What are some experiments or research we could do that would yield informative and useful results, but may be quite unethical?

Send all the world’s top athletes (track & field) to Afghanistan & see if they qualify for the next Paralympics?
Ouch, that stings a little!

Research on how to rehab passive aggressive types.

Every time they fail in a straightforward response you juice ‘em with about 10,000 volts until their brains are effectively rewired to be honest and forthcoming.

Allow me to be head switch flipper. ;-)

I recall reading in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich that German ‘scientists’ and ‘doctors’ at various concentration camps often experimented with how long humans could survive exposure to below-freezing weather by deliberately putting them outside, wet and naked, in freezing weather, and timing how long it took for them to succumb. They actually studied this and tabulated the results.

No one can deny that it’s useful information to know, and no one can argue that it was collected in an ethical manner.

@CWOTUS There were many worse experiments than that… They conducted surgeries on people with absolutely no anesthetic to name the worst of many more.

But that being said… American Psychiatry is what it is because people were used as human guinea pigs all throughout the turn of the century.

The Actress Francis Farmer to name one of many nameless faceless people treated by electric shock therapy and forced labotomy and insulin shock therapy as well.

stem cell research

For a long time if you attended hospital with a serious head injury you were often given IV steroids on the basis that IV steroid reduce swelling and reducing swelling must be good for someone with a head injury to stop a build up of pressure damaging the brain. Whether you got this treatment or not depended on the doc looking after you as no one had ever done any research, it was just expert opinion. But for a long time it there was no research to find which treatment was the best because you need an ethics committee to sign off on it and no ethics committee would let you experiment on unconscious people even if you were only selecting between two commonly used treatments and seeing what happens. When the research was finally carried out (it was called the CRASH trial) it became very clear that the last thing you want to do to someone with a head injury is give them IV steroids. Not only was it not as effective as doing nothing it dramatically increased the risk of the patient dying. Over night the chance of surviving a serious head injury doubled

Just because a piece of research is deemed unethical by an ethics committee doesn’t necessarily mean its bad.

I’d like to see a modification to cocaine and crack that secretly sterilizes the users. That would eliminate the horror of crack babies.

Hey, you did say unethical. Right?

What we could do? Well all medical/pharma/genetic/nutrition experimentation could be streamlined going from the lab directly to controlled mandatory human testing. Same with plenty of psychotherapeutic efforts. Other experiments in environmental damage, resource exploitation, space travel, social engineering, criminal punishment could all be done for various unethical costs.

We could sell white girls into the white slave market in order to see how quickly they get pregnant.

@wundayatta If we throw in some birth control we can get a NIH grant comparing the efficacy of the different methods.

@worriedguy Woohoo! Do you want to write the grant, or should I? Oh, wait. This is hypothetical. In the real world, we have an IRB. Do you think they could be bribed?

We could find out how specific traumas effect people, and which types of trauma do the most damage, but isolated so that you don’t have to go “how much of this is because they got their head shoved in the toilet every day at school, and how much of this is because the parents used them as a pawn in the divorce”? But, you know, purposefully traumatizing children is pretty unethical. Like we could find out, ok, so you know how children than are orally sexually violated will often have dental work be a trigger years after? So then we could find out if the reverse is true – if children have dental trauma, is oral sex (especially on penises, where the mouth is being penetrated) then a huge trigger for them? How closely linked are dental work and oral sex???

The effects of various levels of infant shaking.

They can’t all be bad. Somethin’ has to make the kid shut up.

Genetically create a human/chimpanzee hybrid and study it through adulthood.

Create identical siblings and raise them in various states of human neglect. For example: one child is hugged and treated well, but never spoken to. One child is left completely alone after infancy, and is fed through a door in a wall. Another child is left alone, but is spoken to through a radio. You get the idea.