Scientific discoveries that involved human testing?

I need help finding some discoveries that were aided by human testing. Or a human trying it first, before it became famous. An example: The small pox vaccine created by edward jenner for his son, then was used after to alot of other people.

Thank you very much!

PS: And if you could, please list some advantages of human testing?

Here's a good and fairly recent story for you...

There were these guys in Australia named Barry Marshall and Robin Warren. They were studying this weird bacteria called H. pylori had this hypothesis that these bacteria caused stomach ulcers and gastric disease (this was in the late 1970's early 1980's).

They proposed these ideas in their papers and at scientific meetings and everybody thought they were crazy. It went against all of the current scientific dogma at the time (that ulcers were strictly a result of stomach acid and nothing more). Nobody believed that a bacterium could possibly be the cause of stomach ulcers.

So Marshall decides he's going to prove it to everybody, grows up a liquid culture of H. pylori and swallows it. Sure enough he gets stomach ulcers and other symptoms of gastro-intestinal disease.

Since then we've learned that H. pylori is the main cause of both stomach and small intestinal ulcers ( 80 and 90 percent of them respectively). Today standard treatments for ulcers include anti-biotics used to kill H. pylori.

In 2005 Dr. Barry Marshall and Dr. Robin Warren were awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work on H. pylori. Marshalls experiment (swallowing the bacteria) greatly influenced the scientific community and convinced many nay-sayers.


Scientific discoveries using human testing are rare because we don't test our ideas out on humans (it's way too dangerous and humans shouldn't be and aren't guinea pigs). Stories like the H. pylori one are rare. Don't get me wrong, all pharmaceuticals are tested on humans before being released to the general public...but tons and tons of research has already gone into those drugs for safety (and even then sometimes things go wrong).

Hope this helped.