Ah, there's nothing like home grown evil.

Ok, hands up if you have a sneaking nostalgia for the Tuskegee experiments. You remember, they let dozens of black men with syphilis go for decades without treatment (while telling them they were providing treatment), just to see what would happen to them as the disease progressed. It led to laws and regulations about informed consent, patient disclosure, etc.

Well, apparently, some folks in New York City decided that the didn't want the good ole boys down south to have all the fun, so the upped the ante by experimenting with AIDS drugs in kids. The BBC has a heartwarming story about it here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/4038375.stm

loot for the holiday

Anyone who wishes to get me a gift (and why not? :) and who can't think of something should check out my holiday wish list at Modern Myths.

Thanks.

Oh, original spellings and their double entendres.

Robert Boyle was a very pious gentlemen natural philosopher of the seventeenth century. Thus, I assure you that the following passage is not intended to be in any way naughty, and Boyle would probably have been very upset that someone would read sexual overtones into it. That said, read it for yourself.

"He related how that ingenious Gentleman Otto Gericke, Conful of Magdeburg, had lately practiced in Germany a way of emptying Glafs Veffels, by fucking out the Ayr at the mouth of the Veffel, plung’d underwater; And you may remember alfo that I expreff’d my felf much delighted with this Experiment, fince thereby the great force of the external Air (either rufhing in at the open’d Orifice of the empty’d Veffel, or violently forcing up the Water into it) was rendred more obvious and confpicuous, than in any Experiment that I had formerly feen." From the New Experiments Physico-Mechanical Touching Upon the Spring of the Air, by Robert Boyle, 1660, page 5