this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 165 points 1 day ago (3 children)

If a person's criticism is of "ethics" in general, that individual should not be allowed in a position of authority or trust. If you have a specific constraint for which you can make a case that it goes too far and hinders responsible science and growth (and would have repeatable, reliable results), then state the specific point clearly and the arguments in your favor.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 day ago (2 children)

So if we put these extra pair of legs on babies then they can stand in more extreme angles making them better at construction at a time when there is a housing shortage

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago

For acceptance in the US we will also add more hands so the baby can hold an AR 15 while doing construction work.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago (5 children)

I am convinced, I vote to allow it.

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[–] ricecake 31 points 1 day ago (1 children)

And we already have a safety valve for when conventional ethics is standing in the way of vital research: the researchers test on themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine

If it's that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?

It's not terribly common because most useful research is perfectly ethical, but we have a good number of cases of researchers deciding that there's no way for someone to ethically volunteer for what they need to do, so they do it to themselves. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they make very valuable discoveries. Sometimes both.

So the next time someone wantz to strap someone to a rocket engine and fire it into a wall, all they have to do is go first and be part of the testing pool.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If it's that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?

You can't really do the kind of experiments being done genetically modifying growing infants on yourself, I imagine. Not that that should be an excuse, of course.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Best I can do is generalization

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 day ago (1 children)

wait he's not a fucking parody account?? i thought he was like. larping as an umbrella corp researcher

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Nah, I'm pretty sure that's the dude that used crispr on some babies years ago in an attempt to make them immune to HIV or something.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago

Wasn't he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?

[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (4 children)

Ironic thing, we already tried this approach multiple times before, specially on war times. And each time humanity concluded that some knowledge has too high a price and we're better off not finding out some things.

Knowledge for the sake of knowledge, especially with a heavy blood cost, isn't the way to progress as a species.

And I should know, as a person greatly defined by curiosity about everything and more limited emotional capacity than other people due to mental limitations.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If you're talking about unit 731 and the nazis then there was very little, if anything, scientifically valuable there.

They had terrible research methodology that rendered what data they gathered mostly useless, and even if it wasn't, most of the information could have been surmised by other methods. Some of the things they did served no conceivable practical or scientific purpose whatsoever.

It was pretty much just sadism with a thin veneer of justification to buy them the small amount of legitimacy they needed to operate within their fascist governments.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 22 hours ago

Everyone keeps leaning on Unit 731 and the Nazis here.

What about Tuskegee and syphillis? What about the way that Huvasupai Indians blood was tested without their consent?

“Fun” fact - the chainsaw was developed to help with child birth. Lots of early US gynecology research was done on enslaved women without pain control.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 day ago

Also the motivation of such research is usually not purely scientific, if at all, so the data gathered is often useless.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 day ago (12 children)

Ethics mean we don't know what the average human male erect penis size is.

No, really. The ethics of the studies say that a researcher can't be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis. Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error. There are ways to induce an erection with an injection, so they use that.

Is the size of an induced erection the same as a sexually aroused erection? Probably in the same ballpark, but we don't really know.

Source: Dr Nicole Prause, neurologist specializing in sexuality, on Holly Randall's podcast.

[–] [email protected] 53 points 1 day ago

Having the testee measure their own penis is prone to error.

To be fair, testicles aren't designed for that task.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

A quick trip on Google scholar turns up a lot of studies on the size of male erections.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/553598c1e4b0a7f854584291/t/55ee4a5ee4b025d99f73150e/1441679966732/Penis+Size+Study+-+Veale+et+al+2015+BJUI.pdf

It is acknowledged that some of the volunteers across different studies may have taken part in a study because they were more confident with their penis size than the general male population.

Ha, poisoned data tho

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