Can You Cure Homosexuality?

It's in at number four the top ten least ethical experiments, and for good reason. Trying to cure homosexuality using electrodes and psychological abuse was never going to go down well with the liberals. Which of the experiments do you think is worst?

	1960s & 70s
	Can you cure homosexuality?
	Aversion therapy on a Clockwork Orange scale.
	It doesn’t work.
	Injecting people with vomit-inducing drugs or zapping them with electricity while making them watch gay porn? Not so hot on the human rights.
	4/5

Details:
In the 1960’s, homosexuality was still a taboo, leading many people to volunteer themselves, mostly under family pressure, for a pioneering aversion therapy, with the aim of curing them of their homosexual tendencies. However the process they underwent was so disgustingly unethical that it would today be condemned as barbaric.

The ‘therapy’ involved pairing homosexual images with aversive stimuli, ranging from vomit-inducing injections to electric shocks, in an attempt to link homosexuality with either revulsion or pain (and sometimes both) in the minds of the participants.

These experiments to see if it was possible to ‘cure’ homosexuality left many participants psychologically disturbed, sometimes permanently, and needless to say did not work in the way they were meant to.

A case in the early 1990s came to light where one man had serious convulsions and then died after slipping into a coma following a particularly potent bout of aversion therapy involving a series of injections of apomorphine – a potent vomit-inducing drug which was later used (slightly ironically) to as a cure for erectile dysfunction.

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