Just think how much progress we could make in neurology if we could open up prisoners' brains and tinker around with them?
Or to link back to the nutrition topic, what if we could just take prisoners and replace their intestinal bacteria with different mixes of gut bacteria? Continue to feed them a control diet and see who lives, who dies, who gets fat and who loses weight. Obviously, that experiment would be terrible -- but we'd find out pretty quickly what the "magic formula" is.
Could we bioengineer a gut bacteria biome such that an otherwise unmodified human could consume crude oil as a source of nutrition? How about one that can't get drunk because the bacteria break down the ethanol right in the stomach? We probably could -- but many people would die in the research process.
I'm not saying that we should do this type of research -- but our lack of ability to do it has hampered our understanding of the human body, and will continue to slow progress relative to other scientific fields where such research IS ethically possible (e.g. building the LHC to understand subatomic particles).
Or to link back to the nutrition topic, what if we could just take prisoners and replace their intestinal bacteria with different mixes of gut bacteria? Continue to feed them a control diet and see who lives, who dies, who gets fat and who loses weight. Obviously, that experiment would be terrible -- but we'd find out pretty quickly what the "magic formula" is.
Could we bioengineer a gut bacteria biome such that an otherwise unmodified human could consume crude oil as a source of nutrition? How about one that can't get drunk because the bacteria break down the ethanol right in the stomach? We probably could -- but many people would die in the research process.
I'm not saying that we should do this type of research -- but our lack of ability to do it has hampered our understanding of the human body, and will continue to slow progress relative to other scientific fields where such research IS ethically possible (e.g. building the LHC to understand subatomic particles).