Obviously, it can happen that first the experimentation goes awry, and then the experimenting society stumbles.
It touched off a discussion of financial conflict of interest in gene therapy experiments, prompting the society to issue guidelines barring members from running clinical trials if they had a financial stake in the companies sponsoring their studies.
Table 9 shows that the most common forms of partnership are those in which the local government leads with either private actors (112 experiments) or civil society actors (44 experiments).
His fascinating new book, "The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data," begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society where smartphones are miniaturized and hooked directly into a person's brain".
Mr Mankiw begins with a thought experiment: "Imagine a society with perfect economic equality...Then, one day, this egalitarian utopia is disturbed by an entrepreneur with an idea for a new product.
When someone says that moral character has been built up in a particular society experimenting with a free market system, I ask, "Have you observed it long enough?" I'm interested in long-term effects on the society.
But even today the aftershocks of Young's early experiments echo through Mormon society.
More drops were produced and experimented on two days later, and a full report of the experiments given to the society at its weekly meeting by the president.
Pentland spoke with Forbes.com about the benefits his tracking experiments could offer to society, the privacy problems they pose and how he hopes to strike a balance between the two.
Written by Carolyn Johnson, "Pure Verities" centers on a journalism student who "gets caught in endlessly repeating hallways [then] discovers that the phenomenon is linked to an insidious set of experiments by a secret society".
