And all because in the past bozos like these experimenters did crazy things like this and the system over corrected in the hopes of stopping extreme things like this.
Since either way, we pay in blood, the question is really about finding the right balance.
The system is unbalanced by default.
Regulations pretend to "improve" this but inevitably skew the balance to the side of safety, leading to ossification, stagnation, loss of competition and lack of innovation.
Of course ethics does need to make sure that the testing isn't going to harm the participants directly, which is nice and simple in your example, but it also needs to make sure that any measurements will be stored (and anonymised) in ways that conform to your friend's country's healthcare data laws. It needs to make sure there are adequate data protection plans. It needs to ask questions like have they considered ways in which they might accidentally create a device with racial bias (the way pulse oximetres are often worse at reading the blood oxygen level of people with dark skin as they were made by and tested on the fingers of white people). Etc.
We see a lot of exploitation outside of governments too.
And to be fair, some government structures are specifically constructed to limit exploitation.
https://www.youtube.com/@PlainlyDifficult/videos
(radiation, medical, and industrial disasters)
This story reminds me of a guy who was told by a fake doctor that he had a "brain cloud", so he jumped into a volcano, but true love saved him in the end. (Underrated comedy)
To be clear, I think what you described is nuts and the current guardrails are here for a reason, but it’s still an interesting question. And perhaps progress wouldn’t be that much faster.
Look at the rise of the Anti-Vax movement for example. While a lot of it is disinfo driven, a lot of it is because of distrust of Medicine due to bad past experiences.
For example, low elderly vaccination rates in China during Covid among those who lived during the Cultural Revolution due to latent distrust [0], low polio vaccination rates plus attacks on public healthworkers in Khyber Pakhtunkwa in Pakistan because US and Pakistani intelligence posed as vaccination workers to get Bin Laden's children's DNA confirmation leading to mistrust of vaccine workers [1], and the various tidbits of modern vaccine disinfo today in the west leveraging past examples like Tuskegee Experiments.
Medicine has progressed a lot, but choosing to go fast and break things clearly has a tangible impact on trust of medicine as a whole.
There's no point innovating if most people won't use it or distrust it.
[0] - https://www.economist.com/china/2022/04/02/why-so-many-elder...
[1] - https://firstdraftnews.org/long-form-article/first-draft-cas...
I know people who believe the covid vaccines are racist experiments in line with the Tuskegee syphilis study. And that is just the tip of the insanity iceberg they believe in.
You literally have problems with a sloppy study showing something and then needing ten increasingly rigorous studies to show it's bunk.
So ethics review probably puts the kabosh on a lot of bad or unnecessary studies. Which is a positive.
Everything we have nowadays was researched or discovered using "crazy", "unethical", unrestrained science.