Current ethics boards say "no". It's a debatable point -- a lot of things that ethics boards forbid might be, in some way, reasonable to study in some specific

Current ethics boards say "no". It's a debatable point -- a lot of things that ethics boards forbid might be, in some way, reasonable to study in some specific cases. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and ethics boards (correctly) draw simple lines in a place where they'll forbid a very high percentage of the bad stuff and a small-ish but not very small percentage of the good stuff. You're going to get errors when you draw simple lines. Ethics boards are conservative about where the lines go. They should be.