Sometimes, some of the things done in the name of science are not only bizarre, but also cruel and unnecessary. There was a time, in 1970 that a head transplant was done. It was done on a monkey and not a human, thank goodness. When the operation was over, the head had a new body and lived for about 1 1/2 days. It was an angry animal that was created, which bared its teeth and wanted to bite the surgeon. It is said that enough operations were performed that now it is possible for a head to live indefinitely on a new body. Well if this is true, how come we don't see more of these operations? I began to wonder about this and found out that there was one large drawback to the operation, the person would be paralyzed for life. The doctor that performed the head transplant was Dr. Robert J. White. Dr. White was a neurological surgery professor at Case Western Reserve University. He was also the advisor to Pope John Paul II on medical ethics. The Soviet surgeon. Demikhov had transplanted the upper part of a puppy onto a full grown dog and it also lived for several days. "Your body is a machine for the brain," says Dr. White. "The brain is where consciousness is located." Animal rights organizations were infuriated with Dr. White for his experiments. One person said, "He was so busy trying to see if he could, he never stopped to ask himself if he should."

One set of researchers, who were married to each other by the way, had a very young child. They had heard stories about humans being raised by apes and had decided that they would conduct an experiment where they got a very young chimp and raised it with their son in exactly the same way. They were going to raise it as a human right along side of their own child, treating both of them exactlyin the same way. They got a 7 month old chimp from a zoo. The chimp and the child played together, ate together and learned together, being given all of the same tests. In some of the tests that involved physical prowess, the chimp excelled. As time went on the researchers began to notice that the chimp was not making any progress at language. No matter how hard they tried and it tried, speech was beyond the animal. Here is the unfortunate part of the entire experiment. The child was not making any progress either. One day when the child was hungry, he indicated this by making the same sound that the chimp would make. The man and his wife were horrified and sent the chimp back to the zoo. The only thing that this experiment had proved was that it is not a good idea to have a child's actions influenced by an animal while it is growing up. The child needs other human contact also. The animal may have been fine as a pet, but putting it on the same level as the child caused problems for the child. The experiment may have proved something else however and that is if you are raising a problem child along with another child it has a good chance of influencing the second child's development.

In the 1780s Galvani discovered that you could take wires connected to batteries and attach them to a dead frog and the legs would move. Every scientist worth his salt began to try this. As time progressed the scientists decided that they just had to try it out on human corpses. Some did it to amaze people, while others were actually trying to restore life to dead people. A sort of side show mentality took over and some scientists and showmen went around with corpses. They would connect wires from batteries to different parts of the body of the corpse to get it to move different areas of its anatomy. This type of amusement prompted great crowds of people to attend these demonstrations. The amount of electricity applied to human corpses was about 120 volts. It was possible, by connecting the wires to different areas of the body, to get eyes to open, jaws to quiver and even limbs to jiggle around. It is said that the true researchers, the ones that were trying to restore life to dead bodies by using electricity were responsible for inspiring Mary Shelly and that is where she got the idea for Frankenstein.

An experiment was conducted on a condemned prisoner. Electronic sensors were attached to his wrists to monitor his heart as he was being executed. He had volunteered for the experiment. The idea was to see what part fear played on the heart. He was sat up in a chair and a target was placed over his heart. A black hood was placed over his head. I have often wondered it placing a hood over someone's head actually saves them any fear? In this case, since it was a measurement of fear, you would have thought that the hood would have been dispensed with. Anyway the detector showed that the man's heart was beating at a rapid pace. Gee I never would have suspected that a man who knew that he was going to be shot and killed would have had a fast heartbeat, would you? When he heard the command to shoot, his heartbeat climbed up to 180 beats per minute. So what was really learned from this experiment besides the obvious? I would have to say nothing.

Benjamin Libet was a scientist who worked in the physiology department of the University of California, San Francisco. He conducted many experiments into human consciousness. After many years of investigating how our brains work in relation to our consciousness, he stated that an involuntary act always proceeds a volatile conscious act which we thought was spontaneous. In other words our voluntary acts were influenced by unconscious ones and we don't realize it. How was this proved? Volunteers were hooked up to an EEG and put in front of an oscilloscope and told to note where a dot appeared on it. They were asked to push a button when they felt like doing it. The act of consciously pushing the button took about two hundred milliseconds. It was noticed that there was involuntary brain activity that always took place about five hundred milliseconds before, thus proving that an involuntary act took place before the voluntary one. Some scientists have suggested that our consciousness is just a side effect of neural functions. Needless to say that even today, no one is sure what consciousness actually is.

Scientists have shown that if you take an isotope of Helium and lower its temperature to within a few degrees of absolute zero, it can become a super fluid. This means that it can flow across lines without friction loss, like electricity. Another strange state of matter that was discovered is called super solids. In this state a super solid block of matter can flow through another super solid block of matter without any interaction. This was stated as being the equivalent of walking through a wall without any ill effects.

Some experiments are very necessary and have the potential of yielding very important results. I would like to think that most experiments conducted by professionals fall into this category. Then there are the OTHER experiments that yield results that common sense which have shown in the first place, like the one cited above with the condemned man. There are other experiments that are just to cruel to the animals or even humans to make them worthwhile. You have to consider what can be gained from an experiment verses the pain that it will inflict. If you are going to torture dozens of animals just to see if you can develop a lipstick that is a little redder than one from somewhere else, then this experiment should never be conducted.