Seattle Biomedical Research Institute: Are You Crazy Enough for Malaria Research?

Volunteer to get malaria for pay? The Seattle Biomedical Research Institute's announcement that they want to infect volunteers with malaria is not as dangerous as it sounds, and it makes medical sense.

They will use cloned malaria that was developed to be easy to cure. It is like white rats compared to wharf rats - domesticated lab critters. The volunteers will vaccinated, bitten by infected mosquitoes, then closely observed. If the vaccine fails, they will be treated promptly.

Medically, Seattle makes sense because there is no risk that the test results will be confused by natural malaria infections. Ineffective vaccines can be detected without expensive time-consuming field trials.

I've been a human guinea pig before, and if I were in Seattle, I'd volunteer again in a heartbeat, and not just for the $2,000 they reportedly will be paying the volunteers. Malaria kills an estimated 3 million of people a year, including a million children under the age of five. It sickens millions more, making them unable to work and support their families. A few mosquito bites and the risk of some fever is a small price to pay to help get a working vaccine.

I was one of the "polio pioneers", one of the children whose parents offered them up as human guinea pigs in the earliest 1950s polio vaccine trials, the ones that preceded the huge 1954 field trials. We lived in an area unlikely to have an epidemic of polio, and like the malaria researchers, Salk's team needed to test the polio vaccine without the confusion of wild infections. Unlike the Seattle malaria trials, there was no cure for polio then and there is none now. If something went wrong and the virus wasn't properly inactivated, we children were going to get polio. Our parents knew the risks, but polio was epidemic, killing thousands of children and leaving tens of thousands crippled and in iron lungs. Volunteering us must have been an agonizing choice to make, but we were the only weapons they had in a war against a killer.

I didn't appreciate the heroism and altruism at the time. I kicked, bit, screamed and fought every vaccination they gave me. I repeated the protests for evrey one of the multiple follow up blood tests they did to see if the vaccine was causing me to produce antibodies. It always took several adults to wrestle me into submission to get a blood sample. My parents wisely stayed out of the battle, listening to the bloodcurdling shrieks from the waiting room, and let the researchers do their thing. Not all of those shrieks were mine; I left teethmarks in a few people, and kicked one man in the face. (Any problems I had with pediatrics patients later in life were a case of what goes around comes around - karma.)

Did I suffer from any lasting emotional effects? The needle phobia lasted until I began my career as a medical technologist. I never could watch the scare-tactic anti-drug movies in high school. That thud in the back of the room was me, passing out cold at the sight of a needle in an actor's hand.

Did I suffer any lasting physical effects? The vaccine batch I received was contaminated with a virus - a live virus - that was shown later to cause cancer in hamsters. I'm not a hamster, and I'm not worried about the faint possibility of getting hamster-cancer. As a result of the larger than usual number of polio vaccines I received during the first tests, the field trials, and all the ones at various schools I have a staggeringly high level of antibodies against polio virus even now, half a century later.

I also have a strange compulsion to volunteer for medical experiments and studies. Besides the polio vaccine trial, I have been in at least a dozen others. I like being a lab rat.