Wasn't he the guy who was trying to find a way for HIV-positive couples to have HIV-negative babies?
this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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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.
A quick trip on Google scholar turns up a lot of studies on the size of male erections.
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
Of course it was biased, those numbers are huge on there, it was men confident in their size skewing the data, at least that's what I will tell myself
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a researcher can’t be in the presence of a sexually aroused erect penis
Is this some puritan rule? Plenty don't care to flap their erect penis in the faces of some researchers if they asked nicely. What got ethics to do with it when there is consent?
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Holy shit, this guy managed to have 3 of the first 10 papers listed on google scholar about his shenanigans.
Not that I support it in any way of course, but he's not wrong. There's probably a lot of medical knowledge to be gained by seeing how the babies he experimented on develop in the future. It's just that the ends don't justify the means.
It depends on the specifics of the experiment. Throughout the 20th century, the people most keen on unethical medical experiments seemed the least able to design useful experiments. Sometimes people claim that we learned lots from the horrific medical experiments taking place at Nazi concentration camps or Japanese facilities under Unit 731, but at best, it's stuff like how long does it take a horribly malnourished person to die if their organs are removed without anaesthesia or how long does it take a horribly malnourished person who's been beaten for weeks to freeze to death, which aren't much use.
I'm pretty sure that 80% if what we learned from the Nazi/Imperial Japan super unethical experiments was "what can a psychotic doctor justify in order to have an excuse to torture people to death."
Maybe 20% was arguably useful, and most of that could have been researched ethically with other methods.
The potential value to the Americans of Japanese-provided data, encompassing human research subjects, delivery system theories, and successful field trials, was immense. However, historian Sheldon H. Harris concluded that the Japanese data failed to meet American standards, suggesting instead that the findings from the unit were of minor importance at best. Harris characterized the research results from the Japanese camp as disappointing, concurring with the assessment of Murray Sanders, who characterized the experiments as "crude" and "ineffective."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
To back up your point that the research gained by unit 731 was useless.
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Eh, usually less than you would expect. We're really good at math and are quite capable of making synthetic experiments where we find people who either require the procedure, or where it's been done incidentally and then inferring the results as though deliberate.
We can also develop a framework for showing benefit from the intervention, perform the intervention ethically, and then compare that to people who didn't get the intervention after the fact. With proper math you can construct the same confidence as a proper study without denying treatment or intentionally inflicting harm.
It's how we have evidence that tooth brushing is good for you. It would be unethical to do a study where we believe we're intentionally inflicting permeant dental damage to people by telling them not to brush for an extended period, but we can find people who don't and look at them.
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