Elephants on LSD: The ten silliest experiments of all time

The thirst for knowledge often inspires research with life-changing results. But it can also fuel experiments that range from the slightly silly to the downright disgusting.

Now a list of the most amusing, provocative and outrageous experiments of modern science has been compiled by author Alex Boese, who scoured research journals, books and university archives.

Topics covered include what happens when you give an elephant LSD and how to make a turkey frisky.

Featured in this week's New Scientist magazine, his book, Elephants On Acid And Other Bizarre Experiments, also tells of attempts to bring dead dogs back to life.

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Here the Daily Mail details what are being called the ten silliest experiments of all time.

Elephants on acid

Forty-five years ago, two psychiatrists administered history's largest dose of LSD to Tusko, a three-and-a-half ton elephant.

The 14-year-old male was given enough acid to make 3,000 people hallucinate, in a bizarre bid to find out whether it would trigger a temporary form of madness called musth, in which bull elephants become sexually aggressive.

Whatever the intentions of the University of Oklahoma researchers, the experiment backfired within seconds of the drug being injected into Tusko's rump on a hot August day in 1962.

The horrified creature trumpeted round its pen in Oklahoma City's Lincoln Park Zoo for a few minutes, before keeling over and dying shortly afterwards.

Faced with a public outcry, researchers Louis Jolyon West and Chester M Pierce noted they had taken the LSD in the past without fatal consequences - and suggested the drug could be used to destroy herds in countries where they cause a problem.

The masked tickler

Leuba ordered that no one could laugh while tickling the child, or while being tickled within earshot of him.

If the boy laughed when tickled, this would show his response was inbuilt, not something he learned from those around him.

The household became a tickle-free zone, except during sessions in which Leuba tickled the boy while hiding his face behind a mask.

By the age of seven months, the boy was screaming with laughter when tickled.

Three years later, his younger sister reacted in a similar fashion, leading Leuba to conclude laughter is an innate response to being tickled.

Sleep learning

All were chronic nailbiters and LeShan, a U.S. psychologist, tried to cure them by uttering the phrase: 'My fingernails taste terribly bitter' over and over as they slept.

By the end of the summer, 40 per cent had kicked the habit, with LeShan's actual voice more effective than a recording.

Other researchers have questioned whether the youngsters were properly asleep during the night-time lectures.

The vomit-drinking doctor

Determined to prove that yellow fever was not contagious, trainee doctor Stubbins Ffirth set out to demonstrate that no matter how much he exposed himself to the disease, he would not catch it.

To this end, he poured 'fresh black vomit' from a patient into a cut on his arm.

When he failed to fall ill, he gradually upped the ante, pouring the stuffing into deeper cuts, dribbling it into his eyes, and even building a 'vomit sauna' filled with vomit vapour.

He then drank the vomit, which gains its black colour from blood that has haemorrhaged in the stomach.

He finished by smearing himself with yellow fever-tainted blood, saliva, sweat and urine.

Healthy as ever, Ffirth, who lived in Philadelphia, declared his hypothesis proven in his 1804 thesis.

The Lazarus dogs

In the 1930s, the University of California biologist seesawed the canine corpses up and down to circulate the blood, while injecting a mixture of adrenaline and anti-coagulants.

Some did stir back to life, and despite being brain damaged, they lived on for months.

In 1947, armed with a heart-lung machine made from items including a vacuum cleaner blower, he announced he was ready to experiment on a human. A death row prisoner volunteered, but Cornish was refused permission.

Turkey turn-ons

In an attempt to work out just what it takes to excite a male turkey, Pennsylvania State University researchers looked at how the birds reacted to a lifelike model of a female turkey.

Dismantling the model piece by piece did not put the males off, with even a head on a stick appearing attractive.

In fact, the males preferred a head on a stick to a headless body, the 1960s experiments showed.

It is thought that the head fixation stems from the mechanics of turkey mating, with the female's head being all that the much larger male can see while straddling her.

The look of Eugh

To see whether emotions evoke characteristic facial expressions, psychologist Carney Landis drew lines on volunteers' faces with burnt cork to easily view the movement of their muscles.

He then observed the expressions as they smelled ammonia, listened to jazz, looked at porn and put their hands into a bucket of frogs.

The climax of the 1924 University of Minnesota experiment involved decapitating a live rat.

Landis never did find a single characteristic facial expression associated with rat decapitation.

Eyes wide open

Some people can sleep through anything, as Edinburgh University researcher Ian Oswald proved in 1960.

Oswald taped open the eyes of three volunteers before exposing them to flashing lights, electric shocks and loud music.

Despite the abuse, all three dozed off within just 12 minutes, perhaps soothed by the monotony of the combination of light, noise and pain.

Terror in the skies

Trying to chart how people react when faced with death, the U.S. Army faked a plane crash.

A group of young soldiers was told their plane was about to make an emergency landing in the ocean - and they had to quickly fill out insurance forms.

After they completed the forms, they were told the threat was over and the plane landed safely.

Not surprisingly, the fear of a crash landing led to them making more mistakes on the form than another group who filled out the same paperwork on the ground.

So disenchanted were the guinea pigs that one left a note on a sick bag, ensuring any move to repeat the 1960s experiment was ruined.

Two-headed dogs

In 1954 Soviet surgeon Vladimir Demikhov unveiled a two-headed dog, created by grafting the head, shoulders and front legs of a puppy on to the neck of a mature German shepherd.

When one head wanted to eat, so did the other. When it was hot, both panted. When one yawned so, did the other.

But the older dog occasionally tried to shake the foreign head off its neck.

The puppy retaliated by biting its larger companion on the ear.

Twenty such creatures were created. None lived longer than a month, but the work is seen as paving the way for human heart transplant surgery.

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