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View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Biology, Chemistry, Neuroscience, Medicine, Psychology
We experiment on humans all the time.
Deliberately, there are medical trials or stress trials. Kind of obvious how those work.
Unintentional knowledge comes from studying accidents, mental patients or tragedies.
For instance, a person with mental health issues may decide to overdose on some random chemical or a factory making something may accidentally shower a worker in it. Some car accident victim may have some unintended surgery that requires emergency correction and everyone deals with consequences later.
A current long term experiment is ongoing that generates controversy. There is a last-ditch life saving treatment where someones lungs are replaced with an external machine oxygenating their blood. However, about 75% put onto this machine die, about 10-20% come out with brain injuries. They almost certainly would have die without intervention, it mostly doesn't work and long-term everyone seems to be harmed by it. But we do it anyway because once that technology exists, the community now expects any and all live saving treatments to be done, regardless of what outcome means. Overall: we are learning a heck of a lot about lung injuries and blood oxygen levels, etc, really on the fly from using this unpredictable machine.
There's nothing here!