Have you ever risked your physical wellbeing for the good of science?

Near mental breakdowns because you had to work sixty hour weeks and go in on Sundays to check on cell cultures don’t count – everybody does that nowadays. If you can’t hack it I suggest that you take up computational biology instead, then you can check on experiments from home, smoking a pipe while in your underwear.

Anyway: risking wellbeing. I can’t decide if it’s admirable or stupid. Barry Marshall got a Nobel for ingesting H. pylori. Isaac Newton famously poked himself in the eye with a needle to investigate colour perception. Both actions were admirable if slightly unsettling.

But what about what Brady Barr has been doing?

He’s a Texan whose research involves catching wild crocodiles. He also looks suspiciously like the late Steve Irwin and is followed everywhere by a film crew from National Geographic.

You can probably guess the rest of the press release. Get closer to the crocs, less stressful for them than being ‘wrestled and roped’ on cable TV, yadda yadda.

Publicity stunt or brilliant out-of-the-box thinking?