‘Venom Man’ Lets Deadliest Snakes Bite Him

An amateur scientist can shockingly take back-to-back bites from the world’s deadliest snakes on purpose and claims to be making himself immune from their venom. Divorced Tim Friede, 37, has self-inflicted more than 160 bites in 16 years of research and is hoping his experiments will help to develop a human vaccine for snake bites.Show more

To prove his self-immunization theory works, Tim from Wisconsin, USA, recently took back-to-back bites from two of the world’s deadliest snakes – a taipan and a black mamba whose bite can kill in minutes. Unsurprisingly, his obsession with saving the tens of thousands of lives lost every year to snakebites has nearly killed him on a number of occasions and also cost him his marriage. His wife Beth Friede, 35, divorced him in October after 20 years together when she finally had enough of Tim’s snake obsession. She said that she and her kid never came first, sometimes not even second.

In the last 16 years Tom has been injected himself controlled doses of venom to build up an immunity to snake bites. He hopes his experiments with immunisation will lead to a development of a vaccine. Despite the controversial nature of his experiments Tim does have some backing from the scientific community. Dr Brian Hanley, a PhD Microbiologist from the University of California, says a test suggests Tim now has twice the number of antibodies and hopes his company Butterfly Sciences will help him develop his vaccine and find investors to get it into the field.

Videographer / Director: Ruaridh Connellan
Producer: Dan Howlett, Nick Johnson
Editor: Ian Phillips