A man is bitten by a Black Mamba and a Taipan within minutes of each other. But he doesn't panic. He stays completely calm, finishes recording his video and uploads it to YouTube. That's his normal day.
His name is Tim Friede who works as a Truck Mechanic in Wisconsin and he might end up saving millions of lives.
From a young age Tim was fascinated by snakes and as he grew older he developed an unusual hobby, he started keeping venomous snakes like Black Mamba, King Cobra, Taipans and many more as pets.
But one day Tim realised that an accidental bite from one his pets could result in his death. So he started microdosing himself with venom at first just to protect himself. But over the years, amazed by what his body was doing, he started injecting bigger doses eventually even allowing himself to be bitten directly and staying relatively unharmed.
However, this wasn't an easy journey for him. At first his immunity was only species specific, meaning immunity to Mamba didn't automatically mean immunity to a Cobra. So he had to expose himself to each new species separately to build new immunity. During these exposures, Tim suffered excruciating pain, tissue damage and was hospitalized multiple times in serious condition, at times even on the brink of death.
Despite everything, Tim simply kept going for nearly 18 years, adding more and more species to his list. Most people thought he was crazy and even his marriage fell apart under the weight of his venomous obsession. And for years he had nothing to show for it.
Then one day, completely by accident immunologist Jacob Glanville saw one of his videos on YouTube and was astonished watching Tim calmly survive back to back bites from two of the deadliest snakes in the world. He immediately recognised that Tim had built antibodies that worked across dozens of snake species simultaneously, something no lab had ever achieved.
Jacob contacted Tim and together they worked with a research team to extract antibodies from Tim's blood and test them on mice against 19 of the world's deadliest snakes. The results were extraordinary, a cocktail of Tim's antibodies combined with another drug gave mice full protection against 13 of the 19 species and partial protection against the remaining 6, covering species like Cobra, Taipan, Mamba and more.
However, human trails are still ahead and it's an antivemon cocktail and not a vaccine. But Tim may have given science the key to saving more than 100000 lives lost to snakebites every year.