In the middle of 2020, Alex Loukas deliberately infected himself with intestinal worms. The procedure was pretty straightforward: he used a Band-Aid to press a few larvae of the New World hookworm (Necator americanus) gently onto his forearm, and waited for the microscopic critters to burrow on in. Although it wasn’t painful, exactly, he describes a tingly feeling like “little tiny electric shocks as these guys go through your skin,” he says. “It’s intensely itchy for a number of days and then that resolves.” Some people who undergo this process experience stomach discomfort when the worms arrive in the gut, where they will grow up to 1 cm long, but many “will then never have any other clue that they’re infected.”
There were several reasons that Loukas wanted the parasitic worms, or helminths, on board. For one thing, his research at James Cook University in Australia focuses on multiple aspects ...
