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Ten Strangely Cruel Science Experiments
aalobode writes "The Times of London has a current story based on the review of a book by Alex Boase, Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments. There they list the top science experiments — including the one from which the book gets its name — that were conducted by otherwise sane humans who tragically or otherwise ignored the effect of their research on the subjects themselves. Nowadays, most institutions have a review board for research on human subjects which would flag most proposals that could lead to harm for the subjects, but not so in the past. 'Another 1960s experiment, in which ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were then required to fill in insurance forms before the crash -- ostensibly so the Army was not financially liable for any deaths or injuries. They were actually unwitting participants in an experiment: the plane was not crippled at all. It revealed that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual when filling in forms.'"
Nothing beats the lolocaust. Mengele FTW!
Submissions from kdawson and Zonk. Oh the irony on the last one.
Fortunately the Geneva Convention made Slashdot fire JonKatz using the Junis fiasco as a reason.
Leave it to the government to make you fill out a form before you die.
I'm surprised none of them pulled out a pistol and shot the guy making the request.
I wonder if this will be part of Hillary's health care program.
...but he didn't flap his ears fast enough.
Correction: Author's name is Alex Boese, not Boase or Goatse.
-The world would be a better place if everyone had a hoverboard
http://weblogs.marylandweather.com/2007/11/first_earthling_in_space_died.html
RIP Laika
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Vista as among the cruelest experiments wrought on unsuspecting test subjects?
Monstar L
I think conducting a study lacking informed consent where they denied syphilis treatment to over 300 people tops those in the list. And this went on until 1972. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Study_of_Untreated_Syphilis_in_the_Negro_Male
Man, that's cruel. Fetch the soft cushion while you're at it.
That most of our scientific advances were made with experiments that would now be classified as cruel. Particularly psychological, Zimbardo et al, Harlowe et al etc etc. Not suggesting that these are morally fine, but we should be careful about criticizing experiments that have contributed to our understanding. On a different note however, the experiments mentioned don't seem to have contributed an awful lot :P
i know not what weapons the next world war will be fought with, but world war IV will be fought with sticks and stones.
fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual
Yes, mistakenly shitting one's pants instead of standard-operating-procedure use of latrine.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
1) I would assume I had already signed such a waiver when I first enlisted.
2) What was the Army going to do if they didn't? Suddenly save the plane to avoid any lawsuits?
they made this massive social experiemt about how a poor population, which has a 1000 year long history of ethnic conflict, reacts when you take over their country by military force.
Until today researchers have found no clear answer as to why the population neglects the truth, that it actually has been fried,äh freed.
High-school chemestry, on a geek-pr0n scale:
20,000 lbs of metallic Sodium being dropped in a lake.
Oh yeah baby, you roll those barrels in there!
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
"It revealed that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual when filling in forms."
I would think that the soldiers made the mistakes willingly to avoid to let the "army not financially liable for any deaths or injuries.". Why the would like to save the Army (instead of their families) if they think tell are going to die?
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
Sugar Experiments Of Mental Patients.
In 1947-1949 a group of mental patients in Sweden were used as subjects in a full-scale experiment designed to bring about tooth decay. They were fed copious amounts of candy, and many of them had their teeth completely ruined. But, scientifically speaking, the experiment was a huge success.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Report here. Select a random group of ignorant African men, circumcise some of them. Give them vague advice on safe sex, then tell them to go out and have sex. See how many of them come back with HIV.
It was concluded that you're about 50% more likely to catch HIV if you're uncircumcised. I'd say, especially in a society where circumcision is not standard (i.e. not Israel, USA, Philippines, etc.), if you've just had part of your cock lobbed off, you're very likely to change your sexual habits and people are less likely to have sex with you. If you're just given advice and then told to go away, you're more likely to carry on as usual.
Experimentation on the negro is not exactly new, of course.
When I read that they administered 3000 times the amount of a human dose to an elephant, it got me curious. http://www.sandiegozoo.org/animalbytes/t-elephant.html It says males can reach up to 15000 lbs, and females 8000 lbs. I assumed that the average male is 180 lbs and the average female is 130 lbs (I know I'm not really being accurate, but I just wanted ball park figures). That means that the average male elephant is about 83.33 times the weight of a human male, and the average female elephant is about 61.54 times the size of a human female. So the administered about thirty-six times what they needed for a relative average male elephant dose. YIKES! Let me know if my math or assumptions were silly, and correct them if you can. I think it's no surprise that the elephant died with that much of an overdose.
Nothing to worry. Just testing the typical reaction of geeks, nerds and similar species.
In 1960, a guy conducted a psychological experiment where he took identical twin girls from an orphanage and purposefully separated them to different families with the express intent of them having no communication with each other - not even to know they had a sister.
They both found out after 30 years that they were part of an experiment.
I can understand that some twins are separated by accident, but how would you feel to know that you missing 30 years of growing up with your sibling because of some experiment?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/news/2007/10/twins_separated_as_babies_beco_1.html
As for fictional experiments, Portal was pretty cruel and uh entertaining.
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Top/experiments/P0 This site details some more crazy experiments culled from the same book.
Putting someone under stress, like a gun to someones head might cause them to screw up filling out a form? Who knew? Thanks to science we now know.
Would they feel disappointment thought? Perhaps if we tell them after they hand the forms back on the flight, that they were filled out wrong and indeed their families would be receiving no benefits. What would happen? Time for a follow up experiment.
Thomas edison and the war of the currents. Edison did some very cruel experiments on animals to show that AC was more dangerous than DC. He electrocuted dogs, elephants and even advocated for the use of the electric chair powered specifically by AC current.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_currents
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
What about the Milgram Experiment of 1961, in which nearly 2/3rds of subjects were prepared to administer a lethal electrical shock to a partner hidden in another room, just because the scientist conducting the experiment said it was necessary? While no one was actually being shocked, many of the participants who inflicted the fake shocks were emotionally distressed by the ordeal. Derren Brown repeated the experiment in 2006, and obtained essentially the same results. Youtube videos of this are available.
What about the risks taken by the patients and surgeons who pioneered open heart surgery? A great recount of those gruesome days is provided by the book "King of Hearts", which details the career of Dr. C. Walton Lillehei?
"The Times of London has a current story based on the review of a book..." So this is a Slashdot story on a Times of London story on a book review on a book about science experiments...
/offtopic, I realize...
This is like saying that Rock sucks if you're listening to a high-school garage band tuning up.
Jazz is more than "soft" stuff that you probably associate it with. (like anything by Kenny G. which does, in fact, suck.)
Jazz has so many different genres inside of it. You should seriously look at some of the non-soft ones. Namely, Bebop and Free Jazz. Take a listen to Charlie Parker's "Ko Ko" from over 50 years ago. Insane chops on all the players. (Fast, hard... not soft.) Want something modern? Medeski, Martin and Wood albums are a start. (jam-based funky jazz)
Also, although you might consider it "soft" it should be considered "cool," - Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue." That's the album I buy for folks who "hate jazz" and all have enjoyed that album and opened up to Jazz after that. (Plus, all women I've introduced that to now love the thing.)
But perhaps I'm wrong, and you'll just continue to stagnate with Korn, or DethKlok, or whatever...
My favourite along these lines is Jack Barnes who discovered the extremely poisonous box Irukandji jellyfish (Carukia barnesi): "The jellyfish itself was identified in 1964 by Dr. Jack Barnes; in order to prove it was the cause of Irukandji syndrome, he captured the tiny jelly and stung himself and his son." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carukia_barnesi They were both hospitalized, as was a life gaurd he also stung to make triply sure.
Scientists are at least as amoral as the people/corporations/governments that fund them. None of this should be a surprise to anyone. If vivesection or giving subjects disease or electric shocks or whatever might be dreamed up is called for, the scientist will dutifully do it in the name of learning. Or money. Whichever.
Perhaps more scientifically relevant than the rest, with better anesthesia, but freakish nonetheless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdJGlYOL0r4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1263758.stm
http://www.freetimes.com/stories/14/46/whites-anatomy
In other news, Dr. White was my neurosurgeon once a long time ago. I suspect that's where my extra head came from, but you can never really know.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Don't forget the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male", which began in 1932. Even after a cure for syphilis was discovered in 1947 (penicillin), the study continued until 1972, purely to observe how the disease progresses and kills.
Some events of this study are chronicled in the HBO movie "Miss Evers' Boys", in which a nurse (Miss Evers) knows that her patients are going to die from syphilis but does nothing to help their medical condition.
The more I think about the many, more serious experiments that were omitted from "Elephants on Acid", the more I think the book is a bad joke.
I don't see the experiment concerning running a human through giant laboratory mazes with potentially deadly pitfalls. Armed only with pogo shoes and a trans-dimensional gun, the person is forced to dodge machine gun fire, suffer taunting quips from the AI running the experiments, and even commit fratricide. I will say that the carrot at the end of the stick, the Portal Song, does make the reward outweigh the risk.
How about Dr. Jack Barnes who exposed himself and his son to the venom of the Irukandji jellyfish
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
Perhaps the book is written to indicate how much better science is now. How many wonderful controls we have. And of course it would be correct. Except for the Texas A&M biological research lab that was closed for making mistakes that a high school science student learns not to make. Or that we routinely subject out children to unscientific studies in education, nutrition, and marketing just to see what will happne. Or we continue to sacrifice huge number of animals with little scientific justification, because they are animals and have no right not to be sacrificed.
Perhaps this is the similarity between Tuskagee and most continuing research that the parent was looking for. The participants in the study were not considered human persons, but but merely humans without the rights of a person. Just like few would have a problem with sacrificing baby monkeys to study the effects of drugs during pregnancy, who would have a problem with this experiment? Are animals not there to serve the human person? This is a very convenient philosophy which allows to live with collateral losses, torturing enemy combatants, and spewing deadly substances into poor neighborhoods.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
thanks i was getting depressed after realizing I'm pushing 30, living at my mom's, my FOSS MMORPG isn't unique at all, and my entire social life consists of posting to slashdot. Now I have purpose again :)
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
My guess is because they were going for a fairly light-hearted story, with a few light gasps and chills, and not trying to get people actually furious. The last thing I'd put the Tuskegee study in is with a bunch of experiements described as wacky. Would you?
Looking at the article, I think the summary is mistitled. The article doesn't talk about having the "cruelest" experiments, but simply the wackiest ones. For example, number seven about arousing male turkeys with a model of a female turkey is hardly cruel, and as the parent pointed out many really cruel ones are omitted.
I was also reminded of another famous experiment, the Milgram experiment where a group of test subjects were instructed to shock other test subjects. The entire setup was false - those said to be receiving shocks were only acting, but those told to administer the shocks did not know this. They still continued to administer (fake) shocks because they had been instructed to do so. This may not have been cruel to those pretending to be shocked, but I certainly would not want to have been one of those told to administer the shocks, as I would doubtless have had trouble sleeping at night after if I had done so. The Wikipedia article as usual has much more detail on this experiment.
I saw this a few months ago: The Top 20 Most Bizarre Experiments of All Time.
Although it's on a website called Museum of Hoaxes, I know for sure at least some (if not all) of these are true. Students learn about Milgram's obedience experiments in Psychology 101 (check out the videos on YouTube).
"Even when all that remained was a head on a stick, the male turkeys remained turned on."
Strangely appropriate for slashdot...
The large Hadron Collider is a moby piece of equipment. Built in the former LEP tunnel at CERN, it will be operational in May 2008. For the first time in history, we may be able to reach energy levels enough to produce particle-mass black holes (60% probability according to some, CERN just report it as "possible"). The safety analysis concludes that this is not supposed to be a problem because of fast evaporation by Hawking radiation. Alas, Hawkling radiation has never been observed in practice. It fits nicely with the standard model, but so does also models without it ...
This could be a cruel experiment indeed, if we happen to falsify Hawking and create a stable black hole with velocity below earth escape (which LHC, contrary to cosmic rays do nicely by head-on collisions, thereby eliminating momentum). Sadly, I predict a lack of people being able to sumbit this to the Darwin awards page, even less any web (or planet) at all ...
I wish this was just a joke, now this is more of black humour. While it's just a small probability of things going boom in the wrong way; given the hazard, the risk is quite large anyway. Also, sadly, the risk evalutation is highly unserious compared to, for example, nuclear power plant regulation. One good place for further reading is http://risk-evaluation-forum.org/
If you have a scientist who is devoutly religious, and who believes that he is serving God's will by torturing his test subjects, there's no end of the misery, since there no beginning of basic scientific or medical ethics. Religion teaches us that other people are not worthy of God's love, and can be used in any way we see fit. An atheist, one who is not beholden to fascism or communism, which are also religions after a fashion, is far more likely to see a human being or even an animal as being worthy of compassion and mercy. Now mod me as Flamebait so no-one else gets riled up by this.
This sig, aah-ah, is comin' like a ghost-sig...
Another 1960s experiment, in which ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were then required to fill in insurance forms before the crash -- ostensibly so the Army was not financially liable for any deaths or injuries.
They were actually unwitting participants in an experiment: the plane was not crippled at all. It revealed that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual when filling in forms.
It immediately reminded me of Stanley Milgram's Experiments. Where the test subjects are 'set up' and are tested on something different than appearances would indicate. They're tested in extreme conditions and caused such a shock at their time that I surely think they should be #1 on this list. I think Milgram started working on a really incredible part of human psychology: the unconscious rules that we live by so that our society can function. The weirdest part of what his research led to, imho, is that these un-knowing rules are so secretive; we hide them from ourselves. They have not been studied before, or since as far as I know. Until recently...
A group of Internet geeks got together on alt.seduction.fast and started working together to combine resources and model these secret behaviour rules in order to improve their success with women. They have had great success at what they call The Game. As these rules emerged they quickly realized that they are useful in all social situations rather then just the art of the 'pick-up'. Consequently several of these previous geeks are now somewhat superstars in their circles.
What's ironic to me though, is that knowledge of the built-in secret social rules be it Milgram's or the pick-up artists, does not translate to ease of their manipulation. There seems to be a built-in restraint component that does not go away merely because a subject knows it exists. As anthropologists would say, the system is protecting itself...
Now, when one starts to ponder what is often called 'High Level' game. Is it unusual for it to drift into analyses of people in the highest strata of society who use these rules to maintain their already dominant position? I don't want to go all 'Alex Jones' on this, but how much truth resides in conspiracy students who aren't content with staring at the surface veneer of the mass propaganda force-fed to us? Zeitgeist would translate more or less to 'spirit of the age'. Is Zeitgeist the true spirit of our age? Be your own judge, but be enlightened by the journey.
Thank you.
Liberty.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I built a news site for software developers and other geeks, which every 12 seconds flashes a message saying "Blow-up dolls are fun!" The goal is to see if I can substantially increase the sales of blow-up dolls world wide through subliminal advertising.
So far it's been quite a success. The cruel part is that dependency on blow-up dolls seems to dramatically decrease the subject's aptitude when dealing with the (living) opposite sex, but hey, all science exacts a price.
Ignore that.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4398507,00.html Now that they have admitted to these tests it makes me wonder to what else they did and haven't owned up to.
How has the Standford Prison Experiment not been mentioned yet?
Take a few volunteers pay them $15 a day and split them up into Prisoners and Guards. These are just normal people off the street. The experiment had to be canceled early because of the psychological trauma that the Prisoners were experiencing. And we're not talking 30 days of 60 days in, the experiment was canceled in 6 days.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely
I heard about this experiment where a girl was made to go through a lot of dangerous stuff with the promise to receive cake if she did well, only the cake was a lie!!
The U.S. government conducted tests on thousands of its own soldiers, intentionally exposing them to high-intensity radiation from nuclear bomb blasts. The Nevada nuclear tests produced fallout that blew over St. George, Utah, exposing thousands of civilians to radiation and killing livestock. Many have described the atomic bombs dropped on the civilian centers of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as measures of the A-bomb's sole destructive power in areas that had not been previously bombed with conventional warheads.
The University of Iowa supported research, later dubbed "The Monster Study," that involved teaching young orphans how to stutter in an attempt to prove that stuttering is a learned behavior. While none of the children picked up stuttering, many began to exhibit the same mannerisms as stutterers (low self-esteem, hesitations, etc.)
The study's main researcher, Wendell Johnson, has a campus building named after him (the Wendell Johnson Speech & Hearing Center). Apparently the Univ. of Iowa still doesn't see anything wrong with conducting research on non-consenting children...
LSD has only been done in the gram level once, when college students broke into a lab and snorted a bunch of LSD in powder form (an extremely rare thing indeed), thinking it was cocaine. I believe 3/4 only made it through the night due to being put on a respirator. It was probably a VERY VERY bad trip, to the point of not knowing how to work your lung muscles. Considering a 1990s hit was "100micrograms" or so, a milligram is 10 hits, and a gram is 10,000 hits. Is my math wrong? I'm forgetting some of my college stuff and am too lazy to google ;)
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
That's funny if true, because in German, the word "böse" (also spelled "boese" when umlauts are not available) means "evil".
If it's so secret, then how come I've never heard of it?
The article is more focused on strange/humorous experiments.
Just saw this, the other day, and I wonder how truthful it is.
It's a totally creepy video of a dog's head with some gizmo replacing it's body. Obviously, it crossed my mind that it probably is fake, but I've seen a lot of sources stating otherwise, so I really don't know what to think.
Either way, it's just plain sick.
Some smart French guy said "The downfall of every government begins when its citizens find out they can vote themselves money from the common fund"
As for socialized medicine, When a Canadian finds out they have something serious they come to the USA to get it fixed. If they stay in Canada and wait for the socialized medicine there, they die of their ailment before their turn comes up.
Our electrotechnics/electronics class actually got an assignment from one of our teachers to determine the effects of different voltage/ampèrage combinations, frequencies, etc. for 'the average 25-year old human male'. This 15 minutes after reading the numbers from a book and 10 minutes after a tirade from the teacher explaining that those figures were the result of actual experiments peformed by 'the nazis' and how we, by using those figures, were on some manner of slippery slope because if we use the results of such atrocities now, somebody in the future might think it wasn't such a bad idea, given that we've learned from these things. Another might even say so much as "well, let's not let their suffering/deaths be in vain".
Suffice to say that there's been no other method(s) established and that.. yes, it was awful... but we have the data now, and we'd be stupid not to use it - while at the same time knowing that we should do everything we can to prevent this ever happening again in the future. As far as humans go, that seems to have mostly succeeded (people going on wacky new drugs do so 'voluntarily' for money)... things still have a ways to go for lab animals to be used less and less, unfortunately.
I think someone needs to correct the units in the Wiki article. Is Wikipedia at fault, or is Slashdot at fault? Specifically, "1,200 g (1.2 mg)" suggests that Slashdot is deleting characters outside of ASCII, such as the micro sign.
Gobble Gobble "Even when all that remained was a head on a stick, the male turkeys remained turned on."
There is a German movie called 'Das Experiment', it is about a similar experiment, and in the movie things too ran out of control.
I recommend it to those who are interested in studying the human psyche.
The saddest poem
like a gun to someones head might cause them to screw up filling out a form? Who knew? Thanks to science we now know.
There must be a Department of No Duh somewhere doing all these experiments. About a month ago I heard that a study confirmed that men are less choosy about their sexual partners than females. I think it was an Australian study, so maybe there is an International Institute of Obviousness. I wish to submit a grant request on a study proving that staple guns hurt when pointed at flesh. (I will "encourage" some ex-SCO lawyers to volunteer as subjects.)
Table-ized A.I.
MKULTRA was the code name for a CIA mind-control research program that began in 1950.
Some excerpts from the wikipedia article:
LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge and informed consent.
(About experiments in Canada by Donald Ewen Cameron)
His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions.[18] His treatments resulted in victims' incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents
[...]
The Canadian government was fully aware of this, and had later provided another $500,000 in funding to continue the experiments
Cutting off the entire cock reduces the chances of transmitting HIV by almost 100%. Clearly chopping off everyones penis at birth is the only ETHICAL thing to do.
From exactly where do you attain the information that the counseling on safe sex practices involved telling individuals to have sex or was less complete than the counseling available in Europe or the US?
There's nothing preventing such a study from achieving the same results by providing the most up to date methods of preventing the spread of HIV, so without further information, giving the study the benifit of the doubt seems a reasonable thing to do.
Furthermore, as soon as they had statistical evidence that circumcision actually did something, the study was stopped and circumcision was offered to all members of the study. That's a typical methodology for all case/control studies which discover a large effect on patient outcome in either direction and are stopped early because of it.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
I'm confused as to why you (and the person who replied above me) are so scathing about this research. They took people who would not have been circumcised and did it to some but not to others (so maybe making some better off than others but there was a Pareto improvement in utility). According to the article you quoted;
"All participants were extensively counseled in HIV prevention and risk reduction techniques."
I've not heard anything which has made me think that this is untrue, nor can I see why they would want to do anything other than this (as it also allows them to have a look at how effective education is at the same time). IIRC they actually reported the results early because they considered the findings to be so strong that it would be unethical not to report them early. I would think that the people who carried out the study probably met the very strict ethical requirements of research (hell, even I had to consider the ethical implications of political theory... medical research would be twice as strict).
I mean, it might be true that this research genuinely did abuse the people in it, but I have seen nothing which suggests that it was, and without you providing credible sources against this, then I see what you say as a needless attack on what seems like good quality research which could save thousands (or millions) of lives
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
So is embryonic stem cell research cruel and unnecessary?
Was President George W. Bush correct to limit funding for embryonic stem cell research, while allowing adult stem cell research to continue ahead at full speed?
As you can clearly see, the counseling, testing, and even treatment available to the study members was superior to the generally available treatment at the time.
Please do everyone a favor and save such clearly incitatory comments for the experimentations on subjects which are actually conducted in an unethical fashion, instead of merely those whose study population fits in with your preconceived notions of racism.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
Anyone can see HIV/Intactness link is unproven
Comment removed based on user account deletion
omg wtf bbq FAKE!11eleven!
I like your Macs, but I don't like your Mac users. (with apologies to Gandhi)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Now, rather than just pasting the paragraph which mentions what was on offer (much of which was already available to the general public), read what was actually given - a FIFTEEN TO TWENTY MINUTE session on safe sex advice and the offer of condoms. Imagine being relatively uneducated and suddenly being dragged into an advanced medical centre and being preached at in a single 15-20 minute session on how to reduce the chance of getting a deadly disease. This advice has to compete with your society providing countless irrational approaches to health, and has little context within your existing knowledge or culture.
Yes, it's "less complete than the counseling available in Europe or the US" - but since that'd require a modification of society as a whole, we can't expect that, and it's rather odd that you should even suggest such parity. If we were seriously interested in educating a group of people, however, we might set up regular classes, we might educate the respected elders or other educators to pass on messages, we get to know our students and learn their concerns over a long period. That is education, and that is what gets people to actually listen.
Only once all that is done - and once our subjects have fully understood the implications of anything they're about to get into, which includes voluntary genital mutilation in this case - do we start experimenting with them. Especially since our experiment is based on awareness that some will ignore our advice and do things that cause them to die a slow and horrible death.
We do not give them a 15 minute chat and tell them, "oh btw, don't forget to collect your condoms on the way out!"
Desolate Shore, live on Jazz Club.
Because it's patronizing and manipulative. AIDS, specifically, is a very easy disease to avoid. We know how it spreads. It can be quarantined with words for goodness sake. All that needs to be done is to not do something.
But advocating mass circumcision is like saying, "We know that our little brown brothers can't be expected to refrain from fornicating with everyone they meet. They simply don't have the self control or the capacity to understand the risk. Let's just cut them up a bit, and that'll either reduce their mating opportunities or the infection channel through some unknown mechanism whose possibility I just made up right here."
Advocating circumcision to reduce AIDS risk is like advocating gastric bypass to reduce obesity risk. They're both invasive surgeries (although one could be done outpatient), and the both technically have some numbers to support their efficacy, but they gloss over some underlying assumptions whose implications are staggering.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Way to insult deaf people?
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
I don't know about everybody else, but I was certainly aware that the system was totally broken in an evil kind of way while I was struggling through the middle of it. I just barely managed to crawl across the graduation finish line, having made enemies with several of the staff. I was young, and I could have done much better had I another go at it, but the whole thing seemed monumentally evil at the time. When I came across Ingli'e work, it made a lot more sense.
But the absolutely most mind-blowing points are covered in this video.
-FL
Wow, your comment had me convinced until I read the link provided by an AC:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/1/125028/8808
Very good argument that it was poorly done science in search of a pre-ordained conclusion by an interested party. I read through all the opposing comments as well, and they certainly don't seem satisfactory and are mainly just the Courtier's Reply. To be more explicit, The author of the article points out several ways in which the experiment did not have a sufficient control group and the counter-argument was that some of these are accounted for statistically. However it seems that list of things accounted for doesn't include all of the problems, and the counter-arguer just repeats himself more vehemently and seems to have absolute faith that sufficient rigor was taken despite lack of support from the research paper and multiple instances of other scientists and groups of scientists pointint out the exact same problems brought up in the article. Given the available options, we should in fact not trust the one scientist who has probable cause to fake the results and as the article points out, has already been suspiciously injudicious in his methodology. That's not just an ad hominem attack, the study itself has been attacked successfully, with a large variance on trustworthiness, and the circumstantial evidence only serves to point out that prudence urges caution in accepting the results. That some scientists agree with the research paper is not good support, as people (even scientists) who don't know tend to go with whoever's loudest, which creates false consensus.
(BTW, joe, this long reply is just to summarize the linked article and address possible concerns, not because of anything you said. I'm certainly interested in hearing any rebuttal if anyone has one)
What, was that little tidbit so concealed that they'd need to test for that?
Trainees are potentially heading into very dangerous, very consequential situations. Thousands of years of experience show that stressful training helps them survive these situations and achieve vital objectives. This involves an irreducible level of danger in training exercises.
It is proper to try to minimize the sum of training casualties, battle casualties, and mission-failure consequential casualties. It turns out that under this constraint the optimal number of training casualties is not zero. Sorry, it's a dangerous world.
--phunctor
Aren't there some rather severe psychological effects of being circumcised as an adult? (as in, "severe enough that most doctors won't do it unless there's a pressing medical need")
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The pilot has announced that the plane is going to crash land into the sea in fifteen minutes. The commanding officer on board orders me to fill out a form to release the military from liability.
Situation #1 - I sign the form. I die in the crash. I could've told the commander to fuck off, but I don't care now because I'm dead.
Situation #2 - I refuse to sign the form. I die in the crash. The last fifteen minutes of my life were spent with the commander yelling at me.
Situation #3 - I sign the form. I survive the crash. Everybody's happy.
Situation #4 - I refuse to sign the form. I survive the crash, and so does the commander. I get dishonorably discharged for failure to follow orders.
It would be hard to think logically, but a sliver of hope and a moment of thought would lead me to sign the form.
Although many of the items on the list are indeed cruel and necessary, there are some that aren't really...
Take the guy who tried to infect himself with Yellow Fever in every way imaginable to prove that it wasn't contagious. He was so sure of his hypothesis, that he was willing to risk his own life to prove it.
As long as he's inflicting it upon himself, there's nothing terribly cruel about it
And of course, doing so did provide an important contribution to the development of modern medicine.
Why not put the Stanford Prison Experiment on the list instead.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Wow, your comment had me convinced until I read the link provided by an AC:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/5/1/125028/8808
Frankly, if DailyKos said the sky was blue, I'd go outside to check.
Circumcision itself is still questionable surgery on a child. The cutting-off of a perfectly useful part of one's anatomy for purposes of religious or family tradition or "cleanliness" is sad.
I'd be wondering how the signed forms would survive the ditch in the ocean when I wouldn't. Of course the thinking wouldn't be clear either.
From a perverse POV, The germans experimented on humans doing such bizarre things as ripping off an arm and then trying to stich them on. From all this, many surgical techniques were developed. The same is true of the japanese. In fact, both of them advanced human science a great deal.
OF course, this did not make it right. But it is obvious that the book did not list everything.
Yes, but there are downsides for infant circumcision as well, and in most countries doctors don't circumcise anyone without a pressing medical need.
In Sweden they have a circumcision rate of about 6 in 100,000 because they treat it like other amputations (leg amputation, mastectomy, castration, etc) - it's a last resort when nothing less invasive will work. So if you're heading for the argument "better now than when he grows up", keep in mind that you'd have to preform thousands of circs on infants to prevent one adult from needing one.
Finally, most of the impulse behind anti-circumcision groups and books like The Joy of Uncircumcising comes from the psychological effects of being circed as an infant. A person wouldn't try growing new skin on their penis, wave a protest signs saying "Penis Mutilator", or attempt to ban something if it hadn't had a large impact on them.
Well, that one's such a downer... the book wouldn't sell if it wasn't funny. Read the review:
Mr Boase said. "I confess I had no profound intellectual motive; I simply found them fascinating. They filled me with disbelief, astonishment, disgust and -- best of all - laughter."
I like to place meaningful quotes in my sig, so people will know that I know what meaningful quotes are.
"A person wouldn't ... attempt to ban something if it hadn't had a large impact on them."
What sentient species are you talking about? As far as I can tell, humans have been trying to ban things and activities that don't have a large impact on them since the very first nosy neighbors.
In 1951, at McGill University, in Canada, a group of grad students were put in a dark chamber.
http://www.samadhitank.com/sensorydep.html
"Years later, 1961, Hebb published an introductory note in the book, "Sensory Deprivation" which shed light on the true original purpose..."the work we have done at McGill University began, actually, with the problem of "brainwashing".We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing. What we did say however was true-"
Wbat the found is for the unwitting subjects, the amount of time spent in sensory deprivation, the more personality changed. Most of those subjects who spent more then 3 days, deprived of only the minumum of senses, had experenced a complete change of personality. Almost all long term subjects dropeed out of school.
The subjects earned about $5/day as a stipend.
All science experiments are cruel to the grad students that stay up late at night working on them.
Ah yes; hello Godwin. Were that a civilized discussion were still possible.
First off, it's not exactly difficult to demonstrate the proper use of a condom in 15 to 20 minutes and explain that failure to wear one during intercourse will result in a higher likelyhood of contracting an STD and dying. Furthermore, that was the individualized, mandatory counseling session; participants were recommended to attend other sessions as well. Secondly, these individuals were not "dragged" off the street; they had to volunteer for the study, give informed consent, and were renumerated for their participation.
So you think that instead of attempting to find methods which may decrease the risk of STD transmission, scientists should do nothing?
Since there seems to be some confusion here, I don't particularly have a strong opinion on the actual treatment methodology used in this study or actually agree that the results are likely to be replicable. Those are valid things to attack this study for. What I completely disagree with is the characterization of this study as unethical on the grounds that it some how incited individuals in the control group to have unprotected sex (or failed to provide opportunities for the control group to minimize their risk of contracting HIV) without evidence indicating that that is the case. Is it bad science? Probably. Is the study design inherently unethical? Assuming informed consent was obtained before the treatment modality, not in my opinion.
http://www.donarmstrong.com
LMFAO that should be score 5 funny not -1 troll lollz
I'm surprised that there is no mention of Harry Harlow or Josef Mengele. But then, killing an elephant with LSD is funny, whereas inhumanely cruel experiments of a more scientific nature are not.
- Godwin isn't a law of physics; it's more advice against using irrelevant, emotive references to Nazi Germany.
- It doesn't even apply when there is a genuine relevance to Nazi Germany. When talking about fascism, Hitler is a relevant figure; when talking of cruel, useless science experiments, Mengele is a relevant figure.
it's not exactly difficult to demonstrate the proper use of a condom in 15 to 20 minutes and explain that failure to wear one during intercourse will result in a higher likelyhood of contracting an STD and dying If you honestly believe it takes only 15 to 20 minutes to gain the trust of someone with little to no understanding of biology and no personal or cultural connection to you, such that you can convince them to make significant changes to their sex life, then you ought to check your own approach to authority. After such a short time, I'd be shocked more by those who eagerly take the counsellor's advice. In cultural terms, compare a sage spending 15 minutes telling you why you must drink some potion once a week. The whole concept of the sage is against your culture, the reasoning he provides has no relevance to your knowledge, so you ignore it.Indeed, that's half the point in illustrating the flaw in the study: those who actually have the circumcision go through various pre-op, post-op procedures exposing them for far longer to the safe sex message and counsellors, reinforced by the contemplation that is likely to occur after part of their sex organ has been amputated. They have been made physically different to their neighbour, and this alone is incitement to breaking free from local cultural attitudes. participants were recommended to attend other sessions as well. Irrelevant. Either ongoing participation (before the snip) and monitoring of progress and understanding is a compulsory part of the experiment, or the experiment hasn't come close to providing a useful safe sex education programme. So you think that instead of attempting to find methods which may decrease the risk of STD transmission, scientists should do nothing? I'm sure you recognise this argument form as fallacious: "Since method X (which one party has judged as flawed and unethical, and the other at least flawed) of solving Y is wrong, you must be saying that all methods of solving Y are wrong!" Here I was indicating that a scientist should take much more care with education, "especially" when the risk of ignoring the scientist's advice is painful death. I was not stating that the risk of painful death precludes any sort of investigation or experimentation.
I'm a mathematician by training, but I'm repreatedly saddened by lack of consideration for the softer sciences (sociology, psychology, etc.) by my fellow hard scientists. Yes, humans do seem to have some innate ability to comprehend logic and a rigorous proof process - consider the dialogue in Plato's Meno - but it must be drawn out, and finding out how to do so effectively is precisely the challenge.
Since dentists knew that calcium fluoride in some early 1900's Southwestern US water supplies was making the residents cavity-free teeth brown form drinking it and irrigating their crops with it, they thought drinking fluoride reduced tooth decay, also.
To test this theory, they added sodium fluoride to the drinking water of Newburgh, NY's water supply to see what would happen to the children's teeth and health. The adults were never examined. And children sick two weeks before examination weren't examined - eliminating the very children who might be harmed by fluoride. Kingston, NY was the fluoride free control city.
Because of political pressure, the experiment was declared a success after five years before the permanent teeth of children born into the experiment had erupted. Fluoridation began spreading all over the U.S. and eventually into other countries.
A State University of New York study conducted in 1955 showed that children in Newburgh NY had more bone defects and anemia than children in Kingston
The Newburgh/Kingston study is a classic study that is still used to "prove" that fluoridation is safe and effective. However, children in Newburgh and Kingston have been showing their teeth to dental researchers over the decades. The most recent Newburgh/Kingston study shows that children in fluoridated Newburgh have more cavities and more dental fluorosis than never fluoridated Kingston NY children.
Besides being a failed experiment, the Newburgh/Kingston study is one of the most unethical experiments conducted on an entire population without their informed consent. One that's now still perpetuated on the entire U.S. population either directly through their water supply or indirectly via the food supply using that fluoridated water.
Over 1,000 Professionals are calling for an end to water fluoridation and Congressional Hearings to look into the ethics of promoting fluoridation in the face of growing scientific evidence of its harm and ineffectiveness
And an Online Petition to End Fluoridation and call for a Congressional Hearing
http://www.actionstudio.org/public/page_view_all.cfm?option=begin&pageid=8276
Sponsored by the Fluoride Action Network http://fluorideaction.net/
I'm not anonymous - just don't want to take the time to create a n account
nyscof@aol.com
... promised cake but that turned out to be a lie.
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA34A.htm Of course, the view you are given of Tuskegee is slanted & far from the truth of what actually happened. At the time the approved treatment was a series of arsenic injections, they were painful, and there was serious doubt as to whether or not it had any benefit vs. doing nothing. A large number of blacks did not complete the standard treatment, and there was no tracking for them at the time. What isn't commonly reported, they did offer treatment to all of the participants, many took it - the arsenic based treatment, the same treatment given to whites, many declined. Those that declined the treatment as well as those who accepted it were followed for a small cash stipend. 95% of syphilis goes into remission without treatment, a small portion of that crowd develops problems from latent syphilis.
The government didn't infect any of these people. Every single one of them was offered treatment. Every single one of them in the non-treatment group rejected treatment. Now it sounds a little different, doesn't it?
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
I should have mentioned that this video is a very slow-starter, but the opening info is important in order to grasp the whole enchilada. --It's well worth watching all six parts. One of the weird points which led the researcher to start investigating was a test her son told her about having written in school. She asked him what some of the questions on it were, and found them odd enough that she decided to ask the principal to see the test. She was denied, and in fact told that parents were not allowed to see the test, and that the children were not allowed to see their own test results. Okay. So she made a big stink and after weeks of work, finally got to see the test; one of the questions on it was the following. .
"If you and you friends are planning an act of vandalism, do you. .
A. Report this to an adult.
B. Report this to the Police.
C. Leave the group and go home.
D. Go along with the group.
The correct answer to the above question is, "D. Go along with the group."
Watch all six parts of this video. By the end, your hair will be standing on end.
-FL
How is Watson's classic conditioning study on Little Albert not mentioned? Watson took an 11 month old, and conditioned him to be afraid of a white rat. Albert later generalized his reaction so much that he later showed fear to anything that was white.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Albert_experiment
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Every single one of them was offered treatment.
But not penicillin.
HAL.Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
This region is already completely ignorant about HIV/AIDS and how to have safe sex (thanks in part to the Catholic church sucessfully spreading the baseless belief that condoms have tiny holes in them that let HIV pass through).
Now they are being told that circumcision will help protect them against AIDS. These newly-circumcised people will likely be less afraid to have sex with random individuals, and won't bother using condoms (after all, their safety is questionable!). And how long will it be until their education gets distorted to the point that they believe circumcision stops AIDS altogether?
These researchers seem to be completely ignorant of the consequences of their actions.
High-school chemestry, on a geek-pr0n scale: 20,000 lbs of metallic Sodium being dropped in a lake.
The thing I don't get is why it was disposed of at all. Metallic sodium is a valuable material used in industry. The video clip claims that no transport company would ship it, so it had to be dumped by the military.
Of course, how did sodium get to existing industrial customers?
The military transported it to the lake. Why not transport it to a customer?
Select a random group of ignorant African men, circumcise some of them. Give them vague advice on safe sex, then tell them to go out and have sex. See how many of them come back with HIV.
Not quite. They were all given condoms and quite a lot of advice on safe sex, far, far more than the general population gets.
But, that wouldn't fit into your predetermined opinion that blacks are always discriminated against. Open your mind.
if you've just had part of your cock lobbed off, you're very likely to change your sexual habits and people are less likely to have sex with you.
Really? You're saying that people are less likely to have sex with you based on what your cock looks like? I think the decision to have sex with you is made before getting a good look at your cock.
Further, if you bothered to read the study, having part of their cock lobbed off did not change the sexual habits of the participants.
If you're just given advice and then told to go away, you're more likely to carry on as usual.
That is not unique to African males. People from all walks are of life listen carefully to medical advice, nod, agree, and then ignore the advice. That is common for obesity, smoking, drug use, exercise, etc.
You're right. It was late, and I needed a third example to fill out the range of behaviors affected.
And the use of foreskin is what, exactly? Other than being something you have to clean all the time so that it doesn't get infected, there is absolutely no use. The skin cut off is also used to help grow skin for burn victims, a worthy use of skin that has no practical purpose.
Thats because penicillin didn't exist in 1932, and it didn't become the treatment for Syphilis until the late 50's. By the time it had, every single person in the experimental would be at the latent stage by more than 20 years where it was unlikely to do anything for them.
Freedom is merely privilege extended unless enjoyed by one and all.
Even earlier than this, in the 40s, the Canadian government experimented on James Howlett amd Wade Wilson, in the first case bonding molten metal to his skeleton and in the second, causing severe disfigurement.
we would have no progress in medicine whatsoever. For any successful medical procedure, a great many were tried that were fatal. Even the successful ones need to be refined.
Without cutting some living thing open and watching its heart pump, we would never have learned about something as basic as circulation.
Without purposely exposing some poor sod to small pox, we would have never known that the vaccine worked.
The net result is that we have some basic understanding of the human body, and massive amounts of human suffering is alleviated.
Are these things unethical by most people's standards? Yes. Are they *worth it*? Obviously.
We need ethical standards in medicine, but you might consider that the sort of ethical standards that are imposed in a field that intensionally kills people are very different from what you might be used to.
The moral of the story is that nothing of value can be achieved without sacrifice.
But look at how much we learned from these 'evil' experiments! Weren't they worth it, so long as you weren't among the test subjects?
Can you imagine what we might know if all science were like this, free from old religious ideas about ethics and morality and focused instead on learning as much as possible whenever the occasion arises? Today you're worried about dead dogs, tomorrow you'll be worried about embryos or something, when instead we could have all sorts of cures!
The Tuskeegee study wasn't "bizarre", it was just plain wrong. I think the book is intended as dark humor, and there was nothing humorous about that one.
It was bound to come up at some point, but grats on the pre-emptive strike.
This may not have been cruel to those pretending to be shocked, but I certainly would not want to have been one of those told to administer the shocks, as I would doubtless have had trouble sleeping at night after if I had done so.
I would love to be in that kind of study. If there was a (safe) way for me to be granted temporary amnesia so that my current knowledge of the experiments wouldn't mess with the results, I'd pay good money just to find out what I would do in that kind of situation.
TFA says the 10 "wackiest" experiments - they weren't selected for cruelty. One of the few that arguably would have been cruel as a proper experiment is mitigated by the fact that the experimenter was the only subject.
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Apparently, some people consider having a part of their body that they have to "clean all the time" to be a waste of effort. Is it your opinion that the clitoris (maybe look it up) also has no practical purpose? Do earlobes actually "do" anything other than provide a fleshy part where one can hang shiny objects and make a social/political statement?
Hmmm, maybe removed foreskins could be used to grow new foreskins for those that never got to enjoy their own!