the 10 most expensive experiments

TEN MOST EXPENSIVE EXPERIMENTS

$150 Billion
International Space Station (£92 billion)
Weighing nearly 420 tonnes and floating 370km above the earth, the iss has been continuously occupied by astronauts from
various countries since the first crew docked on 2 november 2000.

02
$20.6 Billion
International Thermonuclear experimental reactor (£12.3 billion)
In 2010 construction began in france on what will become the world’s largest tokamak fusion device –
a magnetically confined core in which fuel will be heated to
temperatures greater than 150,000,000°c.

03
$8 Billion
James Webb Space Telescope (£4.9 billion)
Scheduled to launch in 2018, this telescope – a nasa project with input from the european and canadian space Agencies – will investigate how galaxies form by peering out to the farthest reaches of space.

04
$6.65 Billion
International linear collider (£4.1 billion)
A planned particle accelerator even bigger than the large Hadron collider, the
ilc will use a straight path rather than a circular one to measure particle collisions more accurately. sites in europe, the usa and Japan are currently being considered, with construction due to begin by 2016.

05
$6.4 Billion
Seattle Kingdome demolition
When: 26 March 2000
Large Hadron collider
(£3.84 billion) the 20 member states of cern
(conseil européen pour la recherche nucléaire – the
european council for nuclear research)
picked up most of the cost of the 27 km circumference tunnel and equipment, with significant
contributions coming from an additional six observer nations.

06
$3.26 Billion
CassiniHuygens Spacecraft (£2 billion)
launched in 1997, the cassini orbiter
entered saturn’s orbit in 2004, at which point the Huygens lander probe separated to
investigate the ringed planet’s largest moon, titan.

07
$3.1 Billion
Envisat (£1.9 billion)
launched aboard an Ariane 5 rocket from the european space Agency’s facility in
french Guiana in 2002, envisat spent 10 years in orbit monitoring signs of environmental impact and climate change on earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land and ice. Ground control lost contact with the satellite in 2012.

08
$2.7 Billion
Human genome project (£1.65 billion)
Work to map the entire human genome began in 1990; it had a budget of $3 billion and was expected to take 15 years – but was completed two years early and under budget.

09
$2.5 Billion
curiosity rover (£1.5 billion)
this car-sized robotic rover was designed to investigate whether life could ever have existed on mars. its original two-year mission was extended
indefinitely at the end of 2012, and it continues to explore the Gale crater.

10
$2 Billion
Superconducting Super collider (£1.2 billion)
construction on a particle accelerator with an 87kmcircumference ring in texas was halted in 1983 – but not until after nearly half of the $4.4bn budget had been spent.

10 Scientists who experimented on themselves

TEN SCIENTISTS WHO EXPERIMENTED ON THEMSELVES Max Joseph von Pettenkofer 1818–1901 in 1992, this Bavarian hygienist drank the diarrhoea of a cholera-stricken man in an attempt to demonstrate that the microbes became harmful only after incubating in the ground. He discovered that he was wrong. William J Harrington 1923–92 the American researcher in autoimmune disorders transfused blood from a patient with idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura into himself, showing that the condition causes the body to destroy blood platelets. Horace Wells 1815–48 An American dentist in connecticut, Wells pioneered the use of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) in dentistry by having one of his own teeth extracted while under anaesthesia. John Paul Stapp 1910–99 the American researcher made a huge contribution to air-crash safety by testing the effects of rapid deceleration on the human body, strapping himself to a rocket sled braking rapidly from up to 1,000km/h. Nicolae Mino...

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