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ost_uid0]One of my profs told us an anecdote a couple weeks ago about some research that could qualify for an Ig Nobel.
Several years ago (this is probably going back to at least the 70's if not farther), one of the professors in the Microbiology department decided to investigate whether you could get vitamin K from intestinal bacteria. To do this, he found some grad students to experiment on. (Grad students apparently have no rights in the scientific community; you wouldn't be able to get away with this on any animal -- they're too well protected.
) Anyways, he put these grad students on a diet extremely low in vitamin K. This may not sound so bad until you realize how many things have vitamin K in them; these students weren't allowed to eat milk products or leafy greens to name a few and were basically living off diet coke and Jell-o. Naturally, this made the poor grad students pretty weak and exhausted. As if this weren't enough, just to make absolutely sure that their vitamin K levels were lowered (because this experiment was so important to science, you know), the professor gave the students low doses of warfarin.
For those of you who may not be aware, warfarin is used as rat poison.[/color
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