There’s not a moment’s hesitation, let alone fear, as Tim Friede strides into his basement office and proceeds to let two of the world’s most venomous snakes sink their fangs into him.
In a jaw-dropping two-minute video posted online, he walks over to a box sitting on the floor and pulls out a 10ft-long black mamba.
Then he moves over to a camera, carefully holding the mamba’s head in one hand as the terrifying creature, whose venom can kill within an hour, writhes furiously and wraps itself around him.
Slowly, Tim moves the snake’s head towards his outstretched left arm – until it delivers a single bite.
Without even flinching, he then puts it back and fishes out a smaller but even more deadly snake, a Papuan taipan. This one he lets bite his other arm – then it, too, is returned to the tank. ‘Thanks for watching,’ says Tim as he holds up his arms to the camera, one of them now streaked with blood from the mamba bite.
In a short follow-up video filmed an hour and a half later, Tim is still very much alive and keen to emphasise that he didn’t take any antivenom, adding: ‘And that’s the point.’
Delighted scientists agree that it is very much ‘the point’. Friede, a 57-year-old former construction and factory worker from Wisconsin in the US, has developed a ‘hyper-immunity’ to snake venom that might finally deliver the world from a menace that claims nearly 140,000 lives every year.
Researchers who studied the antibodies in Friede’s blood have announced it has led them to find an ‘unparalleled’ antivenom.
A keen and entirely self-taught herpetologist, or snake expert, since the age of five when he got his first nip from a harmless garter snake, Friede spent 18 years encouraging so many venomous snakes to bite him that he has developed an immunity that may finally allow experts to produce a universal antidote that can neutralise all snake venoms.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), nearly three million people suffer venomous snake bites each year, resulting in 138,000 deaths and three times as many amputations and other permanent disabilities. The WHO predicts that the problem will get worse as climate change and urban sprawl increases contact between humans and snakes.
Currently, antivenom is produced by injecting small quantities of snake venom into large domestic animals such as horses and collecting the antibodies they produce.
But using non-human antibodies can cause side effects including lethal allergic reactions. Doctors also need to know what type of snake bit the victim before they can deliver a specific antivenom.
Although he’s now paused his macabre fieldwork, Friede had allowed himself to be bitten by so many venomous types – including cobras, kraits, vipers, coral snakes and rattlesnakes – so often that there was really nothing out there that gave him anything more than a bruise.
All told, he has been bitten more than 200 times and injected himself with at least 700 doses of venom which he ‘milked’ from the rotating collection of snakes he kept in his basement. He told the Mail this week that, although he’s delighted to have done something that could help the world, his initial motive was purely selfish: he wanted to build up his own tolerance so one of his pets didn’t accidentally kill him.
Unfortunately, his first attempt to let snakes bite him almost did exactly that.
In March 2001, he started injecting himself with highly diluted venom, gradually strengthening the dosage.
Occasionally, a snake bit him while he was trying to milk it – a fiddly and hazardous process he’d previously done as a ‘hobby’ with scorpions and spiders – but he survived.
Six months later, however, he received his first intentional bite from an Egyptian cobra, on one of his fingers. When he suffered no adverse reaction, he followed this up an hour later with a bite from a monocled cobra.
He hadn’t built up sufficient immunity, however, and he suddenly felt cold, his eyes drooped and he couldn’t speak.
Friede fell unconscious and woke up from a coma in a hospital four days later.
His wife, Beth, was livid and told him to ‘fix it because it ain’t working’, he told me.
‘I fixed it. I never went back to hospital after that,’ he said.
His ‘saddle time’, as he called his biting and injecting sessions, became a ‘lifestyle’, he added. ‘I’d work all day, come home, play with the kids and the family, and go downstairs and do my stuff all night long, wake up and do it again.’
In the process, he built up his venom resistance to the point where he could receive four bites in just two minutes.
He clearly doesn’t suffer from ophidiophobia (a fear of snakes) – one of the most common phobias, affecting a reported one in three people – but Friede admits that even he was unnerved when he progressed from injecting venom to actually holding a snake as it sank its fangs into him.
‘At first it was nerve-racking, though the more I was bitten the more comfortable I became,’ he explained. The pain – which initially was like ‘a bee sting times a thousand’ – also decreased over time.
Some snake bites, he explains, are a lot more painful than others. While most snake venoms cause paralysis, that of the cobra is particularly nasty.
‘Their venom also contains cytotoxins which eat your muscle cells – what’s called necrosis,’ says Friede. That, he adds, explains why he has nasty scars all over his body.
Rattlesnake venom isn’t much fun either, as it contains hemotoxins, which cause haemorrhaging.
‘If I take, say, a black mamba bite, I’m 100 per cent healed in two days. But with those [cobra and rattlesnake] bites, I could be down for almost a month,’ he said.
One has to wonder what possessed him to venture down this gratuitously masochistic path.
Friede said it got to the stage where he would get bad-tempered if he hadn’t had his fix of snake venom. He enjoyed the challenge of overcoming progressively more venomous bites without needing medical assistance and, later, the knowledge that he was doing something of potential use to humanity.
‘It did teach me to tolerate pain at a very high level without painkillers,’ he added. ‘I never missed a day of work, even when I had a rattlesnake bite on my finger.’
At one time, he had as many as 60 snakes in his basement – ordered legally from breeders in Florida – and used a ‘rat-breeding facility’ down there to feed them.
It comes as little surprise to hear that he and his wife got divorced in 2015. ‘She got pissed and she had a right to be pissed,’ he told me.
In 2017, Friede caught the attention of Jacob Glanville, boss of San Francisco biotechnology company Centivax. Glanville was searching for a more effective method of producing antivenoms but having little success.
Then he read about Friede.
‘I thought, my God, this is madness,’ says Glanville. When he contacted Friede, who had already been asking scientists if they wanted to use him for research, Friede said: ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for this call.’ And, as hoped, researchers discovered dozens of ‘broad spectrum’ antivenom antibodies in Friede’s blood.
When they were tested on mice, they provided them with full protection from the venom of 13 out of 19 species of the most lethal snakes and partial protection against the remaining six. Other scientists say the discovery could be ‘revolutionary’.
Amid all the celebrations of Friede’s singular, if eccentric, achievement, Glanville stressed that ‘we strongly discourage anyone from trying to do what Tim did’.
It seems a rather unnecessary warning.