When you watch Tim Friede's now decade-old homemade videos on his YouTube channel, showing him getting bit by the world's deadliest snakes – and surviving – you might not instantly think of him as a pioneer in the world of immunology.

But Friede's videos are actually only the showy part of a self-immunization project he undertook for nearly two decades in which he injected himself over 800 times with increasingly high venom from a wide-range of serpents. This effectively hacked his immune system to produce some very valuable antibodies.