Self-experimentation

Self-experimentation seems like a path to life and learning

Here is one that was not -

The 19th-century German medical researcher Max von Pettenkofer once drank a test tube of cholera bacteria to try to disprove the emerging theory that diseases are caused by germs. Von Pettenkofer managed to not get cholera, but he did commit suicide after a cholera outbreak proved his anti-germ hypothesis disastrously wrong.