WI Man Allows World’s Deadliest Snakes To Bite Him 200 Times — And Lives To Tell The Story

A Wisconsin man with a lifelong fascination with snakes allowed a deadly black mamba, whose venom can kill within an hour, and more than a dozen other venomous snake species to bite him 200 times.

Tim Friede, 57, of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, has also allowed scorpions and cobras to bite him. After the black mamba had its way with Friede, he let an extremely venomous taipan from Papua New Guinea bite his other arm. It’s all documented in a video on YouTube

He lived to tell about it, according to a study published in the journal Cell, because over 18 years, he injected himself with a carefully calibrated cocktail of escalating doses of venom to build up his immunity to 16 deadly venomous snake species.

This non-degreed herpetologist’s experiments could lead to the development of a universal antivenom, scientists wrote in the study.

Friede’s interest in snakes began as a 5-year-old, when he hunted harmless garter snakes in Wisconsin and was bitten by one. As an adult, his fascination turned to venomous snakes and the harm they cause. Globally, the more than 600 venomous snake species bite about 2.7 million people a year, killing about 120,000 a year and permanently maiming another 400,000, according to the World Health Organization.

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He decided the best way to educate others about the risk was to allow a venomous snake to repeatedly bite him.

“I was put in ICU after two cobra bites and I dropped in a coma for four days,” Friede told NPR.

He was more careful once he began looking at the situation from the snake’s perspective. “They want to kill me,” he told NPR. “I want to survive.”

Friede, who described himself as a non-degreed scientist to The New York Times, also had a hypothesis that he could develop immunity to the toxins. In their paper, the researchers said Friede’s nearly a quarter-century of self-envenomization provides a blueprint for the development of a broadly applicable antivenom.

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The threat of venomous snakes is minimal in Wisconsin, but deforestation, human sprawl and climate change have increased the danger of snake attacks globally.

“This is a bigger problem than the first world realizes,” Jacob Glanville, founder and chief executive of Centivax, a company that aims to produce broad-spectrum vaccines, and lead author on the study, told The Times.

“The principles of this study can definitely be applied to other snakes,” Nicholas Casewell, a researcher at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine in England who wasn’t involved in the study told the publication.

Friede told The Times that he is “really proud that I can do something in life for humanity, to make a difference for people that are 8,000 miles away, that I’m never going to meet, never going to talk to, never going to see, probably.”

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