25 Less Than Ethical Experiments That Would Never Fly Today
Ever wonder why fiction is filled with mad science? Because laws and regulations keep you from doing the really WEIRD experiments.
What kind of experiments would internet users try to conduct if not for those pesky ethical concerns? You won't believe what some of these people came up with!
1.
I'm curious what happens if I isolate a person from, say, the color blue until the age of 10 and then put her in a room full of blue things.-u/HarmoniumSong
2.
What could happen if you conjoin two brains in a way that allows them to communicate-u/ImpressStrict1366
3.
How long can we prolong human life by replacing failing organs and whatnot with ones harvested from clones-u/_RealFakeDoors
4.
How a child would turn out with exactly 0 human contact, just very basic necessities met by robots. It would be interesting to see exactly how animalistic we are at the core-u/Historical_Collar_33
5.
How many people would I need to throw off the Empire State Building before the pile is big enough for them to survive the fall-u/Iamcryingontheinside
6.
I’d love to see the results of more twins studies done under controlled circumstances, but splitting up twins just because I’m curious about what makes people tick.-u/popejubal
8.
Give a baby a proportioned weight vest all its life, increasing the weight as it gets older. When it’s 11, will it be able to jump as high as all the other kids because its body has adapted? If yes, when we take it off can It jump much higher?-u/scemscem
10.
Any experiment that checks to see if a medicine is safe for pregnant ladies to consume... Would require trials of pregnant ladies consuming the medications before we knew the medications were completely safe.There are precious few Pregnancy Category A medicines.Most medications (like acetaminophen aka Tylenol) given to pregnant women are under Category B, "Animal reproduction studies have failed to demonstrate a risk to the fetus and there are no adequate and well-controlled studies in pregnant women."-u/lub-shh-dub
11.
Dr. Curt Richter conducted an experiment with rats that essentially concluded that the presence of hope could prolong the ability to stay alive when faced with life-threatening circumstances.During the first part of the experiment, rats were put in a bucket of water. After about 15 minutes the rat would begin to drown. The scientist plucked the rat out of the bucket of water merely seconds before death. After a couple of days, the scientist repeated this process. However, instead of drowning after 15 minutes of treading water, some of the rats survived for up to 2 and half days.The scientist concluded that the rats were able to continue swimming because they retained the HOPE of being rescued, as this is what they experienced during the first trial.It would be interesting to see how the concept of hope influences humans under similar circumstances.-u/Public_Bullfrog_382
12.
I'd create an exact clone of me as a baby and send him to be raised somewhere else, by people who are as different from my parents as I can find, then meet up with him once he's, say, 30, and see how differently we turned out in terms of personality-u/WesleyPatterson
13.
It would be cool if we could somehow bring back different species of humans that went extinct. Like Neanderthals, Denisovans, etc. and see how they’d differ, if at all, from us if raised in a modern society. It’s been talked about, but likely will never happen due to ethical concerns.-u/jackiepoo0804
14.
I'd like to know how how much of a human body could be replaced by cybernetics.I imagine we have/could make a good enough equivalent to quite a few organs but other organs I doubt could be replaced as easily It would also be interesting to see the mental impact of having so much of your body replaced.-u/northraider123
17.
I'd like to see an experiment where a child is brought up believing a fictional piece of work like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings is a real religion.Think of it like the Truman Show, but instead of a show it's just a household that worships Nic Cage or something. It would be interesting to see how behavior would deviate and/or be similar to other religious groups.-u/10sansari
18.
My brother and I have talked a lot about a special version of the Olympics where the competitors can use whatever and however many performance-enhancing drugs they want just to push the absolute limits of what humans can do. We figure it probably wouldn’t pan out though, since most of the athletes would probably just push themselves to death.-u/NoLifeMax
19.
If you had 5 families living in one house and there were five kids each, all born the same day, same gender, etc; and the parents never once spoke to the child. All 5 sets of parents spoke their own language (let’s just say Russian, English, Chinese, Spanish, and German) and the kids grew up hearing all of that but never being spoken to. What language would the children learn or would they learn any?-u/Mountain_Ostrich0
20.
How many people would be willing to participate in incentive-based eugenics? IE - you get a timeshare in Florida if you promise to never have kids.-u/ItsPaulKerseysCar
21.
If we're getting political: Organize a project where groups of people identifying with the same political belief govern a small region/city/county with full political control. So observing how a 100% leftist city would fare. And what a centrist city would do compared to a far-right city. I'd be curious if those people would either start splintering into different sections, or harmonize into one big group, and if they'd fare relatively well or if they started to veer into extremism-u/notabuttersoup
23.
Leave a bunch of babies in an isolated area alone (obviously feed them and stuff) but do not intervene otherwise and see what/how they develop a language.-u/_forum_mod
24.
I’m fully convinced that living animal organisms need conflict or difficulty to survive. I’d like to see what happens if you took infants, put them in an artificial world, and provided them absolutely everything they needed to live, without them ever learning there’s a world outside. Obviously, it’s ethically atrocious, but I want to know what would happen-u/RavenStrider526
25.
Injecting mosquitos with vaccines so that they spread them instead, I'd love to see if that'd actually work.-u/FestieBoy
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