Spider goats and Stanford Prison: Two controversial experiments of the 20th century 

If you are someone who is familiar with the world of science, you must be aware that the 20^th century was witness to a fascinating number of landmark scientific experiments and discoveries. Be it differentiating human blood groups or the innovation of penicillin, the field of science and was bolstered with invention. However, not many know that the century also witnessed a few bizarre and controversial discoveries too! Today, we will help you explore two of them: Genetically engineered spider-goats and the Stanford Prison experiment. Here’s exploring them.  

Mutation of goat and spider 
In 1990, researchers at the University of Wyoming, USA, started a controversial experiment where they tried to genetically engineer a spider with a goat. This was done to find a shortcut to harvest silk from spiders. Considering spiders are tiny organisms as well as highly territorial, scientists over the ages have tried to find easier ways to derive silk out of them. As a result, researchers at Wyoming decided to try out something weird. They injected spider gene (that is responsible for creating silk) onto the genome of a more tractable animal such as a goat. However, this resulted in the mutation of several female goats that released strands of silk into their mothers’ milk. This, in turn, was taken out to make raw silk. According to many science critics, this experiment endangered the lives of innocent goats. 

The Stanford Prison experiment 
In the year 1971, a psychology professor from the Stanford University, USA, named Philip Zimbardo hired 24 graduation students and treated them as his own human subjects to perform a unique experiment. As it happened, he assigned a dozen students with the task of being ‘prisoners’ and a dozen others with that of being ‘guards’ and set up a makeshift prison at the basement of his psychology department. His intention was to study the change in behaviours of inmates. However, two days into the experiment and it got out of hands when the ‘guards’ asserted their power and the ’prisoners’ started resisting. This led to an infamous revolt following which several students had severe mental breakdown as well as physical trauma. The experiment has ever since been regarded as one of the most horrifying and controversial experiments of the previous century. The researcher, however, had concluded that his experiment was successful. It helped him realise that even normal and reasonable people surrender to their darkest demons when given utmost power, justifying the Nazi concentration camp phenomenon. In 2015, even a movie was made on this infamous experiment.