I STARTED collecting examples of bizarre experiments years ago while in graduate school studying the history of science. I confess I had no profound intellectual motive; I simply found them fascinating. They filled me with disbelief, astonishment, disgust and – best of all – laughter.

With hindsight, perhaps there is a deeper message. These experiments are not the work of cranks. All were performed by honest, hard-working scientists who were not prepared to accept common-sense explanations of how the world works. Sometimes such single-mindedness leads to brilliant discoveries. At other times it can end up closer to madness. Unfortunately, there’s no way of knowing in advance where the journey will lead.

Here are 10 of the bizarrest experiments of all time – which, it must be said, mostly fall closer to madness than to genius.

1 Elephants on acid

What happens if you give an elephant LSD? Researchers solved this mystery on Friday 3 August 1962, when Warren Thomas, director of Lincoln Park Zoo in Oklahoma City, fired a cartridge-syringe containing 297 milligrams of LSD into the rump of Tusko the elephant. With Thomas were two colleagues from the University of Oklahoma School of Medicine, Louis Jolyon West and Chester M. Pierce.

The dose was about 3000 times what a human would typically take. Thomas, West and Pierce figured that if they were going to give an elephant LSD they’d better not give it too little. They later explained that the experiment was designed to find out if LSD would induce musth in an elephant – musth being a kind of temporary madness male elephants sometimes experience during which they become highly aggressive …