Okay, so what sort of in-character justification would you use to support studying it, since our character knows nothing about the Reapers?
"Studying it would let us know whether someone has already been affected."
"There may be more of these things with this sort of effect, and I want to be able to protect our researchers going forward."
(I have more, but they're mostly jokes)
The fact that the artifacts are capable of effecting and altering the minds of those around them via unknown means is all the reason
for studying them, because they are demonstrating something nobody has ever seen before. It's like finding uranium and discovering that people around it end up poisoned via means they cant detect or understand. They only way to figure out what's going on(and discover radioactivity) is to start researching the stuff(even if it means you have a few marie curie's in the early years).
And you think we can do that?
Are you sure you aren't indoctrinated? You're showing the signs. Arrogance, a belief that indoctrination is something that happens to other people, the belief that your mind is still your own...
Being serious, if people with tech thousands of years ahead of us couldn't work out how indoctrination works, then we won't be able to.
The tech difference is too great. It's like assuming that a person who has just recently learned how to bash someone's head in effectively with a rock will be able to safely fire a rocket launcher with no real instruction other than seeing how some others managed to get themselves killed.
The worst part is that all it takes is a single indoctrinated person to bring down the safeties, leading to exponential indoctrination. Then they claim that it's safe, that they discovered a blocker or a cure and the indoctrination spreads.
This tech is an armed, unexploded bomb. Every moment it exists is a moment it could go off. Unless we destroy it, it will go off eventually.
Bullshit. The Alliance never had the chance to truly study the effects of Indoctrination. Mass Effect is not some easy scifi universe where it's only a matter of months(or even just a few hours) to go from an unprecedented discovery to practical applications, not outside copy and past engineering. Reaper Indoctrination technology is the type of thing that requires a bare minimum of
decades of exhaustive research, the few months(at best) that the Alliance was able to do in a secret, isolated facility before the Batarians started messing around wouldn't have even allowed them the chance to do an in-depth study of the effects of Indoctrination in sentient beings.
Will there be casualties while studying the technology? Yes, just like with the RL early study's of radioactivity the researchers will have no idea what so ever of how the Indoctrination effects work or how to protect against it, despite the researchers best efforts there will be marie curie's, that's inevitable. That's just the natural result in the scientific study of dangerous phenomena, especially in the early days where nobody knows anything.
But shooting the things into a sun while going "La la la la la, it cant get me now, I'm perfectly safe" wont help at
all. In fact it do exactly fuck all when it comes to combating Indoctrination because 2000 years from now no study into Indoctrination technology will have happened, no means of detecting the effects of Indoctrination in people will exist(outside of that Prothean VI on Thessia), no understanding on how it happens, no means of protecting against it will have been developed, and even the knowledge that it's possible will have been long forgotten. Because if you think that all that could get developed in a vacuum without having long term study of Reaper Indoctrination technology then you clearly must have flunked all your science classes because that's not how science
works.
[X] Continue limited experiments. With exposure trajectories already charted for you by the Dalatrasses' sprint to fathom the bottom of sapient morality, you have what you need to ethically study this thing. Of course, the prior experiments also show the dangers of the artifact, so you'd best tread carefully.
