How far would you go to advance medical research?

It took just a couple of days for virologist Pradeep Seth to decide that he would use himself as a human guinea pig in his own experiment. On a December day in 2003, the head of microbiology at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), in New Delhi, injected himself with a vaccine that he had been designing since 1996. It was a decision that was condemned by the country's medical community as being unethical,1 because the vaccine was yet to be cleared for human trials.

Having already successfully tested in mice and monkeys, Pradeep Seth was eager to know the human body's reaction to his vaccine as human trials were not due to start until 2005: “The test was to find out how a human would react and to find out if the vaccine construct was going to evoke any severe immune response.”

Pradeep Seth says that he has had no complication from the vaccine in the last eight months and is waiting for the Indian government's signal to begin the proper human trial.

His maverick effort may not help fast track scientific protocols to push the test ahead of schedule, but it has certainly inspired more people to participate as volunteers in the trials for the long awaited HIV vaccine in …