The Greatest Experiments Ever

A round up of the stupidest experiments ever conducted by people who should have known better. This comes courtesy of www.timesonline.co.uk

1) Elephants on Acid

A curiosity-led experiment from the 1960s, in which Warren Thomas decided to inject an elephant named Tusko with 297 milligrams of LSD – about 3,000 times the typical human dose – to see what would happen. The idea was to determine whether the hallucinogenic drug could induce musth – the state of temporary madness in which male elephants become aggressive.

The result was a public relations disaster: Tusko died. The scientists claimed in their defence that they had not expected this to happen – two of them had taken plenty of acid themselves, they said.

2) Terror in the Skies

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.

3) Tickling

In the 1930s Clarence Yeuba, a Professor of Psychology at Antioch College in Ohio, formed the hypothesis that people learn to laugh when tickled, and that the response is not innate. He tested it on his son – the family was forbidden from laughing in relation to tickling when he was present.

Leuba’s wife, however, was caught some months later bouncing the boy on her knee while laughing and saying: “Bouncy, bouncy.” By the time the boy was seven, he was laughing when tickled – but that did not stop Leuba trying the experiment again on his sister.

4) Headless rats and painted faces

In 1924 Carney Landis, of the University of Minnesota, set out to investigate facial expressions of disgust. To exaggerate expressions, he drew lines on volunteers’ faces with burnt cork, before asking them to smell ammonia, listen to jazz, look at pornography or place their hands in a bucket of frogs.

He then asked each volunteer to decapitate a white rat. While all hesitated, and some swore or cried, most agreed to do so – showing the ease with which most people bow to authority. The pictures, however, look quite bizarre. “They look like members of a strange cult preparing to offer a sacrifice to the Great God of the Experiment,” Mr Boese wrote.

5) Raising the dead

Robert Cornish, of the University of California at Berkeley, believed in the 1930s that he had perfected a way of raising the dead. He experimented by placing corpses on a see-saw to circulate the blood, while injecting adrenalin and anticoagulants.

After apparently successful experiments on strangled dogs, he found a condemned prisoner, Thomas McMonigle, who was prepared to become a human guinea pig. The state of California, however, refused permission, for fear that it would have to release McMonigle if the technique worked.

6) Slumber learning

In 1942 Lawrence LeShan, of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, attempted subliminally to influence boys into stopping biting their fingernails. While they were asleep, he played them a record of a voice saying: “My fingernails taste terribly bitter.” When the record player broke down, he stood in the dormitory repeating the phrase himself.

It seemed to work: by the end of the summer, 40 per cent of the boys had stopped biting their nails. Mr Boese, however, has another explanation: “‘If I stop biting my nails,’ they probably thought,