Once Bitten – The Weird Side of the Internet

Once Bitten – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

Okay, so this is embarrassing, but relevant to the coming topic. When I was five, my dad and I were going to the supermarket by our apartment, and as we were cutting through a shortcut through a parking lot, we saw a snake coming. We booked. It was probably a garter snake, You have to understand that at about this time, Indiana Jones was getting trapped in a massive chamber full of deadly snakes in Raiders of the Lost Ark. My dad grew up in the country my guess is that he ran because I ran and he didn’t want me to feel stupid.

To be fair, he was the one who took me to see Raiders.

So it was wild to me this morning to come across the story of Two Rivers, Wisconsin resident Tim Friede and the amazing claim to fame of getting himself bitten 200 times by some of the world’s most deadly snakes.

His first bite put him in a coma for four days, and was the result of inner turmoil he had felt in the wake of the September 11^th attacks. After that, he decided to be about as careful as he could be getting bit 200 times.

Masochism? Not really. There was eventually method to Friede’s madness. He was building immunity in the hopes that his blood could be used as a universal antivenom,. And when he came to the attention of immunologist Jacob Glanville. They met, and Glanville made the fateful ask of perhaps more than a few drops of Friede’s blood.

The rest isn’t history, but the future of antivenom may have gotten a big boost.

I should probably conclude this by saying that if you try this at home, in case you’re crazy enough to want to, you’ll probably end up dying. He almost did. So I’m not responsible for your dumb *ss here. I just report the news.

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