Unethical human experimentation in the United States

The experiment on pregnant mothers in Tennessee is just awful. One article cited [1] reads:

> During the 1940s, 800 pregnant women, the poor patrons of a pre-natal clinic at Vanderbilt University, were given a "cocktail" including a tracer dose of radioactive iron. The object of the experiment was to determine the iron requirements of pregnant women. Ongoing lawsuits point to a higher-than-usual incidence of malignancies in the children of the women subjected.

[1]: http://news.psu.edu/story/141518/1996/03/01/research/subject...

Nowadays, it's pretty regulated. Which makes smaller, pilot projects more of a hassle, but not impossible. You just have to be persistent with the paperwork, and luck out with an IRB or IACUC (for animals) that has good, well-informed members, and not a bunch of incompetents riding on their high horse.

On the other side, you have scientists who do dangerous experiments on themselves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicin...

For example, Dr. Jesse Lazear helped confirm that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever by letting infected mosquitoes bite himself and then dying of yellow fever.

And then there's Dr. Werner Forssmann who developed cardiac catheterization by putting a catheter in his arm and guiding it into his own heart. He then walked up the stairs to the X-ray department to get a picture as proof. He got fired for doing this, but later got the Nobel Prize.

which then lead to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_review_board

I'm working on a project to create a more humane channel of scientific discovery using human volunteer testers from around the world.

It's collaborative like open sourcing, but I call it "open suffering". Many hands make light work, as they say.

Visit http://selfexperiments.com to find out more. I can be contacted using the email in my profile. I have several interesting experiments in the works.