Scientists 'gone crazy'
2007-11-01 07:28
Paris - Elephants on LSD... sexual turn-ons for turkeys... attempts to restore corpses to life: all feature on the list of the "craziest scientific experiments of all time," New Scientist reports.
Here is a selection from the Top Ten, appearing in this Saturday's issue of the British science magazine:
Elephants on acid
In 1962 US researchers, curious about what might happen to an elephant injected with LSD, fired into a tusker a syringe-full of the drug, about 3 000 times the maximum dose for a human being.
The elephant trumpeted violently, keeled over and died within an hour, despite attempts to revive it with anti-psychotic drugs.
"It appears that the elephant is highly sensitive to the effects of LSD," the researchers sheepishly concluded, in a paper published by the August journal Science.
Reversing death
Seeking to restore life to the deceased, Robert Cornish, a University of California scientist in the 1930s, seesawed corpses up and down to circulate the blood while injecting adrenalin and anti-coagulants.
Forced off the campus for his controversial experiments, Cornish continued at home, building a lab that included a heart-lung machine built out of a vacuum cleaner and radiator tubing.
Thomas McMonigle, a prisoner on death row, volunteered to be Cornish's guinea pig, but was turned down by the State of California, which worried that if McMonigle came back to life, he would have to be freed.
Eyes wide open
In 1960, University of Edinburgh sleep researcher Ian Oswald wondered if it was possible to sleep with one's eyes open. He got volunteers to lie down on a couch, taped their eyes open, placed a bank of flashing lights in front of them, attached electrodes to their legs to deliver painful shocks and blasted loud music into their ears.
Three plucky volunteers signed up for the experiment. Despite all the impediments to sleeping, an electro-encephalogram (EEG) monitor of their brain showed all fell asleep within 12 minutes.
Turkey turn-ons
Pennsylvania State University's Martin Schein and Edgar Hale discovered that male turkeys, when placed in a room with a lifelike model of a female turkey, mated with the surrogate as eagerly as they would the real thing.
Schein and Hale experimented to see what was the minimum sexual stimulus, gradually removing parts from the model one by one until the male bird finally lost interest.
"Tail, feet and wings - Schein and Hale removed them all, but still the clueless bird waddled up to the model, let out an amorous gobble and tried to do his thing," says writer Alex Boese for New Scientist.
"Finally, only a head on a stick remained. The male turkey was still keen. In fact, it preferred a head on a stick to a headless body."