Anyone who knows me knows that I have long advocated for scientific experimentation on humans, particularly the vast swaths of humanity that clearly contribute nothing to the progress of the species. Interestingly, a recent issue of Wired has an article on scientific experiments that could be of great benefit to mankind, but would clearly be unethical.

What are the experiments? If I could find my copy of the article, I could provide more detail, but off memory I recall that one was mating a human with a chimpanzee. There’s some debate as to whether this would actually be biologically possible, but it certainly seems worth exploring. Another was swapping the fetuses within a fat and skinny woman, and seeing whether the in utero environment had a substantial effect on a baby’s weight. (The children of fat people tend to be fat themselves, even before the effects of a fatty diet would kick in.)

Jonah Leher, a neuroscience author I’ve mentioned in the past, posited an experiment I’ve thought of myself. There’s an interesting new technique for brain study called optigenetics. It’s essentially a process of using a virus to make brain cells receptive to manipulation by light waves. It has been used, for example, to make a rat run in circles using a beam of light aimed at particular neurons. So, have we dragged some homeless bums off the street and used optigenetics to make them run in circles? No… that would be “unethical.”