Want to be a lab rat? The U of M has a website where you can sign up.

For reasons I’m not sure I fully understand, I like being a test subject in clinical research studies.

I once signed up for a study at Mayo Clinic that examined the efficacy of a colon cancer screening test.

I let my DNA be tested in a large-scale community health research study run by HealthPartners.

I answer survey questions every week for a respiratory disease study conducted by the University of Minnesota called “Got Snot?”

And when I go to the Minnesota State Fair, I drop by the university’s Driven to Discover building, where researchers recruit volunteers among the teeming masses streaming by on their way to corn dogs and mini-donuts.

That’s where I got my grip strength measured and had a tiny camera stuck in my ear to test an ear wax cleaning device.

Even my dog is enrolled in a wide-ranging research initiative called the Dog Aging Project that involves answering an extensive online questionnaire about doggie diet, disposition and exercise, downloading health data and reporting results of canine mobility and cognitive tests.

Why do I do it? It’s true that sometimes when I’m giving researchers a cheek swab, it crosses my mind that maybe my DNA will be used in a secret government project to clone an army of super soldiers.

But mostly it’s kind of fun to see modern science being practiced firsthand. I feel like I’m doing my small part to advance knowledge. And sometimes I learn a little bit about myself.

For example, according to my DNA, about a quarter of my ancestry comes from southwestern and northeastern Europe. And I likely have wet ear wax and an aversion to cilantro.

I’m not alone in offering myself as a guinea pig.

For the past few years, Minneapolis mom Tiffany Blomgren and her sons, Greer, 11; Artem, 8; and Otto, 6, have volunteered in several University of Minnesota research studies.

The four of them have given urine, stool, spit and blood samples, provided fingernail and hair clippings and cheek swabs, gotten an MRI, immersed a hand in a bucket of ice water and kept logs of their sleep and stress levels.

“I’ve done one about how my brain works,” said Artem, who has worn an EEG cap to measure his brain waves while doing math equations or answering questions on an iPad.

The Blomgrens are typically the healthy volunteer participants in studies that need a control group as a comparison for patients with a particular condition.

For example, Otto recently had an MRI so researchers could see what a healthy brain looks like compared with a child of a similar age suffering from a genetic condition called adrenoleukodystrophy that damages the membrane insulating nerve cells in your brain.

Tiffany Blomgren participated in a study looking at the effects of menopause on women’s blood pressure. She was one of the premenopausal comparisons, having her blood pressure response measured in different conditions that included holding her breath, squeezing an object or immersing her hand in icy water.

The Blomgrens are also enrolled in the same Got Snot? respiratory disease study I’m enrolled in. But they’ve provided more interesting information to researchers than I have.

“We’ve sent in [nasal swabs] three times now,” Blomgren said.

Depending on the study, participants can get some compensation. Blomgren recalls getting $100 for a study involving collecting urine for 24 hours.

I think I got a $5 debit card for my participation in the Got Snot? study and a book of postage stamps to answer questions for the colon cancer study.

If you participate in a study at the Driven to Discover building at the State Fair, you will usually come away with a small U of M logo drawstring backpack.

Researchers try to set those kind of payments at a level that compensates volunteers for their time and inconvenience, but not so high that it would amount to a coercive incentive to get someone to participate against their better judgment or to sign up for a study in which they don’t meet the criteria.

Volunteers like the Blomgrens don’t do it for the money.

“I feel like this is how science moves forward,” said Blomgren, who works as a pediatrics ICU nurse and has seen how advances in knowledge can change care practices. “I think it’s even more important now. If I can be of help, I’m just interested in it and happy to contribute.”

Blomgren said she makes sure to get buy-in from her kids before they participate in a study.

“I always ask them before I sign them up,” she said. She said her sons like the attention and social aspect of interacting with researchers.

“I want to do it because I know it helps other people and helps science learn about other diseases that we don’t really know much about,” Artem said.

There is the potential that people with a disease could get some benefit from participating in a clinical trial studying their medical condition, according to Dr. Joanne Billings, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Medical School who does research on cystic fibrosis.

But Billings said study participants often participate in research so that scientists can learn something that will help other people with their condition.

“They say, ‘I’ve been suffering for years, and I want to help other people get better treatment,’” said Melena Bellin, a pediatric endocrinologist at the U who researches problems involving the pancreas.

Those motivations are reflected in a 2023 survey of participants in clinical research trials by the Center for Information and Study on Clinical Research Participation.

Survey respondents said the top two reasons for their participation were “To help advance science and the treatment of my disease/condition,” and “To help others who may suffer from my disease/condition.”

In Minnesota, research participants like the Blomgrens can easily find a way to volunteer thanks to a program called StudyFinder.

Developed in 2013, it’s a website where members of the public can connect with hundreds of University of Minnesota research studies looking for volunteer participants.

You can search for studies concerning a particular condition like asthma, diabetes or depression. You can browse by categories like cancer, women’s health or blood disorders. You can tailor your search for studies that need healthy volunteers.

Even if you don’t end up volunteering, thumbing through the website gives you a glimpse of the wide variety of research being done at the university.

Among the approximately 400 research projects currently on the site, there’s a study recruiting volunteers to research causes of shoulder injuries to athletes spiking volleyballs, a study testing a “full-mouth electronic toothbrush” compared with a conventional electric toothbrush and a study about how attention skills influence memory, language and speech fluency in stutterers and non-stutterers.

Typically, two to five new studies are added to the website every week. In the past year, the site attracted more than 60,000 visits and about 4,000 user emails to study teams expressing interest, according to Megan Hoffman, a program director with the university’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute.

The willingness of volunteers to participate in clinical trials is “hugely important,” said Aaron Hellem, assistant professor in physical therapy at the U of M medical school.

Hellem used StudyFinder to recruit active volleyball players for a study on shoulder pain.

Without human volunteers, researchers would have to rely on laboratory animals to try to come up with solutions.

“Until you’re bringing it to the level of the complexity of the human organism, you never know if it’s going to really work,” he said.

Other databases of research studies enrolling volunteer subjects include ClinicalTrials.gov, an international listing maintained by the National Library of Medicine.

There’s also a program run by the National Institutes of Health called ResearchMatch where you can create a profile to sign up for email alerts from studies around the country that might need your help.

When I signed up on ResearchMatch, for example, I started getting emails from the University of Utah wondering if I kept my extracted wisdom teeth and would be willing to donate them. Researchers there are studying tooth enamel in a project to identify American POWs and MIAs.

In general, I found the U of M’s StudyFinder site to be the most user-friendly way to look for volunteer opportunities that are a good fit locally. Other places are adopting the university’s model.

The university has made the StudyFinder tool available free to other institutions on an open source code basis. Some of the other places using the U’s tool include Penn State, Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of Wisconsin.

If you want any more motivation to volunteer for a research study, scientists will soon celebrate something called Clinical Trials Day on May 20.

It commemorates the day in 1747 when James Lind, a ship’s surgeon in the British Royal Navy, started what is often considered to be the first randomized clinical trial in an effort to treat scurvy suffered by sailors at sea.

Lind’s discovery that citrus fruits fixed the vitamin C deficiency behind the debilitating disease would eventually help Britain to become a naval superpower. It also led to the reason why Americans started referring to Brits as “limeys.”

Science, right?