I’m not sure where this belongs, but my recent post to the Liquid Nitrogen thread got me thinking: My experiment sounds silly, but really, considering some of the things I’ve seen, it’s not. Weird maybe, but not silly.
Since there are a lot of science and engineering geeks here, I’m wondering what kind of Weird Science experiments you’ve conducted or witnessed. Do tell!
To wit: Back in 1982, when I was considering which college I would attend, I visited MIT as a guest of my Uncle’s neigbor, who was a Chemistry professor there. In his lab, he was running an experiment to determine if there was any effect of laser light on skin cancer tumors.
This experiment consisted simply of a class IIIb green HeNe laser shining on a melanoma on a live lab mouse. These poor little mice were held up in front of the laser beam using a frame that was little more than four clothespins, one for each limb. They were exposed for hours at a time.
A pretty shitty life for a mouse if you ask me. It was one of the things that cemented my aversion to biology as a career, even though I eventually one day did pump 20 cc of formalin into a lab rat so I could chop off its head and extract its brain for slicing, staining and microscopic inspection. But my girlfriend at the time was the one raising the rats in another lab, and they lived pretty cushy damn lives up until the moment they entered the Neuroanatomy classroom so I don’t feel too bad. (But I had several classmates who weren’t up to the task. When you inject formalin into a rat, it convulses quite violently before dying.)
Anyway, looking back on it, it seems like a pretty harebrained scheme, to play a common lab laser on a mouse tumor just on the off chance that there might be an effect. At MIT no less. Obviously there were no promising results or we woulda heard about it long ago.