Bizarre Experiments! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Shot a dart containing 297 milligrams of LSD into an elephant to see if it would trigger 'musth', a state where a bull elephant becomes aggressive

Tusco, the elephant died within minutes and the researchers efforts to revive him failed. The experiment caused outrage but the researchers protested that they had all taken L.S.D without any ill effects. However, poor Tusco was injected with enough to make 3000 humans hallucinate. Defending the experiment, while trying to find a useful contribution to science, Thomas claimed that it demonstrated that elephants are highly sensitive to the drug and it could be used in countries were elephants are a problem.

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Answer: All answers are correct

It doesn't bear thinking about, does it?
He also doused himself with infected saliva, blood, perspiration and urine.
Ffirth did not get ill and therefore concluded that he was correct. Noticing that yellow fever only occurred in the summer he hypothesised that the disease was caused by an over indulgence of stimulants such as food heat and noise.
Unfortunately this very 'brave' man was wrong as it was later discovered that yellow fever is very contagious, however it usually requires a direct transition into the blood, from a mosquito bite.

Answer: A two headed dog

At the Moscow Institute of Surgery, Demikhov took the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy and attached them to an adult German shepherd dog. Reporters from around the world were amazed to see both heads lap milk at the same time. Also both panted when hot. Dismay came when they saw the milk dribble out of the puppies disconnected stump, although the puppy did not need to eat or drink.
Demikhov went on to do twenty more such experiments, often observing the adult dog trying to rid itself of the puppy, and the puppy fighting back by biting the adult on the ear. None of his 'dogs' lasted more than a month, succumbing to what we now know as tissue rejection.
Demikhov sounds like a modern day Frankenstein but his work is thought to have paved the way for human heart transplants.

Answer: A man on Death Row

Cornish's method of reversing death involved asphyxiating the fox terriers and leaving them for ten minutes, and then restoring them back to life by swinging their bodies up and down, while administrating a mixture of anticoagulants and adrenalin.
Two out of four of the dogs, all named Lazarus, survived and he considered them successes. That may well depend on one's personal definition of success! The resuscitated dogs were blind; brain damaged, and supposedly caused terror in other dogs.
After being shown the door at Berkeley, Cornish set up a new laboratory in a tin shed by the side of his house and, ignoring complaints from neighbours about mystery fumes, he went on to develop a home-made heart and lung machine, fashioned from radiator tubing, parts of a vacuum cleaner and 60,000 shoe lace eyes.
When he asked for a human guinea pig to come forward, Thomas McMonigle, on death row, volunteered. The state of California refused, worried that if he survived they would have to let him go - a very optimistic person made that decision :-)

At this point in his career, Cornish changed direction and went on to spend the rest of his life selling a toothpaste he had invented.

Answer: "My fingernails taste bitter"

The boys had all been diagnosed as chronic nail biters and professor LeShan wondered if negative suggestions fed to them while sleeping could cure the boys.
After four weeks, one boy had stopped biting his nails and then disaster! The phonograph LeShan had been using to deliver the message broke.
Rather than abandoning the experiment he took over, faithfully repeating the phrase 300 times a night to the boys.

Within two more weeks seven more boys had kicked the nail biting habit and by the end of the summer the figure had risen to forty percent.
LeShan concluded that slumber learning worked and worked best when delivered directly (in person)
His results were later disputed by scientists using an electroencephalograph to ensure the subjects were fully asleep.

Could it really be that the children, so spooked by the message in the darkness, thought "if I stop biting my nails the strange man will go away"?

Answer: A turkey head stuck on a balsa wood stick will attract a male turkey

Schein and Hale discovered, while researching turkey sexual behaviour, that male turkeys are not that fussy when it comes to mating.
Male turkeys happily mated with a life like model of a female turkey As the researchers removed bits from the model, wings, feet and tails, the male was just as happy to continue, even when only the head was left. In fact the male turkey preferred the head on a stick to a headless body suggesting that the erotic response was focused on the female's head.
Schein and Hale went on to see just how minimal they could make the head before the turkey lost interest.
Although slightly less interested, the male turkey was still aroused by a plain balsa wood head.
Schein and Hales published their results in a book called "Sex and Behaviour" in 1965.

How this knowledge can be used to further science, I'm not sure but it does demonstrate, as with humans, turkeys will attempt to mate with almost anything.

Answer: Fill out an insurance form

The U.S Army Leadership Human Research Unit near Monterey, California designed the study of behavioural degradation under stress, specifically the stress of being told you were probably about to die.
A steward passed out the insurance forms explaining it was a 'bureaucratic necessity'.
The forms were deliberately written in a confusing manner to make the task even harder. At the same time a control group on the ground were asked to fill in the same form. (No brownie points for guessing that the men on the ground made considerably less mistakes!)

After the last man had dutifully filled in his form, the pilot announced "Just kidding about the emergency folks" and then landed the plane.
One of the 'guinea pigs' was obviously not very happy about the study and managed to sabotage the next one by leaving a warning message on his airsick bag for the next ten subjects :-)

Answer: Decapitate a live rat

Landis, a graduate student of psychology at the University of Minnesota, drew lines on the faces of his subjects so he could easily see the movement of their muscles. They were then exposed to various stimuli , such as smelling ammonia, putting their hands in a bucket of frogs, and listening to jazz.
Finally they were asked to decapitate a live white rat.
It took a bit of convincing but eventually two thirds of his subjects did comply.

In case you're wondering, Landis did not find a universal characteristic expression for decapitating a rat.

It never occurred to Landis that his experiment demonstrated the willingness of people to obey orders. In this sense his experiment anticipated the results of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiment, at Yale University, forty years later.

Answer: All of these are correct

Oswald, from Edinburgh University, not only taped the men's eyes open, he subjected them to regular electric shocks and flashing lights and, as a finishing touch, blasted loud blues music into their ears. Two of the men were 'fully rested', the third had been deprived of sleep. However, it made no difference, they were all asleep within 12 minutes according to the EEG results.

Oswald was careful when wording his results "There was a considerable fall of cerebral vigilance, and a large decline in the presumptive ascending facilitation from the brain stem reticular formation to the cerebral cortex." In another words, as his volunteers said, they fell asleep.

Oswald suggested that when the brain is subjected to rhythmic monotonous stimuli it turns itself off, perhaps explaining why it is possible to doze off while driving on an empty road even in the middle of the day.

Answer: His Home

In 1933 Leuba used his home and his new born son to discover whether laughter and tickling were a innate response or a learned one. No one, especially his wife, were allowed to laugh while the baby was being tickled. During tickling sessions, Leuba donned a cardboard mask so he did not inadvertently smile while tickling his son.
At 7 months his son was laughing when being tickled. Leuba's wife confessed that on one occasion she had bounced the baby up and down after his bath saying bouncy bouncy and laughing. Was this enough to spoil his experiment? Who knows, but Leuba tried again after his daughter was born. By the age of seven months she was laughing when tickled.
He had no choice but to conclude that laughter is a innate response.

In most experiments variables are hard to control and his experiment suggests that it's even harder when one of those variables happens to be your wife.

I don't believe a single one of these experiments would be accepted today on ethical grounds.