And we already have a safety valve for when conventional ethics is standing in the way of vital research: the researchers test on themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine

If it's that vital, surely you would do it to yourself?

It's not terribly common because most useful research is perfectly ethical, but we have a good number of cases of researchers deciding that there's no way for someone to ethically volunteer for what they need to do, so they do it to themselves. Sometimes they die. Sometimes they make very valuable discoveries. Sometimes both.

So the next time someone wantz to strap someone to a rocket engine and fire it into a wall, all they have to do is go first and be part of the testing pool.