If I am donating to a charity which funnels money to research, how is this all that different? I think you can tap into a similar set of population and motivations for the donations. One of the upsides with this sort of approach is that you have a great opportunity to involve the donors in the overall process. The experiment can be used to provide a view into the nitty gritty of the scientific process and more specifically drug research. Of course to do this well will take a significant effort to communicate everything effectively. On the other hand, as you mentioned, you don't want to create false hope. To mitigate this you would want to work on managing expectations on the potential results and consequences of those results are. Either way you should be able to gather useful information/experience on both the scientific experiment and the social experiment.