

Some were physically or emotionally tough, others just plain foolhardy. Ian Sample is compiling a list of the hardest people in science and he needs your help
Hard Scientist : Sir Henry Head
Sir Henry Head operated on his own arm to discover how sensations change when peripheral nerves are cut and left to regenerate



In November 1908, Henry Head, a balding, bespectacled physician at the London Hospital, published a scientific paper in the journal Brain describing his meticulous investigations into how sensation was affected when peripheral nerves were cut and left to heal. To compile data for the article, entitled "A human experiment in nerve division", Head took his bag of surgical instruments and turned them on himself.

Over the past few weeks, I've been collecting stories about people like Sir Henry Head. And not just those who, for lack of a convenient alternative, became the subject of their own experiments. I was interested in scientists and engineers who have, one way or another, proved themselves to be tougher than the average. I wanted to create a list of the hardest men and women in science and thanks to the good people of the Twitterverse, it's coming together.

What follows is the beginning, not the end: a rough, incomplete and recklessly scattergun compilation of scientists and engineers nominated on Twitter. So far, the list has a UK bias, and men and medics are surely overrepresented. One question that has already been asked is, what makes someone hard? When one person nominated Buzz Aldrin – not for going to the moon, but for landing a punch on someone in a YouTube video – another pointed out that it is often harder to walk away from confrontation. Hard is whatever you want it to be.

Compiling this list began as a bit of fun, but as the nominations poured in, I became genuinely intrigued and at times, moved by the stories. Some of the people on the list are physically tough and not a little foolhardy. Others are remarkable and inspiring. If you can help us build the list, please add your own nominations in the comments below.

Here are the nominations so far, in no particular order:

Hard Scientist : Sir Henry Head
Sir Henry Head, a physician at the London Hospital, operated on his own arm in 1908.

Sir Henry Head. Physician at The London Hospital. Operated on his own arm to investigate how sensations change when peripheral nerves are cut and left to regenerate. He didn't stop there though. In another experiment, Head investigated the nerves in his penis by dipping it into hot water. He reported feeling no sensation of heat in the tip, but went on to discover that it could feel pain and coldness. You can read more on Head here and here.

Gudrun Pflueger. Austrian-born wolf tracker, cross-country skier and champion mountain runner. During one field trip, she was spotted by a pack of wolves and lay in the grass for an hour to draw them closer.

Hard Scientists : Dr. Elsie Widdowson
Dr. Elsie Widdowson Photograph: Wellcome Images

Elsie Widdowson. Biochemist who studied at Imperial College London. Widdowson and her colleague, Robert McCance, endured minimal diets for long periods to study the effect of calorie restriction on health. Widdowson advised the British government on the nutritional needs of those who had suffered extreme starvation in Nazi concentration camps.

V. Craig Jordan. The Texas-born scientist studied pharmacology at Leeds University but spent time in the Special Air Service (SAS) before making his name as a scientist. Jordan is known as the "father of tamoxifen", for being first to discover that the drug could be used to prevent breast cancer.

Hard Scientists : British Explorer Dr Mike Stroud
British Explorer Dr Mike Stroud leads his fellow explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes through the British leg of their Landrover 7x7x7 Challenge event, 31 October 2003 as they run through Berkshire. Illustration: Martyn Hayhow/AFP

Mike Stroud. British physician at Southampton General Hospital. The thinking man's Ranulph Fiennes. Stroud is an expert in human endurance and extreme environments. He accompanied Fiennes on several polar expeditions, during which he took muscle biopsies from his own leg without anaesthetic. In 2003, he joined Fiennes to run seven marathons on seven continents in seven days.

Hard Scientists Jerri Nielsen
Dr. Jerri Nielsen, a National Science Foundation physician, is shown at the ceremonial South Pole, 1999. Photograph: AP

Jerri Nielsen FitzGerald. American ER doctor. FitzGerald was working at a research station at the South Pole in 1999 when she found a lump in her breast. A medical evacuation was impossible, so FitzGerald used ice and a local anaesthetic to perform a biopsy on the tumour. Samples of the tissue were assessed by videolink, but the results were inconclusive. When doctors monitoring her condition from afar decided she needed chemotherapy drugs, they were air-dropped at night onto a stretch of ground lit by fires. She spent the last ten years of her life giving lectures around the world on cancer and its impact on her life.

Apollo 11: Buzz Aldrin

Astronauts. There were so many nominations for individual astronauts who trained as scientists or engineers that it seemed fairest to give them a group nomination.

Leonid Rogozov. Another physician who performed self-surgery at the South Pole. Rogozov was stationed at a Soviet research station in 1960 when he developed peritonitis and decided to remove his own appendix. The two-hour operation revealed that it was perforated. Rogozov was back to work within a fortnight.

Cicely Williams. One of Britain's first female doctors. Williams specialised in children's diseases and developed life-saving high-protein diets while working in Africa. During the second world war, Williams was captured after the fall of Malaya and was held in two different Japanese prison camps, where she continued to treat patients despite coming close to death herself.

Hard Scientists : Amanda Feilding
Amanda Feilding Photograph: Daily Mail/Rex Features

Amanda Feilding. The Countess of Wemyss was 27 years old when she donned a pair of dark glasses, cut a neat patch of hair from her head, and pressed a whirring dentist's drill into her skull. Feilding lost almost two pints of blood in the act of self-trepanation, which took so long she had to dip the drill in water from time to time to cool it down. She believed the hole might give her brain more room to move and produce a heightened state of consciousness. Feilding is not a scientist, but was nominated on the strength of her experiment.

Hard Scientists : Colonel John Stapp
Colonel John Stapp (1901 - 1999) enduring the effects of acceleration and deceleration of riding in a rocket-propelled research sled. Photograph: Getty Images

John Stapp. A former US air force flight surgeon, Stapp became known as the fastest man on Earth following a series of adventures in a rocket-propelled sled designed to assess the greatest deceleration that a human could survive. Stapp survived at least 45g. During his test career, Stapp suffered broken bones, a detached retina and various other injuries.

Timothy Leary. The American psychologist once described by Richard Nixon as "the most dangerous man in America", he was infamous for his enthusiastic consumption of psychedelic drugs, often, but not always, in the name of research.

Isaac Newton

Sir Isaac Newton. Another scientist who wasn't averse to experimenting on himself. On one occasion, Newton pushed a needle into his eye socket and pressed on the back of the eyeball to change its curvature. He reported seeing several white, dark and coloured circles. Newton used prisms for subsequent investigations into the nature of light.

Tom Tuohy. Deputy manager of Britain's nuclear facility, Windscale (now called Sellafield). In 1957, the UK witnessed its worst nuclear accident when a fire broke out at the facility. Tuohy ditched his radiation badge – so no one could tell him he had exceeded the legal dose – and repeatedly went to the top of a 25-metre pile to peer down through inspection holes at the fire in the reactor's core. From the colours of the flames, he deduced that the fire was approaching the melting point of steel. He survived with no apparent ill effects.

Hard Scientist : Dr Alice Stewart
Dr Alice Stewart in 1984. Photograph: Denis Thorpe for the Guardian

Alice Stewart. The Sheffield-born epidemiologist took on the British and American governments with research that showed that the adverse effects of low-level radiation were more serious than either officially admitted. After the second world war, Stewart worked in Oxford on childhood cancers and showed that leukaemia was linked to X-ray scans the mothers received in early pregnancy.

Edward Harrison. The British chemist invented the gas mask during the first world war, an achievement that saved thousands of lives but cost him his own. Harrison and his team perfected the design by exposing themselves to poisonous gases in sealed rooms. The trials and Harrison's relentless working hours took their toll and he died at the age of 49.

The Mary Seacole portrait
The Mary Seacole picture at the National Portrait Gallery. Photograph: National Portrait Gallery/PA

Mary Seacole. Jamaican nurse. Treated soldiers on both sides of the Crimean war while under fire. Florence Nightingale took against Seacole, accusing her of running a brothel. Seacole is noted in Who's Who as "a woman who succeeded despite the racial prejudice of influential sections of Victorian society".

Mary Kingsley. British explorer Kingsley travelled extensively in Africa and collected hundreds of fish and other fauna, many of them new to science. In her first book, Travels in Africa, she describes fights with crocodiles, falling into a spear pit (and being saved by the padding of her voluminous dress) and being caught in a tornado. She died of enteric fever at the age of 37 after nursing Boer prisoners and was buried at sea.

Hard Scientists : JBS Haldane
British geneticist and evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane. Photograph: Hans Wild./Getty Images

JBS Haldane. The British geneticist and evolutionary biologist suffered a perforated eardrum while experimenting in a decompression chamber, prompting the infamous line "The drum generally heals up. And if a hole remains in it, although one is somewhat deaf, one can blow tobacco smoke out of the ear in question, which is a social accomplishment." Haldane composed a comic poem about his own rectal cancer shortly before his death.

Lawrence Patrick. American biomechanics expert and human crash test dummy. Patrick, a researcher at Wayne State University, wanted information on what the human body could withstand, all in the name of car safety. He was struck in the chest with a 10kg metal weight to see how much abuse the ribcage could take, and took 400 rides on a rocket sled to investigate what happens when the body decelerates rapidly. Other experiments involved dropping deadweights onto his cheeks to understand the exact mechanism of fracture. When the pain became too much, Patrick resorted to using cadavers, which were struck on the head, run over and sent flying through windscreens.

Hard Scientists : The Russian scientist Anatoli Bugorski
The Russian scientist Anatoli Bugorski. Photograph: Guardian

Anatoli Bugorski. On 13 July 1978, the Russian scientist poked his head into the U-70 synchrotron, the most powerful Soviet particle accelerator, in Protvino. As a result of a failed safety mechanism, Bugorski was hit by a beam of protons, and saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns". He was taken to a hospital where doctors expected to monitor his last remaining days, but somehow he survived. He experiences occasional seizures but his mental capacity was evidently unaffected.

George "The Animal" Steele. A science graduate from Michigan State University, in the 1980s Steele was a professional wrestler with a fearsome reputation. One of his trademark moves was a "lifting hammerlock" that ended with a "wheelbarrow facebuster". Both sound painful.

Hard Scientists : Portrait of Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), Danish astronomer. Photograph: Corbis

Tycho Brahe. The 16th century Danish astronomer famously lost the tip of his nose in a duel after falling out with a fellow student. Brahe owned an elk and kept a dwarf – whom he considered clairvoyant – under his dining table. He refused to leave a banquet despite suffering from an excruciating bladder condition, which by most accounts led to his death days later.

Louis Slotin. Canadian physicist. Slotin was a Manhattan Project scientist who worked on criticality experiments in nuclear fission, a task referred to by Richard Feynman as "tickling the dragon's tail". In May 1946, he dropped a carefully suspended dome of beryllium onto a plutonium core, triggering a nuclear chain reaction. Slotin noticed a blue glow of ionised air in the room and reported a sour taste in his mouth. He received an enormous dose of radiation that killed him nine days later.

Hard Scientists:  Nobel Prize for Medicine recipient Barry Marshall
Nobel Prize for Medicine recipient Barry Marshall Photograph: Stringer/Reuters

Barry Marshall. The Australian physician drank a Petri dish of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori to prove it caused peptic ulcers. He received a Nobel prize for his effort.