Snakes don’t rattle him — in fact, he has long invited their bites.
Wisconsin herpetologist Tim Friede, 57, spent two decades deliberately injecting himself with more than 650 strategically measured snake venom shots and letting dangerous snakes, including cobras and mambas, bite him over 200 times.
“It always burns, and it’s always, always painful,” Friede told Science News.
In trying to make himself immune to 16 lethal snake species, Friede developed unique antibodies in his blood that are being used as an anti-venom.
A study published last week in the journal Cell found that a cocktail of two of his antibodies and an inflammatory drug fully protected mice exposed to lethal venom from 13 snake species and partially protected the mice against six more species.
Venomous snakes bite nearly 3 million people a year, killing up to 138,000 and causing many more to suffer a permanent disability. Friede’s self-experimentation may eventually help lead to a universal anti-venom to neutralize these toxins.
“I’m really proud that I can do something in life for humanity, to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably,” Friede told the New York Times.
The Times reported that Friede’s first snake bite was a garter snake at age 5.
He hunted snakes as a kid and finally scaled up his passion at the age of 30 by taking a class on milking spiders and scorpions with the hopes of garnering a career collecting venom for medical research.
After a brief dalliance with scorpions, he turned his attention to snakes in 2000. The rest was hisstory.
He would milk the venom and inject increasingly larger amounts into his body to build immunity.
His first professional bites came in September 2001, when he tried to milk an Egyptian cobra and it accidentally bit his finger. He survived because he had been microdosing the cobra’s venom for months.
Overly confident after cheating death, he let a monocled cobra bite his biceps. This time, medics had to revive him with six vials of anti-venom from the zoo. He spent four days in a coma.
“My first couple bites were really crazy,” Friede said, according to NPR. “It’s like a bee sting times a thousand. I mean, you can have levels of anxiety that goes through the roof.”
Friede’s viper-tual testing drew the attention of immunologist Jacob Glanville, who reached out in 2017.
“We had this conversation. And I said, I know it’s awkward, but I’m really interested in looking at some of your blood,” Glanville recalled to CNN. “And he said, ‘Finally, I’ve been waiting for this call.’”
Friede’s 40-milliliter blood sample paved the way for the new research.
He works for Glanville’s biotechnology company, Centivax — and is no longer smitten about being bitten. His final chomp was from a water cobra in 2018.
“Tim, to my knowledge, he has an unparalleled history. It was different, very diverse species from every continent that has snakes, and … he kept rotating between (the snake venoms) over a 17-year, nine-month history, and he took meticulous records the entire time,” Glanville told CNN.
“However, we strongly discourage anyone from trying to do what Tim did,” he added. “Snake venom is dangerous.”
