Seven Creepy Experiments That Could Teach Us So Much (If They Weren’t So Wrong)
Separating Twins
The Experiment: Split up twins after birth—and then control every aspect of their environments.
The premise:
In the quest to tease out the interplay of nature and nurture, researchers have one obvious resource: identical twins, two people whose genes are nearly 100 percent the same. But twins almost always grow up together, in essentially the same environment. A few studies have been able to track twins separated at a young age, usually by adoption. But it’s impossible to control retroactively for all the ways that the lives of even separated twins are still related. If scientists could control the siblings from the start, they could construct a rigorously designed study. It would be one of the least ethical studies imaginable, but it might be the only way (short of cloning humans for research, which is arguably even less ethical) that we’d ever solve some big questions about genetics and upbringing. Continue Reading
Toxic Heroes
The Experiment: Test each new chemical on a wide range of human volunteers before it comes on the market.
The premise:
Under current US regulations, we’re all de facto test subjects for a whole range of potential toxins. So why not recruit volunteers to try out chemicals for us? Even with informed consent, medical ethicists would recoil at that idea. But it would almost certainly save lives over time.
To comply with the US Toxic Substances Control Act, manufacturers turn to testing labs, which expose animals—usually rodents—to high levels of the chemical in question. But just because a mouse survives a test doesn’t mean that humans will. The only studies we can perform on people are observational: tracking the incidence of adverse effects in those we know to have been exposed. But these studies are fraught with problems. When researchers can find high levels of exposure—for example, workers in factories that make or use the chemical—the number of subjects is often too small to yield reliable results. And with broader-based studies, it becomes extremely difficult to tease out one chemical’s effect, since we’re all exposed to so many toxins every day. Continue Reading
