Well, The Rats Seem Okay

Think, if you will, all the way back to my last blog post, where I mentioned the name William J. Baerg in reference to experimenting with yourself as the guinea pig. Now I'll explain exactly what I meant by that.

William Baerg was an entomologist who worked at the University of Arkansas from 1918 to 1951. He published his first article in 1920 (Beekeeping In Arkansas), and somewhere in the next year he decided that his name wasn't quite epic enough (I agree), and he started publishing under the name William J. Baerg (better, but still not spectacular) in 1921.

For reference, his full and proper name was William Baerg, the J. stood for nothing, and was just there to make him sound more official. Normally, I'd throw up a picture of him now, but I can't seem to find one, but this picture is likely him:

The hand, not the tarantula.
(click to embiggen, clicky-poppy)

You see, Baerg is also known as "the father of North American tarantula research." He focused mainly tarantulas, but he was quite knowledgeable about all sorts of North American spiders.

One of the things he researched was just how dangerous spider bites were. First, he'd get the spider and a few rats to experiment on (he seems to have preferred using six test rats for each experiment). Then, he'd pick up the spider and the rat, have the spider bite the rat, and then he'd observe and report. If the rats didn't seem too badly injured by the bite, he let the spider bite him. And it worked pretty well. Baerg's the main reason we know that tarantula bites are about as dangerous as bee-stings. After seeing the rats suffered no long-term damage from a tarantula bite, he'd let it bite him. In his own words:

It is doubtless a far-fetched conclusion that if the poison produces mild effects on young rats, it will not be dangerous to man; yet this conclusion I found quite safe in the case of the tarantula (Eurypelma steindachneri).

So, when a colleague from Cornell asked Baerg to look into whether the danger presented by the black widow spider was fact or fiction, Baerg knew what to do: Get one to bite some rats and watch to see whether they were badly injured or not.

Guess what? The rats were pretty much fine. You know, relatively speaking. For twelve to fourteen hours they were clearly in pain, they sometimes had convulsions, and they entered a state that he describes in his notes as "Sleeping (in coma?)", before apparently recovering completely. In fact, they built up a resistance to the black widow venom quite quickly, and by the third time they were bitten (three weeks after the first bite) the rats showed no reaction to the venom at all, beyond their licking the wound.

And this is where the previously mentioned "far-fetched conclusion" bites him in the ass. Or more specifically, in the left hand.

At first, things looked promising. On July 9th 1923, Baerg let a black widow bite him. He made it bite him on the finger at 11:15am, and within five minutes there's a sharp pain and the site of the wound is visibly throbbing. Ten minutes later the pain is slowly dissipating, and by 2:10pm the pain is completely gone and he feels fine. Clearly, as the rats indicated, the bite of the black widow isn't actually all that bad.

Not so bad at all, is it?

Since the first test went so well, and the rats seemed to develop an immunity fairly quickly, Baerg decided to repeat the experiment the next day. This time, things didn't go so well.  The spider bit deeper, for longer, and probably injected a lot more venom.  Baerg was, however, both a scientist and an optimist, and here's how he described it in the article he wrote about the tests (emphasis added by me):

The fangs were allowed to remain inserted for about five seconds, and during this time the pain which when the fangs entered was rather faint, increased rapidly, presumably produced by the poison rather than by the fangs. The results, from the point of view of the investigator, were all that could be desired.

I will remind you that Baerg himself was the investigator.

So, he let the spider bite him at 8:25am on July 10th, 1923.  The pain was minor at first but increased rapidly.  Then it spread.  Everywhere.  His arm, his chest, his hips, his legs, his toes, his head. He had trouble breathing and couldn't keep food down.  He didn't manage to get any sleep for the first 28 hours, and didn't manage more than a nap until the night of the 11th, when he was plagued by delirium and nightmares.  He spent almost three full days in the hospital.  Even after he left the hospital, it was still another full day before he was well enough to work.  The pain was gone from most of his body by the 13th, but the pain in his hand persisted for a few days longer, and there was an itchiness that stayed for almost a week.  His body temperature fluctuated fairly wildly for more than a month, although he claimed he wouldn't have known if he hadn't been taking it, since there were no associated symptoms.

That's enough to keep you from ever wanting to be near a spider ever again, isn't it?

Well, you're not William J. Baerg.  He continued to research spiders (and other insects) his entire life. Even after he retired, he was still helping other people do their entomological research.  47 years after the black widow incident, in 1970, when he was 85 years old, Baerg heard that someone was investigating the toxicity of the yellow sac spider, whose bite is thought to be mildly necrotic and highly painful.  What advice did he give them?

He volunteered to be the test subject for the human bite test.

The head researcher politely declined the offer.

William J. Baerg: He makes the Mythbusters look absolutely cowardly in their scientific experiments.

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Sources:
William J. Baerg's hand (?) image taken from Encyclopedia of Arkansas
Black widow spider bite image taken from WebMD.com, originally from David-O's Flickr stream


Encyclopedia of Arkansas
University of Nebraska - Lincoln, DigitalCommons Journal of Parasitology archive (Vol. 9, No. 3, pp 161-180)