Was This a Coverup?

Back in the 1980s, I worked as a proofreader. In the course of that, I noticed the following sentence in the translation of Iosif Shklovskii's obituary:

Shklovskii enjoyed working with young people: he would seek out gifted students, generally choosing the ones who wanted to be experiments and observations using new techniques.

(The emphasis was added.) I changed it to:

Shklovskii enjoyed working with young people: he would seek out gifted students, generally choosing the ones who wanted to do experiments and observations using new techniques.

Was this a coverup of Mad Science?

I'm reminded of the advice given in “The Mad Scientist's Primer” by Tom Rainbow:

Another important point is never experiment on yourself. That is what undergraduates are for.

Addendum: I just noticed that “he” in the obituary sentence should have been capitalized.