Investor Says a Snake Collector Who Injected Himself With Venom Helped Save Thousands

Jason Calacanis, a startup investor speaking on a podcast recorded in Tokyo, reached for an extreme case to make his point about medical risk. There was a guy, he said, who collected venomous snakes.

The man "injected himself with the snake venom to build up a tolerance for it," Calacanis said, doing it on his own "so he could handle his own snakes."

Calacanis raised the account during a podcast interview about the right to try and risky volunteer trials. He described people willing during COVID to be infected and then given a possible treatment to help the world.

That choice seemed admirable to him, Calacanis said. He called it "a beautiful thing for somebody to do," and he compared such volunteers to astronauts, soldiers, and firefighters who accept danger for society.

Bilal, a guest from Eeki Labs working on aging research, said deliberately making someone sick crossed a line for him. He said "we do not burn the skin of firefighters to then study" how skin heals.

Calacanis then offered the snake collector as a different arrangement, in his telling a person experimenting on himself rather than researchers sickening a volunteer. He named no source or study for the account. According to Calacanis's secondhand version, the man's blood plasma was able to help create the antidotes for toxins, and he moved that science forward.

Calacanis said he did not know what to call those antidotes for poisons and toxins like this. He put the effect in personal terms, saying, "He saved thousands of lives, I believe," and said his team would post a link with more detail.

What he gave the audience left much unresolved. There was no account of how many injections were involved, how sick the man became, or which researchers used his plasma.