A man who willingly let himself be bitten over 200 times by deadly snakes explained why he did it.
For more than 18 years, Tim Friede has been letting deadly snakes bite him, while he's also injected himself with more than 700 doses of their venom.
Cobras, mambas, taipans and kraits are just some of the dangerous serpents he's allowed to bite him in that time, and his initial goal was to build up an immunity to their venom so his body could handle the deadly dosage.
Tim told CNN: "Venom is very inflammatory by nature, and like when you get a bee sting, you get 1 or 2 milligrams, but in the case of like a black mamba, you get up to 200 to 300 milligrams of venom, so that really overloads your system.
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"I methodically take notes and weight the venoms out very specifically. My goal is always to do six milligrams."
First bitten by a snake when he was five, Tim believed that regularly dosing himself with their venom would build his immunity to it and protect him from the danger posed by the most deadly of them.
He told ScienceNews that the feeling of a snake bite 'always burns' and was 'always painful', and he did end up needing to go to hospital once after he let an Egyptian cobra and a monocled cobra bite him, little over an hour apart, in his Wisconsin home.
Airlifted to hospital, he spent days in a coma, but it didn't deter him.
Having injected himself with venom many times, he has actually developed an immunity to a number of deadly snakes, and he has the bites to prove that his methods work.
Tim has even donated his blood to medical research in the hope that his acquired immunity might help develop a universal anti-venom which could treat people bitten by the deadliest snakes.
Around 140,000 people are killed each year from snake venom, while many more suffer life-changing injuries, though a potential anti-venom which works from Tim's immunity would still be a long way off being rolled out to humans.
The man told the BBC he hopes he's 'doing something good for humanity' and positive results might come out of it.
He also described injecting himself with snake venom and letting snakes bite him as 'a lifestyle' he's adopted in the hope that he could help advance research into treating and helping people bitten by deadly snakes.
Research using his blood protected mice from what should have been a lethal dose of venom from 13 species of snake, and partially protected them from six other snakes' venom.
Joe Harker