Hypothetically, that is.
I really want someone to just really start messing around with the human genome, see the limits of gene expression. Let’s add horns, let’s add tusks, let’s add tails, and wings, and carapaces, and antennae, and claws, let’s just see what happens. Human evolution has gotten so tired and trite; let’s add some spice.
Or creating super mutant athletes. Like how fast do you think a modified human body could run? Or jump?
Don’t let the furrys hear you
Too late. Off to back those experiments… as soon as I figure out how to become one of the suspiciously wealthy furries
Raise a group of a dozen newborns with absolutely zero contact outside of their own group. Food and necessities get provided of course, but no language learning, no nurturing, no generational teaching.
What kind of community do they form when they are old enough to grasp such things? Do they develop their own language; or a different method of communication entirely. How do they stratify their society, or even do they?
At a certain point, when they are old enough, introduce challenges that only work if they cooperate with one another. See what happens.
Who from the US government will last the longest in a bonfire. Although it might be questionable if this experiment is really unethical.
I’ll allow it, we can also see if two wrongs make a right.
Lobotomize all conservatives to see if their IQ increases.
We’ve exhausted all other options.
In The Host (2007) they lobotomise the protagonist but he’s so dumb it doesn’t affect him
Trolling against some lemmy mods? (surely one of the most hazardous things to to)
I heard there’s a guy called Luigi with a cool idea.
gather massive amounts of stats on the ideal amount of physical punishment to mete out to children to produce the best results in adults.
Take ten or twenty thousand children, take over a fairly large portion of a midwestern state, build a large and complete environment for them to live in including towns, museums, theme parks etc. and raise them as normal Americans but absolutely 100% avoid introducing them to the concept of religion until they’re 25.
Before the oldest turns 24, that small city would just sublime into a higher plane, leaving behind nothing but a beautiful prairie and a fresh minty smell.
I suspect they’d invent their own. No one introduced religion to humanity. It came from within.
Then the experiment would yield data.
It would yield another religion, originated in a group that could parley their forced participation into fame on social media, which might lead to many more followers and eventually a holy war with the Mormons. Hmm. Might be worth a try.
I’m pretty sure that they would start making one up very soon.
I’m not meaning dump 20,000 children alone in the left half of Wyoming, I mean, keep them with their parents, hire teachers, teach them math and science and…basically a history that replaces a lot of “and they believed their gods said” with “the ruling class decided they wanted to”. What happens to children when they are raised in a functioning, supportive, nurturing society that does not contain religion or superstition?
Many developed countries are majoritarily irreligious. But it’s also hard to draw the line between religion and culture.
So you just wanna expand the absolute bonkers premise of Kid Nation . Lol
Hypothesis: Conservatives will refuse to believe contradicting facts regardless of punishment.
Experiment: Use increasingly painful stimulus for negative reinforcement when subjects espouse harmful views, ie racism.
I’m on the “make stupid hurt” train.
Put a hundred toddlers on an island. Leave a few older children that will disappear a few years later that are taught to fish/hunt/gather. See what kind of language develops, or what kind of civilization. How many survive?
It is VERY unethical. Add variables to other islands, such as the amount of children, and what you teach them.
This is somewhat similar to how Nicaraguan sign language was developed. Basically, kids at a school for the deaf invented it.
You know there was a mad king who tried to do the same?
Babies just end up dying if not talked to. He also wanted to figure out the language of gods
Most research on human embryonic stem cells - currently impossible in western countries due to ethics concerns.
Theoretically, if a few stem cells from every embryo early on and frozen that might be a huge boon for them once they grow up to adults with potential health issues. Need a new heart? Grow one in a lab from the preserved cells - perfectly compatible.
Currently these kinds of things can’t be explored, and whilst the ethics may be dubious the potential medical benefits left on the table are astonishing.
Nice try, Mengele
Allow all kinds of drugs and other enhancements in sports and see where the limits of the body are
This is happening next year. It’s called the “enhanced games” or something.
Ultra Olympics
Too late, the techbros already went with this one
Recreate the setup of Training Day and see how many people become dirty cops because they get finessed by Denzel Washington
Seems pretty tame compared to various other answers, but keeping people under anesthesia longer than expected during surgery and seeing how it affects things like memory or personality.
Supposedly after an open heart surgery I had gone through over a decade ago, my mother swears my personality changed. Though I can’t remember if that’s true because my memory has felt, in a sense, kinda foggy since then. So I wanna know if it was because I was under for longer than expected or because the surgery itself.
I’d be interested in this too. Maybe some synapsed stop firing if they are put to sleep for long enough.
Alternatively your mother might be gaslighting you.
I doubt she is gaslighting me because there’s not much for her to gain from her doing it. Tighter control over family is something I expect from her family rather than her.
I would wager that it’s more to do with the surgery itself. Even transient hypoxia from blood not getting to your brain for a little bit can make a big difference. Anesthesia is used very frequently with rare complications, but complex heart surgeries have higher complication rates.
Sounds fair enough that it could have just been the surgery. I’m nowhere near a medical professional, but I can totally see unforseen complications having happened to me.
Brains are very finicky things and they get very upset if there’s any disruption in their supply of glucose and oxygen, but anesthetics are carefully selected to not disrupt that as much as possible. Anesthesia might paralyze the muscles you use to breathe, but that’s what the intubation and ventilator is for. The anesthetics we use don’t affect the heart muscle because it uses different ions and chemicals than every other type of muscle in the body to generate contractions. However, open heart surgery will absolutely mess with the heart which will disrupt circulation.
