When scientists violate moral taboos, we expect horrific consequences. It’s a trope in our storytelling that goes back at least to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: However well-intentioned our fictional scientists may be, their disregard for ethical boundaries will produce not a peer-reviewed paper in Science but rather a new race of subhuman killers, a sucking wormhole in space-time, or a profusion of malevolent goo.

In the real world, though, matters aren’t so simple. Most scientists will assure you that ethical rules never hinder good research—that there’s always a virtuous path to testing any important hypothesis. But ask them in private, perhaps after a drink or three, and they’ll confess that the dark side does have its appeal. Bend the rules and some of our deepest scientific conundrums could be elucidated or even resolved: nature versus nurture, the causes of mental illness, even the mystery of how humans evolved from monkeys. These discoveries are just sitting out there, waiting for us to find them, if only we were willing to lose our souls.

What follows are seven creepy experiments—thought experiments, really—that show how contemporary science might advance if it were to toss away the moral compass that guides it. Don’t try these at home—or anywhere, for that matter. But also don’t pretend you wouldn’t like to learn the secrets that these experiments would reveal.

The premise:
In the quest to tease out the interplay of nature and nurture, researchers have one obvious resource: identical twins, two people whose genes are nearly 100 percent the same. But twins almost always grow up together, in essentially the same environment. A few studies have been able to track twins separated at a young age, usually by adoption. But it’s impossible to control retroactively for all the ways that the lives of even separated twins are still related. If scientists could control the siblings from the start, they could construct a rigorously designed study. It would be one of the least ethical studies imaginable, but it might be the only way (short of cloning humans for research, which is arguably even less ethical) that we’d ever solve some big questions about genetics and upbringing.

How it works:
Expectant mothers of twins would need to be recruited ahead of time so the environments of each sibling could differ from the moment of birth. After choosing what factors to investigate, researchers could construct test homes for the children, ensuring that every aspect of their upbringing, from diet to climate, was controlled and measured.

The payoff:
Several disciplines would benefit enormously, but none more than psychology, in which the role of upbringing has long been particularly hazy. Developmental psychologists could arrive at some unprecedented insights into personality—finally explaining, for example, why twins raised together can turn out completely different, while those raised apart can wind up very alike. —Erin Biba

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