PaulSpoerry.com

To research his new book, Elephants on Acid, Alex Boese scoured scientific archives searching for the most bizarre experiments of all time — the kind that are mind-twistingly, jaw-droppingly strange… the kind that make you wonder, “How did anyone ever conceive of doing such a thing?”

His website lists twenty of these experiments. You’ll find all of them (and about 80 more) discussed in greater detail in his book, which will be published this November, 2007 by Harcourt. Kirkus Reviews calls it, “One of the finest science/history bathroom books of all time.”

The list contains the following (click thru the link below to read the truely bizarre details:

• Monkey-Head Transplant - yes… they transplanted a monkeys head onto another monkey
• The Remote-Controlled Bull
• The Ape and the Child - raising an ape as a human
• “My Fingernails Taste Terribly Bitter”
• The Electrification of Human Corpses
• Seeing Through Cat’s Eyes - an attempt to tap into another creature’s brain and see directly through its eyes
• Stimuli Eliciting Sexual Behavior in Turkeys - this would have been much funnier had it been a male chicken  ;O)
• “Would You Go To Bed With Me Tonight?”
• Shock the Puppy - subjects were told to shock a puppy who didn’t stand in the right spot… nearly all of the people cranked up the voltage!
• Heartbeat At Death
• Beneficial Brainwashing
• The Vomit-Drinking Doctor - that’s a dedicated doc
• Facial expressions while decapitating a rat
• The Stanford Prison Experiment - you’ve probably heard of this, but it’s still a bizarre look into the human mind
• Human-Ape Hybrid - soviet experiment create a human-ape hybrid by breeding chimpanzees and humans
• The Isolated Head of a Dog - chop a dogs head off… but keep it alive. CREEPY!
• The Initiation of Heterosexual Behavior in a Homosexual Male
• Demikhov’s Two-Headed Dogs - dogs with another dog head attached (the longest only lived a month… but still… freaky)
• Obedience - told to subject subjects to increasingly high electric shocks for answering questions wrong, nearly EVERY person continued to give shocks
• Elephants on Acid - Speaks for itself… they dosed up some elephants. Why is another story.

Click through for the full story.