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Ludwin, born in the mid 1960s, is a London-based punk musician who has maintained a morbid curiosity about reptiles. He has been doing what he calls, “self-immunization’ for the past 28 years, and this immunization involves milking and injecting small amounts of snake venom into his body. In October 1988, was the first time he started injecting snake venom into his wrist out of sheer curiosity. Ludwin refers to this as vaccinology, “the oldest form of medicine”. Despite receiving many warnings from medical experts, Ludwin continues to extract and inject venom from venomous snakes and have been doing that ever since.

Ludwin is 51 years old and still injects venom into his body routinely with the hopes of developing antivenom. Nicknamed “Venom Superman”, Ludwin describes the pain of injecting venom into his body as “the pain is like someone has taken a sledgehammer, smashed it on your hand and then holds a flame underneath”. He has been injecting himself with snake venom for the past 31 years and he has developed some sort of immunity to the snake venom.

Early Life
Rock singer Steve Ludwin, a former member of the London-based Little Hell band, was born on an air force base in Los Angeles. His father was a Pan Am pilot and his mother a Canadian stewardess. Ludwin grew up with his two sisters in Connecticut town and later moved to London in 1987 when he was about 17 years old. Born with a love of animals, mostly snakes and other reptiles, Ludwin parents gave him his first boa constrictor at the age of 10. It was in London that he started his venom injection journey.

Ludwin’s father took him at the age of 10 years to the Miami Serpentarium, which was a famous tourist attraction where visitors would pay and watch famous herpetologist Bill Haast extracted venom from poisonous snakes, much in the same way Ludwin does it. Haast also believed that his blood could cure snakebite victims. Ludwin became fascinated with injecting snake venom after encountering the works of the late Bill Haast who was the founder and director of the Miami Serpentarium Laboratories. Bill Haast dedicated his life to venom research and a pioneer of venom production. Haast was the first westerner to start injecting himself with snake venom. Haast died June 15, 2011 at the age of 100.

Career
Ludwin studied at the Eckerd College in Florida — a small liberal arts school. When Ludwin moved to London in 1987 he got his dream at the Vivarium in Walthamstow, which supplied animals to zoos and universities where he unpacked reptiles. This gave Ludwin the much-desired access to snakes and eventually started taking them home to milk venom and inject it into his body.

His career as a musician also started in London when he became a member of the London-based Little Hell band. As a musician, he wrote songs for Placebo and Ash, and played the reading festival at Nirvana. While doing tours and recording, he experimented with snake venom. In the early 1990’s, “after several semi-successful indie groups, he landed a millon-pound deal with Island Records” with his band Carrie.

Scientific Research
Ludwin milks snake venom from a variety of dangerous snakes and regularly injects it into his body. He started off by injecting diluted doses of snake venom weekly but has now increased the strength of the doses. Ludwin extracts venom by squeezing the heads of the snake against a plastic film covering a shot glass where the snake ejects venom when it bites down on the film covering the glass. Ludwin recalls the experience of injecting snake venom as injecting Tabasco sauce in a wound and rubbing it. Ludwin describes his first experience as “its like drinking coffee: it’s an energy boost.” He also boasts that he hasn’t had a cold or flu in 13 years. Despite his acquired immunity to deadly snakes, Ludwin has received multiple deadly snakebites and have come close to near death experience.

Ludwin mission is to save lives with snake venom. However, he has had one near death experience when he “overdosed” by injecting too much venom into his arms. Snake Venom is a “highly modified saliva containing zootoxins”, which has the ability to paralyze and kill any living specie that is bitten by a snake. Many scientists have been studying Ludwin and they have been harvesting “copies of antibodies generated by Steve Ludwin’s immune system in response to the injections with snake venoms”.

Ludwin studies the hemotoxin effects on blood and how the hemotoxin causes tissue destruction; he also explains that he has no medical background or any formal education that prepared him for this journey, and does not know exactly how injecting snake venom might affect his body. Ludwin defines injecting snake venom as self-immunizing and explains that he has been doing this for well over 20 years. Neurotoxins in the cobra venom add “extra speed into normal abilities” by boosting his energy and speed. Apparently, Americans and Chinese injected horses with Cobra venom which made them outperform their abilities, was a major motivational factor for Ludwin to use venom as part of his daily routine.

Bill Haast treated people with polio and Multiple Sclerosis and had upwards of 4000 patient. Ludwin mentioned that Haast also had patients that couldn’t even walk and he prescribed and administered medicines with snake venom as part of the key ingredient for the medicine. Ludwin also mentioned that Haast gave snake bit victims doses of his blood and they survived. Haast practices were later shutdown by the FDA. Frank Markland, PHD, Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Medicine at the University of Southern California is spearheading a research on the effects of copperhead venom on breast cancer and ovarian cancer cells. Markland studies illustrate that snake venom protein can be used to fight cancer. Ludwin is pursuing partnership with Markland in doing further research into snake venom as a medicine. Ludwin is also working with a group of scientist in Copenhagen, where they are farming his antibodies to produce antivenom that is safer and cost effective to combat fatal snakebites. Ludwin believes that anything that has the ability to kill you, can also save you.