Technology

Great! Most people feel the same way!

The problem is that most of us who go into scientific research involving human subjects have about a decade’s worth of increasingly specialized education on a specific subject, have worked in a junior capacity in study design, execution, and analysis, and were generally not billionaires trying to become the first trillionaire.

There’s a reason why academic research works the way it does - because we learned the hard way.

The Tuskegee experiment carried out by the US Public Health Service and the CDC was a program in which black American males were deliberately infected with syphilis and left untreated, so that researchers could watch the profession of the disease. The program didn’t officially end until 1972. Just yesterday I read a news story about a doctor successfully being sued for giving prisoners, without their consent, high doses of Ivermectin to treat Covid, going off of his intuition and the idea that he was qualified to do medical research.

When I was doing this kind of work, I had to go through something called a Human Studies Board. Every university has one. The HSB is a team of senior researchers which will review your proposal to make sure what you’re asking to do is both justified and does no harm to your subjects. If they say “no,” you’re going back to the drawing board. I have had PhD students whose thesis research had to go through multiple revisions because the HSB felt that they weren’t properly controlling for potential harm. Bit there were not billions of dollars on the line, and I didn’t have billions in personal wealth and the ability to influence the HSB.

Another example: About ten or so years ago, Facebook decided to run an experiment in which they promoted sad news stories to some people, and happy news stories to others. They then followed up on those individuals’ posts to see if the former group became noticeably depressed. They did. Facebook did this without the users’ consent, and didn’t make provisions for followup with any human subjects who did become depressed. Some of their subjects may have committed acts of violence or self-harm because of pre-existing psychological states. They have no idea. They just came up with the hypothesis that sad news might make people sad, and ran with it. It was unethical. I do not believe they faced any consequences other than the researchers and the company being universally berated in the academic community.

We are researching brain implants. That’s already underway in universities around the world. Elon wants to move fast and break things to make it go faster, but in this case the “things” are people.

So you have Elon, who is legendary in the industry for thinking he’s very much smarter than he is and pushing his experts into screwing things up. You have his vast wealth as well as a drive to create more wealth (academic researchers very rarely grow wealthy from their discoveries and rarely have wealth as a driving factor).

We are already doing what you’re asking for. I have a colleague at one of the top US university that’s specifically researching telomere repair and other aspects of DNA-focused methods to prevent some of the effects of aging, and I’ve personally done modeling on the molecular biology associated with deregulation and cancer in grad school.

We would be better off if the government would just take Elon’s money and use it to fund actual scientific research.