Another more recent one: https://abcnews.go.com/Health/Healthday/Story?id=4741269&pag...
More examples aren't hard to find at all, including the case last year of the gene-edited girls: https://gizmodo.com/chinese-scientist-who-created-crispr-bab...
When you've got a burning question in mind and visions of tremendous benefits for all humanity (or saving some academic fields from themselves) it seems like a good idea to get your ideas reviewed.
Research in the educational setting involving routine educational activities is exempt from most IRB requirements, except for an initial review to confirm that it is the above.
It's typically pretty easy to get too -- you can shop around for a sympathetic IRB. In my experience it's been basically a rubber stamp.
Note I work in industry not academia.
How many times have you submitted a small PR that obviously can't break anything, complaining about the annoyance all the time, only to find out that your "obviously right" PR was in fact badly wrong? How many times have you seen some bit of code and thought "this is weird, but it had to have been approved to get merged, so I probably don't have to worry too much about it"? Now multiply that by research with human subjects.