikari's seemingly fatal experiment in merging with Evangelion Unit-01 was part of a secret gambit to undercut the villains' nefarious plans fifteen years before they could be executed, make her son The Chosen One, and Fling a Light into the Future for the sake of human civilization, already on the brink of destruction.
• Somewhat used in Pokémon: The Series: the Pokémon researcher Bill stuffs himself inside a Kabuto costume to find out what it feels like. See the video games section for the more on-the-spot version from the games.
• In Soul Eater, one of the first things we learn about Franken Stein is that he is interested in observation and experimentation, where anything or one could be a test subject — including himself. Stein has, naturally, a bolt through his head and scars all over him. Sort of an odd example though in that we don't actually know what he did to himself. Yes, he has a stitch over his face but aside from that, he doesn't look too different from his younger incarnation we see in flashbacks so it at least wasn't anything cosmetic. He's been hailed as a genius meister since before he had the scar and bolt too so it wasn't some kind of power augmentation. So far the bolt and scar on his face only seem to be evidence that he has done this, but the reason behind it has not yet been given.
• Attempted in Speed Grapher; however, since the "experiment" involved raping a 15-year-old girl, all for the better that it wasn't carried out.
• Shirogane Ryou of Tokyo Mew Mew, upon completing his father's research, promptly tested it on himself. Because he conveniently didn't have the right genetic code, he did not, in fact, become a magical girl... er, boy.
• Yu Kaitou in YuYu Hakusho has the power to steal the soul of anyone who breaks the "rules" he sets down for his psychic territory. If he breaks his own rules, then his soul is separated from his body. How did he find this out? Why, he breaks his own rules on purpose, of course, forcing his friends to seek out Genkai to find out how to cure him before it's too late, which causes the events that kick off the prologue to the Chapter Black Saga.

Comic Books

• Batman: This is the origin of Batman's sometimes ally sometimes foe Man-Bat. Dr. Kirk Langstrom, a scientist specializing in the study of bats, develops an extract intended to give humans a bat's sonar sense and tests the formula on himself because he is becoming deaf. The extract works, but it has a horrible side effect: it transforms him into a hideous man-sized bat.
• Lampshaded in Blue Beetle. When Dani Garrett (having recently switched meds) decides to fly Jaime and herself into a volcano the following exchange occurs:
  Jaime: You're sure this thing can survive a trip so far underground?
  Dani: Only one way to find out!
  Jaime: No! No! There are other ways to "find out"! Like tests and experiments!
  Dani: Oh, yeah. Whoops.
• In G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel), a dentist tried to develop a new method of pain relief that he decided to test on himself. The resulting personality corruption turned him into the Cobra operative known as Dr. Mindbender.
• Testing your own inventions on yourself is the fast track to instant super-villainy in the Marvel Universe.
  • Dr. Curt Connors from Spider-Man tries using reptilian DNA to regrow his lost arm. Congratulations, Curt, now you're a violent half-human half-lizard monster. Bravo.
  • In Avengers: The Initiative, Komodo was a paraplegic who understudied with Curt, above. You can probably see where this is going... she modifies the formula to regrow her legs and gets lizard-woman powers. On the plus side, she doesn't suffer Curt's split-personality issues, but only because she was at least smart enough to make sure that wouldn't happen. She also doesn't particularly care about being a lizard person because, hey, legs!
  • Dr. Michael Morbius tries to cure his blood disease by injecting himself with fluids distilled from vampire bats and turns himself into a living vampire in the process.
  • Marine biologist Dr. Lemuel Dorcas from Sub-Mariner was crushed when a machine toppled onto him during a fight against Namor, and to heal himself, he injected himself with regenerative starfish tissue. It mutated him into a human/starfish hybrid.
  • In the universe of Marvel 1602, Baron Octavius suffered from the bubonic plague. He tried to cure himself by using the blood of octopuses. It worked, but also slowly transformed him into a human/octopus hybrid.
  • In X-Men, this is the origin of the original blue fuzzy status of Beast. In the X-Spider-Man crossover novel trilogy Time's Arrow, a future scientist hangs a lampshade on Beast's testing an experimental serum by drinking it. McCoy has the grace to be embarrassed. His original intention was to use it as a means of disguise which he could use to spy for his employer, one which he would reverse when his spying was done. (Yes, in those days Hank had a little problem with ethics.) However, it is true that Hank drinking the serum was a rather dumbass move to make, and Beast even lampshades this himself, when he observes that he didn't have to drink it — keeping it out of his employer's hands aside, it was in the end an act of hubris. Incidentally, this habit went horribly wrong in the Elseworld Mutant X — one of his projects significantly damaged his intelligence, and he's no longer smart enough to undo the effects.
  • Marvel's other noteworthy Hank, Hank Pym, was also an example of this, testing a shrinking serum on himself. After encountering some now-giant ants and managing to return to normal size, he originally planned to destroy the serum but later used it to become a superhero with varying levels of success. He did it again when he tested out his mind uploading technology to make a robot he named Ultron — who then went mad and became one of The Avengers' worst enemies. He's not proud of it.
  • Ultimate Marvel:
    • In Ultimate Origins, Bruce Banner tries the Super-Soldier serum on himself. As you probably suspected, it goes horribly wrong. Later, in The Ultimates, Bruce decides to tinker with the formula a little while in a depressive funk and having heard Henry Pym insulting him. The end result: the Hulk, but stronger than before, and with the little extra detail that whatever Bruce's done is permanent this time.
    • Decades before, Bruce's mentor tried his own version of the Hulk serum out on himself. It actually worked for him. Then he ran off into the night to play crime lord with his new superpowers.
    • The Ultimates: Henry Pym tried the Giant-Man experiment on himself. It was a successful case, but still, he was the leading scientist, and many things could have gone wrong.
    • Ultimate Spider-Man: Having seen what his Oz formula did for scrawny Peter Parker, Norman Osborn decides that it's a terrifically great idea to inject himself with a souped-up version. The initial power-up blows up the lab, kills a lot of people, and shatters Norman's mind. Later on in the series, when the truth about Norman gets out, a lot of characters even point out how spectacularly dumb this was.
    • Ultimate Vision: Tarleton experimented on himself, even before the Gah Lak Tus unit showed up.
    • Ultimate X Men: Cornelius experimented on himself with Wolverine's DNA, and mutated himself.
• Paperinik New Adventures:
  • Gorthan is an Evronian scientist specializing in creating Super Soldiers who "improved himself", among others.
  • Xadhoom's immense power may or may not be the result of this. It's clear she was trying to create a powerful and eternal power source to stave off Xerba's impending energy crisis, and while some flashbacks have her implying that becoming such an energy source was a genuine accident the Evronian scientist Zoster openly states she did it on purpose (then again, Evronians don't have a good record understanding people with emotions).
• In The Transformers Megaseries, the Decepticon scientist Thunderwing used himself as a test subject for his experimental "polydermal grafting" technology. The experiments made him into a nigh-invulnerable and completely insane Person of Mass Destruction whose subsequent rampage forced the Autobots and Decepticons to unite against him. And the fight caused the destruction of Cybertron, which was the very thing he was trying to prevent.

Comic Strips

• The Far Side has a comic with a group of deformed scientists crowding around a non-deformed one, offering him a beaker full of noxious-looking bubbling liquid. Caption: "Laboratory peer pressure."

Fan Works

• In The Butcher Bird, Grigori Vinci tests most of his Augment types on himself before giving them to others.
• Bruce Banner supposedly did this in Child of the Storm, having seen the files on Camp Cathcart. The result was the Hulk. Sinister also got his powers this way.
• How Green Shield from DC Nation acquired meta-human abilities; faced with a terminal illness, she experimented on herself, hoping to turn her body into a "smoking gun" to protect her patent on the work and provide for her family. It instead made her extra tough, extra strong, arrested her illness's progression... and made her a fugitive from bosses Playing with Syringes.
• Equestria Girls: Friendship Souls: Grogar seeks to improve the Hollow condition (and mostly himself), and as such isn't afraid to use his research to augment his own body after having perfected it on the unwilling test subjects in his "care". In addition to the copy of Adagio's siren gem, his Resurreccion is a horrible mish-mash of his own flesh and cybernetic components made from reishi that in addition to strengthening his physical abilities allows him to use the powers of other Hollows and even Espada he's studied and replicated.
• Cotton Mouth from The Great Alicorn Hunt used himself as a test subject for a new Vitality Elixir he was trying to experiment with. After the initial results proved to be harmless, he peddled the Elixir as a medicine meant to ease pregnancies of 37 Mares in an isolated town in the Bayou: initially to prove that his formula was a success to the scientific community. Unfortunately, after he had sold the Vitality Elixirs did he start to show severe negative side effects, and by then the Mares died giving birth, with a fair number of the fetuses coming out stillborn or heavily deformed. Only two foals managed to survive the Elixirs' effects, one of whom had ascended into an Alicorn.
• In If I Only Had A Heart, Izuku tests his own artificial prosthetics to replace his missing arm and eye as well as support his damaged spine on himself. Granted, he runs countless tests on non-living dummies beforehand, but he has neither the time nor the expenses to ask for a clinical trial, and his inventions are so advanced that no doctor would ever dare help him with it. He's also anywhere between 9 and 12 when he creates his own painkillers and performs surgery on himself. For the most part, they run smoothly, at least until he installs his artificial eye. That one gave him an epileptic seizure after his neural link to the supercomputer inside of it overwhelmed his brain, though he was up and at it after a short stay in the hospital.
• The Palaververse: Second Sun: "Starswirl's Partitioning Dweomerlayk"'s only seen casting applies its effects on the caster, and since Starswirl managed to make notes on its effects, that implies that he made those notes after testing it on himself.
• In Walk Through the Valley, a Rurouni Kenshin fic by Vathara, Hiko used LEGO Genetics to give himself the Absurdly Sharp Claws, Innate Night Vision, ki-sense and instincts of a felinoid alien called a kiryuu. He also tumbled into the Fountain of Youth, which would have gotten him sent to prison if not for his assistant's quick thinking, and went from Child Hater to Knight Templar Parent.

Film — Animation

• Dr. Cockroach from Monsters vs. Aliens was the result of a scientist testing a procedure to give humans the genetic hardiness of the common roach... and ending up with the head of one as well. For further fun, his PhD is in Dance!

Film — Live-Action

• The Adult Version of Jekyll and Hide: Leeder tested his experimental formula on himself.
• Buckaroo Banzai in The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, in a way. He decides to test his Oscillation Overthruster (which can allow something to pass through solid matter) in a vehicle he himself drives. He suffers no ill effects as a direct result, although the president's adviser suggests otherwise.
• In The Amazing Spider-Man, Dr. Connors is developing a serum to regrow limbs using "cross-species genetics". He logically goes through the process of computer simulations and then lab rats and concludes that it is ready for primate trials to determine long-term effects. His Corrupt Corporate Executive of a boss is the one who forces him to bypass his ethics by threatening to test it on unwitting veterans down at the VA if Connors doesn't comply. Cue Connors shooting himself up with lizard goo with predictable comic-book results.
• Back to the Future is a rare example where the scientist doesn't test the machine himself, but he does put his beloved pet dog in the driver's seat, and himself and his best friend in the path of the speeding vehicle, so he does still seem overly confident. "If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you're gonna see some serious shit." "WHAT DID I TELL YOU?! EIGHTY-EIGHT MILES PER HOUR!" He did intend for himself to be the first human test subject, with the space of time to observe negative side effects in said dog being a few minutes.
• Before I Hang: Using the blood of a recently executed prisoner, Dr. Garth and Dr. Howard succeed in developing a serum that will reverse the effects of aging and decide to test it on Dr. Garth immediately prior to his execution.
• Professor Brody in Cats & Dogs tests his allergy cures on himself. He does it three times that we can see in the movie: the first time, it doesn't work, and he breaks out in hives all over; the second time, his nose becomes bulbous but at least he doesn't sneeze; the third time, it's the correct cure.
• Daybreakers: Edward Dalton tests sun exposure plus submergence in water as a cure for vampirism. On himself. Justified in that he's the only vampire around the human refugee hideout when he tests it. Generally, unless there are vampire animals around, it's rather difficult to test a cure for vampirism in a method that is not either really stupid (this trope) or morally questionable (Strapped to an Operating Table).
• The crux of the plot of Flatliners is the students experimenting with near-death experiences on themselves after interviews with patients and their experiences.
• In The Fly (1958), the lead character tries teleporting himself and winds up switching heads with a housefly. The 1986 version of the story, besides having the experience result in a Slow Transformation into a Half-Human Hybrid instead, rationalizes this trope simply enough. While Seth has just finally sent a baboon through the process with no ill effects, after a previous attempt turned a creature inside-out, he plans to have the animal tested to make sure it's truly unaffected and is willing to wait weeks on that before making another move. Teleporting himself is supposed to be the Grand Finale of his work somewhere down the line. But due to a misunderstanding involving his love interest, who abruptly leaves to confront her editor/ex-lover just as they're celebrating the breakthrough of the baboon, Seth ends up getting drunk on champagne and decides to teleport himself right there and then.
• At the start of Frankenstein Created Woman, Baron Frankenstein is testing his theory that the soul does not leave the body at the moment of death by allowing himself to the buried for an hour, then frozen, and then revived by his assistant Dr. Hertz.
• Hollow Man and its sequel both have the person who has taken the serum become a serial killer. The original does have extensive animal testing of the invisibility serum, but the head scientist fudges the results and takes the serum himself. In this case, the big problem is reversing the invisibility process; the scientist thinks that trying it on a human will provide better results, and he's the only one willing to do it.
• Dr. David Banner from Hulk resorted to using himself as a test subject for his Bio-Augmentation research after the Army refused to let him use human test subjects. As it turns out, the modifications are inheritable...
• Junior has Dr. Hesse test an experimental drug for reducing miscarriages on himself due to being unable to get funding and test subjects. He ends up pregnant.
• In The Neanderthal Man, a Mad Scientist tests a devolution serum on himself in order to prove his theory that prehistoric man was more intelligent.
• In Other Life, founder Ren seems to be the only person the eponymous technology is ever tested on.
• The Projected Man features a scientist who must quickly jury-rig a teleportation experiment to convince his Corrupt Corporate Executive sponsors not to cut his funding. Unfortunately, the ditsy blonde secretary he enlists to help him teleport botches the procedure, and the machine explodes. The scientist then winds up getting his DNA mixed with that of a rat that had died in a previous experiment. Oh, and he also gets the ability to generate lethal electric shocks.
• Spider-Man: Norman Osborn's company is about to lose a military contract and go under, thanks to a lack of successful human trials of a performance-enhancing drug. With only two weeks to produce good results for the asshole general who makes the ultimatum and no time to go "back to formula" as suggested by his colleague, he tests it on himself in desperation — never mind the fact that, if that test were made public, he'd surely lose the contract and the company. It's all kind of moot anyway, as the drug does work...and makes him go insane as well.
• In Star Trek: First Contact, Zefram Cochrane, the inventor of warp drive, flies the test ship himself. Given the post-apocalyptic setting, however, finding a trained pilot may have been very difficult, and it makes a certain amount of sense for the person who knows the ship inside and out to be aboard. At least he has two astronauts from the future to help him out.
• In The Story of Louis Pasteur, Charbonnet the skeptic injects himself with Pasteur's rabies culture to prove that Pasteur's theories about germs causing disease are wrong. Charbonnet is triumphant when he never gets sick, but this leads Pasteur to an "Eureka!" Moment in which he figures out that weakened forms of the germ (the sample was three weeks old) can be used in vaccines to combat illness.
• One that crosses it with Real Life is Super Size Me, for which documentarian Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonalds for a month and had the results filmed and monitored.
• In The Swarm (1978), Dr. Walter Krim tests out a killer bee anti-venom on himself. It goes as well as one might expect, and he's dead in minutes.
• The Tingler: Dr. Warren Chapin is researching the physiological aspects of fear, and experiments on himself taking LSD some six years before the hippies appropriated it for their own.
• Victor in Upldr used himself as a test subject on a way to upload and download information directly from the human brain.
• Wonder Woman (2017): Dr. Poison's facial scars are quite obviously caused by chemical burns, and Word of God confirms the implication that they were self-inflicted when Maru tested her corrosive gas on herself to see how effective it was.
• Beast again, this time in X-Men: First Class... but he deserves a special mention because unlike a lot of scientists who then stop, X-Men: Days of Future Past makes clear that he kept doing it.
• Dr. Xavier of X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes tests the X-Ray Vision eyedrops on himself... in both eyeballs.

Literature

• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: In a variation, The Professor Aronnax is willing to sacrifice his own freedom for the rest of his life for the rare chance to discover all the sea’s secrets in the Nautilus. Fortunately, he is not willing to sacrifice his friend’s freedom and leads them in their Great Escape.
• In Robin Cook's Acceptable Risk, Dr. Edward Armstrong creates a new anti-depressant drug and decides to start taking it himself in order to streamline the clinical trial process. His team of researchers agree to take the drug as well. Too bad it makes them start having sleepwalking episodes in which they behave like carnivorous reptiles.
• The Apothecary Diaries: The protagonist, Maomao, considers her own left forearm to be a perfectly acceptable testing site for poisons and medicines. She is also extremely casual about ingesting both to see what they do. Her Acquired Poison Immunity is the result of this habit.
• "The Bicentennial Man": When Andrew invents new sorts of prosthetics, he is doing it to make a more human-like body for himself. He owns the patents but arranges for a leasing agreement with US Robots, provided they install the prosthetics into his body first. He's motivated to Become a Real Boy and making his body more organic in nature is part of that.
• In the Boojumverse story "The Wreck of the Charles Dexter Ward", the villain injects herself with her experimental reanimation serum, believing that receiving it while still alive will produce better results than the mostly mindless zombies created by her previous tests.
• The Igors of Discworld believe it is most ethical to test all of their latest medical procedures on themselves first. Kind of makes sense, though, doesn't it?
• In Dr. Franklin's Island, this comes up when the titular doctor happily explains that he's going to splice his captives with animals, acting like it's a great adventure and even saying "If I had your young cells, but alas it's too late." In previous trials, splicing captive animals with human genes, initially much of the human material came from him and his assistant.
• The Operator in Duumvirate developed a retrovirus to bestow transhumanity on whoever received it, and injected himself with it the second it was done synthesizing.
• The Fourteenth Goldfish: Melvin tested the serum he developed with an extract of his T. Melvinus jellyfish on himself, and as a result, he has the body of a 13-year-old, when he's actually 75.
• Galaxy of Fear: City of the Dead has Dr. Evazam trying to make zombie soldiers, and it goes well for him, but he notices that the fresher the corpse, the smarter and more useful the zombie. Some still have their memories and can talk, so he tries killing random kids to quickly zombify. When this gets him killed, he comes back as a zombie with all his old memories and faculties — he had injected himself with the serum while still alive and is delighted to find that it worked so well.
• Harry Potter: Fred and George test sweets they've made that will cause sudden minor illnesses, allowing you to get out of class, on themselves. After they tried out the Nosebleed Nougat, their mother thought they'd had a fight. The worst it gets, though, is painful boils in an area they "don't normally expose to the public", and even that's eventually fixed. They try to test the sweets out on their fellow students (namely, first-years who wouldn't know to be suspicious), but Hermione stops them by threatening to tell their mother about it.
• The Invisible Man: Griffin did test his process on a cat first, and he did have the excuse that he was kind of crazy. The justification given is that the invisibility process will only work on an albino — which Griffin is.
• Journey to Chaos: Ginger Hasina is a healer who makes experimental remedies. One of them was an anthrax vaccine that she tried on herself. When Eric enters her office late at night, she thinks auditory and visual hallucinations are side effects.
• Machine Man has Dr. Charles Neumann. An engineer at Better Future, Neumann doesn't design any Artificial Limbs that he wouldn't try out himself.
• In "The New Accelerator" by H. G. Wells, a scientist tests out a drug on himself that makes him speed up by a factor of several thousand.
• Yatsubiyashi from Rebuild World, a Mad Scientist, installed his own cybernetic inventions in himself that give him Super-Strength and enough confidence to defend himself against hunters or monsters in the field.
• A doctor in J.G. Farrell's The Siege of Krishnapur drinks the 'rice-water' from a cholera patient, to demonstrate his confidence in the miasma theory of disease transmission (the theory that diseases are the result of bad air). It doesn't go well.
• SilverFin: Since he was running out of test subjects back in the States, Algar Hellebore tried the eponymous Super-Soldier serum on himself. As a result, he has become a hulkish but kind brute with little sign of his previous intelligence.
• Another classic example is The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and all the variations thereof, e.g. The Nutty Professor (1963).
• In A Study in Scarlet, Watson's friend Stamford explains Sherlock Holmes' willingness to go this route. Barely a page or two later, Holmes happily and unconcernedly stabs himself in the finger to produce the fresh blood he required for a chemical test. Although he does at least put a sticking plaster over the cut, "'for I dabble in poisons a good deal.' He held out his hand as he spoke, and I noticed that it was all mottled over with similar pieces of plaster, and discoloured with strong acids."
  Stamford: Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes — it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think that he would take it himself with the same readiness. He appears to have a passion for definite and exact knowledge.
• In The Time Machine, the Time-Traveller at least has the presence of mind to build a proof-of-concept device first.

Live-Action TV

• In the third season of The 4400, Kevin Burkhoff has discovered promicin, the neurotransmitter that gives the returnees their abilities, and injects himself with it. First he gets all messed up (skin falling off, etc.), but eventually he develops his healing power.
• In Casualty 1906, Anton Lesser's psychiatrist character asked another doctor to perform an operation on him in order that he could experience the emotions some of the hospital's patients were going through prior to an early 20th-century operation.
• In Charite, Robert Koch tests Tuberculin, his experimental medicament that's supposed to heal tuberculosis, on himself. It's causing him a dangerous bout of fever. Truth in Television, by the way — the historical Robert Koch did just that.
• In the Community episode "Social Psychology", Prof. Duncan inadvertently becomes the subject of the Duncan Principle.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Lazarus Experiment": Elderly Professor Richard Lazarus uses himself as the test subject for his rejuvenation machine, which has some... interesting... side effects. "Mutation into a giant monster" side effects.
  • "Spyfall": Tech mogul Daniel Barton's DNA proves to be only 97% human when scanned. He eventually explains that the Kasaavin can convert human DNA into one of the most efficient data storage devices on Earth, and he's a "proof-of-concept".
• The Farscape episode "DNA Mad Scientist" has an inversion, a Mad Scientist who used to be a guinea pig, or an alien equivalent, before his intellect was enhanced and he killed most of his captors. He does perform further genetic modifications on himself, but he tests them on others first — for instance, injecting Aeryn with Pilot's DNA in order to isolate the Pilot species' multitasking ability.
• The Goodies: In "Snooze", Graham Garden invents a bedtime drink that works so well it puts the entire country to sleep. As there's no one else awake (except Tim who's chasing after a sleepwalking Bill), he has to test the antidote on himself.
  Graham: [dictating into a tape recorder] ...and that should produce the correct antidote. Well, I'm now just going to test it. First, I take a big swig of new-improved Snooze... [drinks] And now for the antido—[falls asleep]
• In one episode of Grey's Anatomy, a patient is an immunologist who's conducting a long-term experiment on himself where he ingested parasitic worms to test if they'd help reduce his allergy symptoms. This isn't as crazy as it sounds. A real-life biologist infected himself and several volunteers with hookworms (not the same type of worm as in the show) to do the same thing, and the results are promising.
• A nightmarish variation in Halo (2022). Halsey makes an illegal flash-clone of herself in order to create the Cortana Artificial Intelligence, which requires a scan of a living mind that will be destroyed in the process. Halsey's Expendable Clone knows full well her fate, as she thought up the idea back when she first took tissue samples for the purpose. The clone muses that at the time, Halsey wondered if she would have to will to go through with it. Unfortunately, she does.
• In Helix, Doctor Hiroshi Hatake hides glowing, silver irises behind brown-tinted contacts, suggesting some interesting side projects apart from the unregulated viral research Arctic Biosystems is conducting.
• In the third season premiere of Heroes, Mohinder Suresh takes a syringe of Maya's blood/DNA/super-powered-phlebotinum out onto a dock all by himself and injects it into himself. He gets insect-like super-strength, agility, and wall-climbing ability, but as a side effect appears to be mutating uncontrollably. The entire plotline appears to be a direct reference to The Fly (1986).
• House: Although Dr. House didn't create the drug, he did test one created by his old college rival to combat migraines. He decides to become a sort of drug pincushion: first, using nitroglycerin to give himself a stonking great headache, then trying the drug (which failed), then ridding himself of it using LSD, and finally anti-depressants to counteract the LSD... and the six Vicodin he had probably already taken that day. House probably had enough drugs in his system to mildly discomfort Keith Richards.
• The Incredible Hulk (1977): David "Bruce" Banner is performing experiments on himself to try to "tap into the hidden strengths that all humans have." An accidental overdose of gamma radiation interacts with his body chemistry to change him: whenever he gets angry, he becomes the Hulk.
• In the case of The Invisible Man, the title protagonist is the brother of the scientist who created the invisibility process, and there had been previous testing done, albeit not with very encouraging results. The protagonist agrees to undergo the treatment because the alternative is life in prison for a crime other than the one he actually committed. His brother also knew how to reverse the process... but didn't bother to tell anybody else or keep any records of it, so it became permanent when he was murdered. It later turns out that the records were stolen by Arnaud, Kevin's murderer. Arnaud then proceeded to repeat the experiment on himself, playing this trope straight.
• In Lost, it seems that Daniel Faraday tested his time machine on himself and only recovered from it gradually once near the Island. He also accidentally used it on his lab assistant/girlfriend, unsticking her in time.
• In the first nationally broadcast season of Mystery Science Theater 3000, as well as the one that came before it, Dr. Laurence "Larry" Erhardt was an involuntary version: Dr. Forrester would test experiments on him (often against his will.) The more interesting ones included cold fusion being created within Erhardt's mouth and making him sweat through his tongue. TV's Frank would later take on this role, but not technically being a scientist he's just a plain Guinea Pig.
• The MythBusters often use themselves as test subjects for their experiments. That said, the experiments they run in this manner have to be approved by their insurance company in advance, and there's always someone keeping tabs on the test subject(s) (if not another one of the hosts, then a producer or other member of the production team), avoiding at least some of the pitfalls of this trope.
• This happens in several episodes of The Outer Limits (1995). "Double Helix" lampshades it.
  Student: Dude, you injected that stuff that made that fish grow legs into yourself!?
• Subverted in Power Rangers: Dino Thunder where Dr. Anton Mercer tries and tries to perfect a potion to free himself from his Superpowered Evil Side Mesogog, where Mesogog actually succeeds in perfecting the potion and capturing the scientist. Of course, Mercer experimenting on himself was what created Mesogog in the first place.
• In Quantum Leap, Dr Sam Beckett was pressured to prove his theories or lose funding so he stepped into the project accelerator himself. This experiment wasn't exactly a resounding success.
• Semi-averted in an episode of The Saint, where a man with a heart condition wanted to use cryogenics until open-heart surgery was commonplace. He did several animal tests, and wanted to start human testing with somebody else, but at the end of the episode, Simon Templar escaped and a heart attack forced the man to enter his machine in an emergency.
• In Sanctuary (2007), the Five all injected a serum based on pure vampire blood directly into their veins. The results were surprisingly beneficial. However, each one got different results, some of which were not related to vampiric abilities: Helen Magnus only got longevity out of it, John Druitt gained teleportation powers with Teleportation Sickness, Nigel Griffin became the Invisible Man, James Watson became a super-genius, and Nikola Tesla became a vampire with electricity powers.
• Siren (2018): Ben experiments on himself in Season 3 through injections of merpeople DNA. It results in him gaining some of the merpeople's natural abilities, like enhanced healing and senses. He was hoping to prove they were safe for treating his mother's paraplegia, but found much more.
• In an episode of Star Trek: Discovery, science officer Paul Stamets uses a tardigrade-like creature as a navigation tool for the experimental spore drive, which allows instantaneous jumps across dozens of light-years. However, each jump takes a physical toll on the creature, and it eventually goes into self-induced hibernation. Burnham, Stamets, and Tilly figure out that the "tardigrade" is able to absorb the DNA of other living beings, thus explaining its symbiotic relationship with the spores. Burnham also realizes that humans still have a genetic link to the spores, since both are terrestrial species. For the final jump, Stamets injects himself with the creature's DNA and enters the reaction cube in order to use himself to plot the jump coordinates. It works, although Stamets is unconscious for several minutes. He personally finds the experience incredible. The last scene of the episode is a Wham Shot of Stamets turning away from his bathroom mirror to go to bed, while his reflection doesn't move for several seconds, before copying the action.
• In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Daedalus", Emory Erickson, the wheelchair-bound inventor of the transporter, is shown receiving an injection from his daughter— his back and spine are grossly distorted, implying a failed transporter experiment.
• Star Trek: The Original Series:
  • In "Miri", our heroes are trapped on a planet and slowly dying from a disease that kills all adults. Dr. McCoy has mixed up what may very well be the antidote. Only problem is, he's not sure, and the only way to be sure is to check the Enterprise's computers, which can't be done because the local Creepy Children have stolen the communicators. What to do? Why, wait until Spock leaves and inject yourself, of course!
  • Cited in "Dagger of the Mind" to explain why a researcher from a penal colony has escaped onto the Enterprise, raving mad and terrified of returning. Apparently, he was testing a "neural neutralizer" on himself at too high a setting. However, Dr McCoy doesn't buy this and insists that Captain Kirk investigate. Turns out the neural neutralizer is being used for forced brainwashing.
• In an episode of Supergirl (2015), a Mad Scientist breaks Livewire out of prison only to plug her into his machine and drain her Shock and Awe powers into his two Mooks (a security guard and a former female prisoner). The two new Livewires turn out to be highly effective copies of the original. When the Guardian and Mon-El manage to defeat them at the scientist's warehouse, he references this trope before subduing them with a more powerful version of Livewire's lightning coming from his hands. Luckily, Supergirl arrives and, together with the original Livewire, defeats the scientist.
• In V: The Final Battle, the dust used to kill the Visitors is tested on an alien prisoner. Then while the others are busy arguing about whether they should find a human collaborator to test it on, the scientist steps into the chamber instead and survives.

Tabletop Games

• Genius: The Transgression
  • The Progenitors have a whole transhumanist philosophy centered around this trope. They specialize in creating biological Wonders, as well as prosthetics and implants of various types. Originally, they experimented and tested their creations on human subjects of varying levels of willingness, but following the discovery of this by the rest of Genius society (and an ensuing internal purge of their old guard) they’ve taken to testing their creations and upgrades on their own selves instead.
  • The trope is also enforced by the game's Karma Meter: self-modification is a Transgression, but running risky and dangerous experiments on human test subjects (even willing ones) is a worse one.
• Magic: The Gathering: In the Innistrad and Shadows over Innistrad blocks, there’s a cycle of two-faced cards (Delver of Secrets and Insectile Aberration, Aberrant Researcher and Perfected Form, and finally Docent of Perfection and Final Iteration) that follows a Mad Scientist as he runs tests on himself after running out of other subjects and turns himself into an insectoid monster, eventually putting himself through increasingly complex processes to "perfect" his form and turn into more and more horrible forms, eventually returning to share his discoveries with the other humans once he’s satisfied with his transformations. The final card reveals why he's transformed so horrifically: he's unknowingly tapped into the power of the Eldrazi.
• In the dark, gritty cyberpunk urban fantasy world of Shadowrun, the physical world operates on three layers: meatspace (the physical world), cyberspace, and Astral space. Cyberspace and Astral space overlap the same place at the same time, but are essentially invisible to each other. Dragons, naturally, are physical creatures with a massive magical presence in both physical and astral space. So, Emerging Futures, a subsidiary of the MegaCorp Ares, kidnapped the young dragon Eliohann to test him for compatibility with a net connection. Eliohann himself was interested in the experiment. It was some years, but Eliohann went from the golden guinea pig to having earned a controlling interest in Emerging Futures. It was, after Eliohann negotiating with Ares for the greenlight and keeping Eliohann on as the CEO of Emerging Futures, but Eliohann agreed to be fitted with the standard datajack. As a creature of magic, not technology, Eliohann temporarily went insane, but the result was deemed a success, and Eliohann became a noteworthy techy, something unheard of for dragons. He would later be one of the victims of Crash 2.0 (a minor apocalypse, a "mere" Class 1 where the world pick up the pieces and move on). Eliohann, however, flatlined. His body remained comatose, but his consciousness didn't dip into the Astral, but dipped into cyberspace, a known, if rare and very mysterious phenomenon.
• Warhammer 40,000 has Fabius Bile, a mad scientist sworn to Chaos who not only experiments on others but is also said to have used his own body as his most extensive testing ground.

Theatre

• Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark sees Dr. Norman Osborn, bereft of funding for his experiments and against the objections of his wife, test his DNA-splicing equipment on himself. It turns him into the Green Goblin.
• In Noah Smith's stage version of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Jekyll does at least spend several months testing his serum on animals before considering human testing, but he's his own first and only human test subject.

Video Games

• In the Another Code games, Richard ends up having the Another machine tested on himself twice — both times, it was done involuntarily by the villains.
• Atlas Reactor:
  • Doctor Finn used himself as a subject in order to finalize his human-fish-hybridization procedure because he had run out of willing test subjects. Downplayed in that it's mentioned that he did test parts of the procedure on others first, but he was the first person to go through the finished process (which was performed by a whole team of geneticists and doctors).
  • Orion is a less benign example; he used the reactor merging technology that created him on himself first because he didn't want to risk anyone else becoming superpowered by it before he could. Having the procedure go horribly wrong, absorb his entire research group and the building they were in was a stroke of luck for him, really.
• Over the course of her 71 years of life which became immortal at 15, Beatrix from Battleborn has constantly experimented on herself, a thing which she has no qualms about.
• In BioShock 2, a Brute Splicer in the diner at Pauper's Drop turns out to have been Leo Hartwig, a scientist for Sinclair Solutions who put together a cocktail of strength- and speed-boosting plasmids and gene tonics and injected it into himself, turning him into one of the first Brutes. You find this out after listening to an audio log found on his corpse of him taking the serum and Hulking Out.
• Bugsnax: Floofty Fizzlebean can't convince any of the other grumpuses on Bugsnax Island to help with their bizarre and dangerous experiments, so they end up testing on themselves. This includes cutting off their own snakified leg (and eating it!) and then trying to regenerate it with an experimental device.
• The Big Bad of Cave Story manages to produce a highly concentrated form of the game's Psycho Serum. When you confront him, he explicitly states that his new invention will drive him insane before testing it on himself. Though in his defense, he ends up going One-Winged Angel multiple times and is completely lucid by the final battle, so it must have worked out for him.
• Done by Dr. Nitrus Brio in Crash Bandicoot (1996) at the end of the boss battle. Before that, he spends time throwing the beakers at you. The red beakers, properly mixed, become highly volatile, exploding when smashed, while the green ones release semi-alive brains that chase after you. Naturally drinking a mixture of both turns him into a giant green muscleman.
• In Crying Suns, you can stumble upon an abandoned Akee space station where a Dr. Akara used herself as a test subject for her experiments. If you send some commandos to investigate the place, they will be slaughtered by a monstrous creature. If you then send in a fighting specialist to kill the beast, the specialist will identify it as Dr. Akara from its eyes.
• Darkest Dungeon: The Hag was once an ordinary young woman with a strong interest in medicine and herbology, who helped the Ancestor with his research. However, her insistence on sampling various strange plants and fungi, and concoctions derived from them, turned her into a hideous, cannibalistic madwoman whom the Ancestor eventually banished to the depths of the Weald.
• Dr. Muto has one as its protagonist, capable of collecting DNA from various creatures to mutate himself into various beasts.
• Professor Hojo in Final Fantasy VII. When the player party (some of its members being his former test subjects) finally confronts him, he injects himself with The Virus, claiming that he has, once more, succumbed to his desire for knowledge. As you'd expect from the dad of the Trope Namer, he pulls a One-Winged Angel afterward.
• In Gears of War 3, Adam Fenix turns out to have injected himself with Imulsion in order to study how the Lambent infection spreads and build his Lambent-killing weapon accordingly, knowing full well that becoming infected would mean the weapon would kill him as well. Granted, it's not like there was anyone else around for him to experiment on instead.
• I Was a Teenage Exocolonist: Sol gets at least two separate opportunities to be their own test subject:
  • If they assist Instance and Tangent with finding the Shimmer cure, one option they have is infecting themself with the disease, then trying the cure. In fact, in loops in which they know the cure works due to being a Groundhog Peggy Sue, but need to convince the colony's scientists, the option is encouraged.
  • If they come up with a new variety of blep tea while working in the xenobotany lab, their choice of testers are Tangent, Cal, or themself.
• In League of Legends, Singed, Mundo, and Heimerdinger are all scientists who have experimented on themselves, and as a result have gone terribly disfigured. Singed is now covered in burns and most of his body is wrapped up in bandages, but he has also been strengthened by self-testing. Mundo, although he used to be human, is now a giant, purple Frankensteinesque monster who talks in the third person. Heimerdinger, in the effort to become smarter, expanded his brain so much that now his entire head is shaped like one.
• Purah from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild developed a Fountain of Youth rune with Ancient Sheikah technology so that the elderly warriors of Hyrule could once again be robust enough to fight Ganon's forces. She tested it on herself and quickly went from elderly to physically six years old. Naturally, she didn't bring it into mass use after that. Tears of the Kingdom has her do it again, this time with an aging rune to cure the previous, and it works, bringing her back into her prime.
• Overwatch features Moira; her intro cinematic and a couple of her sprays show her experimenting on herself.
• In Pokémon Red and Blue, the Pokémon researcher Bill, working on a Pokémon teleporter, has a Teleporter Accident, and combines himself with a Clefairy while working on it. Luckily for him, it's a fairly quick fix: the player just has to run the machine while he's inside so he can return to human form. Seems to be an homage to The Fly.
• Portal 2 reveals that Cave Johnson, the lunatic founder of Aperture Science, was not above testing his inventions on himself. This resulted in his death by Conversion Gel (moon dust) poisoning. Somewhat related, when his recruitment of street bums as test subjects had less than ideal results, he began encouraging his own employees to test the company's products, which had a negative effect on morale and retention. The next evolution of this seems to have occurred only after his death, with "Bring Your Daughter to Work Day".
• The Player Character of Prey (2017), Morgan Yu, is Vice President of TransStar and chief researcher among Talos I. To advance research on Neuromod technology in faith that it'll guide humanity towards transhumanism, they tested Neuromods on themselves. However, due to the nature of Neuromods resetting the user's memory back to when they were first installed whenever they're removed, Morgan suffers severe memory and brain problems from extensive Neuromod testing to the point they consider their past selves as a fundamentally different person.
• Resident Evil:
  • Scientist William Birkin from Resident Evil 2 injects himself with his experimental monster-making formula, which not only mutates him into an unrecognizable, gigantic, grotesque monster — but also drives him to impregnate his 10-year-old daughter. He had a better excuse than most, mind you — Umbrella goons had just repeatedly shot him in the chest. Injecting the serum was a last-ditch attempt to keep himself alive/fuck those goons over. The resulting abomination was mostly, if not entirely mindless aside from its considerable killing expertise.
  • Alexia Ashford from Resident Evil – Code: Veronica did the same thing, though only because she'd already messed around with her father and needed a new subject.
• The scientists in the Bio Research Lab in SaGa Frontier have used themselves as the testbeds for their experiments. They frequently crow about achieving "a disease-free, immortal body", but their tendency to transform into monsters speaks to the downsides of such a procedure. The Remastered version reinserts cut content from Asellus's story which reveals that they're experimenting on captured Mystics to gain the knowledge they then apply to themselves.
• In Shovel Knight, the Mini-Boss of Explodatorium is an alchemist who doesn't mind chugging down a potion to turn himself into a hulking beast. Or rummaging through shelves for said potion so violently bottles fly exploding everywhere, for that matter.
• Skylanders: Pop Fizz is a crazed alchemist who drinks the potions he creates (which he seemingly is unaware of the effects of), which has caused various changes to his body, the most notable of which is turning him into a maniacal monster.
• Implied in StarCraft II. If you choose to help Selendis for the "Safe Haven"/"Haven's Fall" mission, Dr. Ariel Hanson will swear to find a cure for the Zerg nanovirus before the heroes can destroy the colony. Partway through the mission, Captain Horner calls you, reporting that Dr. Hanson has locked herself in the lab. After the mission, Hanson is found to be suffering the effects of the Zerg nanovirus (major Body Horror and Nightmare Fuel involved), and she has to be killed before she can do any damage. Given that this doesn't happen if you choose to help Dr. Hanson by protecting the colony, it's implied that she injected herself not only with the supposed cure but with the nanovirus it's supposed to be effective against. That, or she had an accident brought on by her haste; either way, she locked herself in the lab to protect the rest of the crew.
• Team Fortress 2:
  • The Medic apparently did this during the Halloween 2013 update, replacing his entire head with that of his pet dove, Archimedes. Exclusive lines for wearing the item reveal he isn't quite sure whether this is awesome, or whether he regrets it. Even earlier, though, he was implied to have performed open-heart surgery on himself so he could utilize the Übercharge function he designed.
  • The Engineer (Dell Conagher) did this as well, testing out his new robotic hand design by willingly chopping one of his hands off. Of course, the Engineer was suffering from Australium exposure at the time, so at least he had an excuse.
• At the end of Vessel, Arkwright decides to use the Accelerator on himself, believing that as the creator of the Fluros and indirectly responsible for the havoc they've caused, it's his duty to take the first step into the next phase of human evolution. He runs the machine with himself inside and becomes a Transhuman made from protoplasm.
• Warframe:
  • Grineer scientist Tyl Regor is noted to have experimented on himself to the point that, unlike most other Grineer, he's able to speak English very clearly. He also proves to be Wicked Cultured and a Genius Bruiser.
  • The Veilbreaker update introduces former Corpus-turned-Solaris worker Chipper, who is noted to be quite experienced in modifications, including to himself (and considering that part of being a Solaris is the removal of one's organic limbs and head...).
• Played for Horror in the "Mimi's Little Project" challenge of World of Horror, as Mimi inflicts rather gruesome bodily alterations upon herself.

Webcomics

• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Dr. Birding tested his formula to transform into a super-strong giant on himself, with dubious success. While it does accomplish this, it doesn't cure his paralysis, which was presumably the purpose behind the experiment.
• Sage from Castoff, a firm believer in Sufficiently Analyzed Magic and the closest the continent of Alveria has to a Mad Scientist, used to try out healing spells by cutting himself and casting the spells on the cut. He has lots of scars on his arms.
• In Dead of Summer, Alan Stone is this, testing a 'cure' for zombiism on himself. When it fails, turning him into a monster, he uses it on his wife.
• The members of the Val'Jaal'darya clan in Drowtales, specialists in bio-magical technology and experimentation, often use themselves for their experiments, such as outfitting themselves with Artificial Limbs — or even wings and tails — of real flesh. Their leader, Asira'malika, owes her dark-scleraed, white-irised eyes, and the bleached-looking skin around them, to a failed attempt at turning herself into a dark elf.
• In El Goonish Shive, Tedd tends to test his transformation tech on himself.
• The Villain Protagonist of Evil Plan did the human testing on his telekinesis chip on himself.
• The Sparks of Girl Genius have a habit of "self-augmentation" just as much as experiments on other (often unwilling) patients.
• Hakase from NEXT!!! Sound of the Future is one of the only doctors around willing to do voice modifications on androids (due to them being illegal), and they also happen to have a line of stitches around their throat heavily suggesting they've modified their own. Not to mention all the other stitches on their body, which seems to serve more than just an aesthetic purpose given that their hand is a different skin tone than the rest of them.
• In Noblesse, this is the difference between the mostly evil Union, who got their data and progress by experimenting on countless innocents, and the mostly good Frankenstein, who did the same using only himself as a test subject.
• Ladies and Gentlemen, Dr. Shark of The Non-Adventures of Wonderella.
• S.S.D.D. has Dr. Ashmore. He was working on new eye implants, and paperwork on live test subjects was slow. He'd test it on himself, but he had two healthy eyes...

Web Original

• CinemaSins frequently adds a sin for this.
  Jeremy: Scientist running out of time and/or funding tests his theories on himself cliché. [ding]
• The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids: It is revealed in Revenge of the Old Queen that Doctor Curious, amateur mad scientist and Crown Prince of Triskadeckia, experimented on himself and ended up accidentally mutating himself into a half-snake humanoid, forcing him to flee the palace in disgrace.
• In Dingo Doodles, Emperor Goddrick III has a grand plan to evolve the Foreclaimers into a higher form of being by stealing the sun's power. To prove his plan could work, he implanted himself with two power crystals, something Gothi says should be impossible.
• SCP Foundation: Researchers in the Foundation often test their artefacts of their own accord, although they prefer to leave the more dangerous ones to the expendable "D Class" prisoners.
• Whateley Universe: A recurring problem with the devisers and gadgeteers of Whateley Academy (and out of it too, if Dr Venus and Lady Havoc are any indication). Hazmat was lucky; all his treatment did was burn all his hair off his head. Compiler wasn't quite so fortunate — while she did manage to become a faux-Exemplar and speedster through her nanite treatment, she ended up locked in her dorm room most of the time because she couldn't control her new powers. As for Migraine... well, she should have known better than to mix two different devisor projects when she wasn't even a Devisor herself. Then there are the Mad Scientist types like Jobe, who uses other students as his guinea pigs. Sometimes he even tells them this ahead of time. Sometimes.

Western Animation

• Archer:
  Krieger: I call it "Formula K".
  Archer: And it turns you temporarily gay?
  Krieger: Dunno. I just started human testing. By dosing Danny the intern's coffee.
  Danny: Danny's definitely feeling something!
  Archer: I'll pass.
  Krieger: Suit yourself. [pops a pill] Just means more for me and Danny.
• One of the enemies of Darkwing Duck did this: Reginald Bushroot, Ph. D. finds his funding cut. He tries his experimental procedure on a duck and ends up with a mutant plant-duck. The duck is, of course, himself. Once the science lab bullies ridicule him in front of the girl of his dreams, then the body count starts.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • The first episode of Batman: The Animated Series, "On Leather Wings", involves a professor who drank serum with bat DNA and became the Man-Bat.
  • In the Justice League story "Injustice for All", Batman wrangles this sort of confession out of Cheetah while a "captive" of the Injustice Gang. She was desperate and didn't have the funding to conduct controlled experiments, so...
  • The villain of the Batman Beyond episode "Splicers" is Dr. Able Cuvier, the inventor of modern splicing technology — and like his forerunners above, he used himself as the first test subject. Funnily enough, while Cuvier's splicing is easily reversible and completely painless, he's the only one of these guys to be Hoist by His Own Petard.
• Mocked in Mary Shelley's Frankenhole when Victor tells Doctor Jekyll that only an idiot would use himself as the test subject for an untested formula.
• The Spectacular Spider-Man: As stated above, Dr. Curt Connors created a serum with lizard DNA that he believed would grow his arm back. It worked...and turned him into a giant lizard monster.
• Stretch Armstrong and the Flex Fighters reveals the Big Bad Stretch Monster as the alter ego of a scientist who attempted to find a cure for all diseases, and injected an early sample into himself, while disregarding the other scientists' warnings not to test it on humans so soon.
  "Never underestimate my tolerance for risk."

Real Life

• The inventors of several incarnations of the Bulletproof Vest (including the modern Kevlar vest) tested their inventions on themselves. Downplayed, though, in that the vests had already passed proof-of-concept tests, and the self-"tests" were more publicity stunts than actual tests.
• Jonas Salk and the polio vaccine.
• The creator of LSD, Albert Hoffman, took some himself after a handful of inconclusive animal trials. From his lab notebook:
  Last Friday ... I had to interrupt my laboratory work in the middle of the afternoon and go home, because I was seized with a feeling of great restlessness and mild dizziness. At home, I lay down and sank into a not unpleasant delirium, which was characterized by extremely excited fantasies. In a semi-conscious state, with my eyes closed (I felt the daylight to be unpleasantly dazzling), fantastic visions of extraordinary realness and with an intense kaleidoscopic play of colors assaulted me. After about two hours this condition disappeared.
  • Read more here.
• The inventor of cardiac catheterization did the first one to himself, with an x-ray to prove it. A nurse volunteered to be the Guinea Pig so he sedated her, turned around, and then did the procedure on himself. That's right. The man stabbed himself in the heart as a sleight-of-hand trick, thereby permanently upstaging David Copperfield years before he was even born. And then he walked all the way to the X-ray room while holding the cable. When one of his colleagues tried to pull it out as he thought the man was crazy, Werner kicked him in the chest.
• Colonel John Paul Stapp (M.D., Ph.D.) was an aeronautics expert involved in testing the limitations of the human body in high-speed flight at the dawn of the jet age. Due to the lack of crash test dummies that could accurately model the human body or report on how they felt, Col. Stapp offered his services as a substitute. In 1947, conventional wisdom held that forces greater than 18G would prove fatal. After numerous tests in rocket-powered contraptions, Col. Stapp shattered this barrier and eventually reached 46.2G, a record which stands to this day as the highest g-forces ever voluntarily experienced by a human being. Predictably, Stapp suffered repeated and various injuries including broken limbs, ribs, detached retina, and miscellaneous traumas which eventually resulted in lifelong lingering vision problems caused by permanently-burst blood vessels in his eyes.
  • The only way to get motion pictures of Stapp's test was to chase the rocket sled in a plane. The chase plane for several tests was piloted by Air Force pilot Joseph Kittinger, and Stapp recommended him for greater responsibilities in Air Force R&D. He became the test director of Project Excelsior, to research high-altitude parachute jumps, and made all three jumps himself. In the first jump lines from the drogue parachute caught his neck and caused him to spin so fast he passed out (the main chute deployed automatically), but the other two jumps were successful, with the third setting a new record for highest parachute jump and a still-standing record for longest time in free-fall.
• Isaac Newton was a real-life example of this trope. In addition to looking into the Sun through a telescope, he also forced blood to his head until he passed out, and jammed a bodkin behind his eye to check if squashing it would make what he saw go blurry by changing the distance between the back of the eyeball and the front to confirm the front was a lens.
• Giles Brindley, inventor of early drug treatments for impotence. Link may be NSFW.^note No, not like that. Link may also be disturbing to male readers.
  • Sex researchers in general have tended to resort to this trope, as openly soliciting volunteers for their research is likely to incite accusations of puerile motives, loss of funding, and a slew of applicants whose only interest is in the sex, not the science.
• John Scott Haldane was a british physiologist and father of J. B. S. Haldane who self-experimented on himself, locking himself in sealed chambers and breathing in gases and recording the results.
• Troy Hurtubise, who prior to his accidental death in June 2018 had perhaps the best claim of anyone in the early 21st century to being a genuine Mad Scientist. He even aspired to be a real-life Science Hero. As such, he predictably — and cheerfully — tested his inventions on himself. The more notable of these being: Project Grizzly, a bear-proof suit (the bears were too intimidated by its appearance, and walked away. Stood up to a biker gang quite well though); Fire Paste, a light, spreadable material that hardens into an insulating shell (he put a mask on the back of his skull made of the paste and had a few thousand degrees of blowtorch pointed at it); and "Trojan" Armor, an approximately forty-pound armor suit with various useful attachments. And before you ask, he died in a car accident, not one of his experiments gone wrong.
• Pellagra, a disease caused by vitamin B3 (niacin) deficiency, used to be thought of as contagious until Joseph Goldberger discovered that it was, well, just a vitamin deficiency. He noticed that most cases happened in poor areas with people grouped tightly together. While that does obviously make it seem contagious, a closer look revealed that younger children, with weaker immune systems, seemed to be free of the condition. The answer was that they got supplies of milk for growth while others did not. However, where this trope comes into play is when Goldberger published his findings in addition to the results of an experiment of treating test subjects with pellagra with niacin-rich foods. He was rejected because the scientific community refused to believe that pellagra just couldn't be infectious. So he, his wife, and twelve additional colleagues obtained the snot, vomit, feces, urine, sweat, saliva, and blood of pellagra victims, created pills of them, and swallowed them all. That proved their point.
• In order to prove that Irukandji syndrome was caused by the Irukandji jellyfish (and no, wisecrackers, the syndrome and the jellyfish did not at that time have the same name...), Jack Barnes caught one and deliberately stung himself, his son, and a lifeguard who happened to get the wrong shift that day. "Note the outstanding Darwin potential demonstrated."
• Meet Dr. Gordon Giesbrecht, AKA Professor Popsicle. He believes that the best way to study the effects of hypothermia on the human body is to subject himself to it. Repeatedly. By doing things like falling into frozen lakes, fully dressed.
• Dr. Stephane Huberty has myasthenia gravis, a condition too rare to get much attention from researchers. He found out about a possible vaccine, only tested on animals, and set up a company to produce it. But clinical trials were several years and millions of dollars away — so he injected himself. Apparently, he's feeling better. (The article lists a few more examples of this trope, not all encouraging.)
• In a humorous example, writer A.J. Jacobs has become known for the single gimmick behind most of his books: live some unconventional way for a period of time, then write about it. His experiments include trying to live every word of the Bible literally, trying to follow George Washington's favorite code of etiquette, and outsourcing every aspect of his life to India. The results are, predictably, hilarious.
• The Nuremberg Code, formulated after the trials of the concentration camp "doctors", expressly forbids any form of human experimentation unless the doctors in question experiment on themselves — and treats even that exception as being ethically and morally dubious. No country has ever adopted the Nuremberg Code in its entirety. However, all countries did adopt the Declaration of Helsinki, as mandated by the WHO, which is more practical and easier to work with for scientists and doctors.
• August Beir experimented with spinal anesthesia by getting his assistant August Hildebrandt to inject him with cocaine and kick him in the shins.
• Henry Cavendish, an 18th-century physicist/chemist who did pioneering research on the nature of electricity, measured the strength of electric currents by shocking himself and estimating the amount of pain.
• In 1982, Australian physicians Robin Warren and Barry Marshall were certain that gastric ulcers (which are extremely painful and can easily be fatal if untreated) were caused by microorganism Helicobacter pylori, a massive shift from the prevailing opinion that stress, spicy food, and excess stomach acid caused ulcers. To finally prove the hypothesis, Marshall took a sample of H. pylori from his patient, cultivated it on nutrient broth, and drank the whole beaker. Five days later, he developed a case of gastritis. He was then able to treat it with antibiotics. Marshall and Warren, who developed a non-invasive breath test for the presence of H. pylori, received the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
• Dr. James Young Simpson discovered the general anesthetic chloroform in 1847 when he and his colleagues were sniffing their way through the chemist's catalog of gases (they were looking for a new anesthetic that didn't irritate the lungs or explode like extant ones). It was a miracle that the dosage he took didn't kill him.
• Sucralose (the artificial sweetener Splenda) was invented when a researcher mistook his supervisor's instructions. He was asked to "test" the new compound, but he mistakenly thought he was supposed to "taste" it.
• Hugh Herr lost both his lower legs to hypothermia in a mountain climbing accident. He responded by pursuing a career in academia and eventually became a professor of biomechatronics at MIT. He tries out new bionic limbs on himself as well as volunteers.
• Charles Darwin studied the effects of assassin bug bites by letting them bite him. He got Chagas disease from it, and some believe it contributed to his death.
• Naturalist Farley Mowat, endeavoring to prove that Arctic wolves weren't to blame for declining caribou numbers in subarctic Canada, noted that the wolf family he was studying were living exclusively on rodents for most of the year. To confirm that such a large animal could survive on tiny prey, he proceeded to catch and eat nothing but rodents for protein himself.
• It is said that in the past, a finished mail was usually tested by the armorer putting it on, and the client stabbing it a few times with a dagger. If there was no one left to get the payment, then none was given.
• Dr. Allan Walker Blair of the University of Alabama deliberately allowed himself to be bitten by a black widow spider to study the effects. He had originally planned to undergo a second bite to see whether he had gained any resistance to the venom, but after several days of painful recovery from the first bite he decided not to go through with that part
• Dr. Robert Lopez, a veterinarian, wanted to know if ear mites (a type of arachnid that infests the ear canals of cats and dogs) could parasitize humans. So he swabbed the ear of a cat, then swabbed his own ear. He found out the hard way that the answer to his question was 'Yes, and it hurts like the dickens'.
• The CEO of a corporation that retrofits cars with bulletproof windows and other armor made a very famous commercial by sitting behind a polycarbonate windscreen bolted to a frame and having one of his employees fire three rifle rounds into it. See it in its entirety here.
• Elisha Otis demonstrated the new elevator safety brake he'd invented by building a several-story elevator in the middle of an exhibition hall, riding it to the top, and having his assistant take an axe to the elevator's cable.
• Stubbins Ffirth was a scientist who went a long way to try to prove that yellow fever was not contagious. He cut himself and smeared infected vomit into the wounds (!) and drank it, along with blood, spit, and urine. He was not infected, but the samples were from people who were no longer contagious.
• Paul Quinton, the researcher who identified the basic defect that causes Cystic Fibrosis, a chloride transport problem in cells, has CF himself. He experimented on his own sweat glands, comparing them to the sweat glands of people without Cystic Fibrosis.
• Ryoichi Naito was a Japanese scientist who helped found Midori Juji (Green Cross), Japan's leading blood products company. In his earlier days, he worked for the infamous Unit 731. However, in his final years, when he sought to test an artificial blood substitute, he tested it on himself. (While the substitute did not work, he at least did not suffer any ill effects.)
• Edwin Katskee tested the effects of cocaine on himself, with his last words being "Advise all inquisitive MDs(Medical Doctors) to lay off this stuff."
• Demonstrating that Tropes Are Tools, the pseudoscience of homeopathy, the belief that you can cure illness by giving people a non-existent quantity of poison, was developed by Samuel Hahnemann. Hahnemann heard that malaria was treated in South America by making a tea from the bark of the cinchona tree. Curious, he ordered some bark, made some tea, drank it, and suffered an allergic reaction similar to the symptoms of malaria. From there to a not medicine popular in much of Europe.
  • The cinchona tree works, by the way. Hahnemann's logic, though, is bollocks.

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