You’ve all heard about the mad scientist who takes his work a little bit too much to
heart and too far, only for something he created to destroy him and sometimes many other people
around him.
Thankfully, academics are usually not so crazed or careless.
Nonetheless, throughout history you could say at times scientists have gone too far,
while at other times things just didn’t end the way they wanted them to.
And that’s what we’ll look at today, when experiments took a turn for the worse.
The Stanford Prison Experiment We’ll start with something you might have
already heard of and get to less well-known experiments later.
This was a social experiment that took place at Stanford University in the USA from August
14th to August 20th 1971.
It should have been much longer, but the guy behind the experiment, one professor Philip
George Zimbardo, has explained before why it was cut short.
This is what he said: “Our planned two-week investigation into
the psychology of prison life had to be ended after only six days because of what the situation
was doing to the college students who participated.
In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed
signs of extreme stress.”
Yep, the experiment didn’t really go as planned.
What happened was this.
24 male students were chosen from 75 to take part in an experiment in which some of them
would act as prison guards and others as inmates.
It was a simple role-play, but the students were asked to act it out as realistically
as they could.
In fact, they made it so real that the students were mock arrested by local cops at their
homes, then taken to the station and booked.
They were even strip-searched, had their mugshots taken and fingerprints done.
The students were not chosen for which part they’d play based on their personality.
It was random.
After a while the guards became extremely authoritarian and they abused some of the
prisoners psychologically, and soon it began to seem not like a roleplay.
They really were mistreating each other, these young students who hadn’t acted like this
before.
Some of the pretend prisoners complained about how they were being treated, but guess what,
they were then abused by their fellow prisoners.
One guy even went on hunger strike in protest about treatment, and for that he was put into
solitary confinement: a dark closet.
It showed the professor just how people even in acting roles could find sadism somewhere
in them.
It got so bad he just pulled the plug.
In some ways it was a success since it proved a point, but there was no way the academics
could permit anymore psychological carnage to happen.
The Milgram Experiment Again, you could say this social experiment
didn’t exactly go wrong, but the results were so shocking you could say the outcome
was horrific.
What Mr. Milgram was trying to achieve with this experiment was to prove that humans can
do very nasty things just because they are following orders.
An example for this was how could all those people involved in the Holocaust all be pure
evil?
Maybe people just do awful things when an authority tells them to do so.
In the experiment there were three main people.
The experimenter, the teacher and the learner.
Both the experimenter and the leaner were in cahoots, they were working together.
Only the teacher was a proper volunteer.
The learner was to be tested to see how physical pain can affect memory and the teacher would
be the one who inflicted the pain using electric shocks he could give the learner at the push
of a button.
The teacher was told he got that role after picking a slip of paper and could have easily
been the learner, but that was a lie.
As we said, the learner was in on it.
The teacher and learner were then separated and the test began.
If the learner got something wrong the teacher was told to administer a shock.
Each time the voltage increased by 15-volts.
The learner, acting out his role, would start to shout in pain and then bang around, with
those volts getting very high.
He would then fall silent, as if dead or close to it.
The teacher had already been given the lowest shock just to know how painful it was.
He could only imagine what a higher voltage must have felt like.
Sometimes the teachers just said, “No more, I can’t go on doing this.”
But then they were told, “The experiment requires that you continue.”
Or.
“It is absolutely essential that you continue.”
Or.
“You have no other choice, you must go on.”
And they did, sometimes administering enough voltage that in real life it would have killed
someone for sure.
Milgram later wrote as a conclusion: “Even when the destructive effects of their
work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental
standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”
This one is on the list because a lot of people later criticized such a dark experiment, stating
that it breached ethical standards of psychological research.
Marie Curie’s Fate with Radiation This Polish woman is one of the best known
scientists that ever lived, but her experiments really didn’t end well for her.
In 1898, Curie discovered two powerful elements that she called Polonium and Radium.
Yep, she messed around with radiation and we all know now that if you do this the consequences
can be dire.
In fact, she would carry radioactive tubes around in her clothes.
This eventually led to her dying from extreme radiation poisoning.
And you know what, if you want to see her journals or look at her furniture which is
housed at the Pierre and Marie Curie collection at the Bibliotheque Nationale in France, you
have to sign a liability waiver and wear protective clothing.
Some of those books are even kept in a box lined with lead.
This certainly was a woman who suffered for her science.
The Louis Slotin Incident This is another person who died in the name
of science and it was radiation that got him, too.
The Canadian scientist had been part of the Manhattan Project to create the nuclear bomb,
but things turned black on 21 May 1946.
That day he was showing seven colleagues a fission reaction.
In short, a screwdriver slipped and what followed was a burst of hard radiation.
The other scientists in the room later said they witnessed a blue glow, and some of you
might know that this means trouble.
Mr. Slotin later left the room, but then he vomited.
Not a good sign, because if you vomit soon after radiation poisoning it usually means
you are going to die.
He did die, and that’s the end of his story.
Thankfully the other scientists were alive after, but some of them did have to spend
some time in hospital.
In fact, three of those people in the room that day died because of complications brought
on by the radiation dose they received.
The Monster Study Could an experiment have a worse name?
The Monster Study was an experiment that started in 1939 and involved 22 orphans.
It was led by an American psychologist called Wendell Johnson and took place at the University
of Iowa.
It was simple enough.
What the researchers did was take half of the kids and give them positive therapy sessions
in which they were told they had excellent speech.
They were praised and given lots of compliments.
The other half were given only negative feedback and told they could hardly speak at all.
All these kids had been told at the beginning was they were going to be given some speech
therapy sessions, not of course that they were part of a bigger experiment.
Ten of the kids given feedback were actually stutterers, but the rest weren’t.
What the experimenters wanted to do was see if they gave positive feedback to stutterers
could they actually make that person stop stuttering.
But the more unethical part is they also wanted to see if they could induce stuttering in
a non-stuttering kid by giving him or her aggressive negative feedback.
Some of those kids without stutters were told, “The staff has come to the conclusion that
you have a great deal of trouble with your speech.
You have many of the symptoms of a child who is beginning to stutter.
You must try to stop yourself immediately.
Use your will power.
Do anything to keep from stuttering.
Don't ever speak unless you can do it right.”
What happened was some of those criticized kids never fully recovered, and while they
didn’t develop a stutter many of them were psychologically damaged and did have problems
talking for the rest of their lives.
In fact, in 2007 seven of those kids, now getting on in age, received compensation for
the torment they had suffered and the emotional scars they had lived with.
The experimenters didn’t actually call it the Monster Study by the way, it became known
that due to its very sketchy ethics.
The New York Times spoke to one of the non-stutterers in 2003.
She said, “It just ruined my life…
I can't talk no more.”
She then just hung up the phone.
The moral of this story is you don’t mess with kids’ heads like that.
Project Cirrus In the 1940s the USA had the idea of trying
to control hurricanes and divert them away from people or towns.
Scientists believed they could seed them with dry ice.
Then on October 13, 1947, the US Air Force sent a plane up to a hurricane to drop 80
pounds (36 kilograms) into the clouds to attempt this diversion.
Bad move, because this seemed to make it change direction.
It ended up hitting the town of Savannah, Georgia.
One person was killed and 200 million dollars’ worth of damage was caused.
One man said its path had been changed by human intervention and lawsuits were threatened,
but it took some years for the government to admit that it had seeded the hurricane
that “went whacky.”
We should add, though, that it’s unlikely that the seeding caused the change in direction.
Still, some people believe it did.
Stubbins Ffirth’s Filth Rubs In 1793 Philadelphia’s population was decimated
by around 10 percent and the demon that did it was called Yellow Fever.
This was something that needed to be dealt with, and on the scene was a doctor called
Stubbins Ffirth.
Yes, that’s two Fs, but we don’t think he was a stutterer.
Mr. Ffirth studied yellow fever and one very bad conclusion he came to was that it was
not contagious.
Now we know it is, and we know it is very contagious.
But he was sure it wasn’t, and he could prove it.
In one of the weirdest and outright nasty-sounding experiments of all time he made cuts in his
arms and smeared the vomit of yellow fever sufferers into those cuts.
For good measure, he also rubbed the vomit into his eyeballs.
Could it get any worse than that?
Of course it could.
Stubbins then decided to take that vomit and fry it up while inhaling the fumes, which
was strange to say the least.
In the end he just ended up drinking the raw vomit.
He so much wanted to prove that the disease was not contagious that he put the vomit aside
and then started testing with blood, urine and saliva.
It seems he didn’t delve in feces, though, so we can commend him for that.
He published his findings in a thesis called, “A Treatise on Malignant Fever; with an
Attempt to Prove its Non-contagious Non-Malignant Nature.”
This experiment went wrong as he was completely wrong about yellow fever not being contagious,
but he in fact got very lucky.
That’s because the patients he used had been infected so long they were no longer
contagious, so all Ffirth suffered was the experiments themselves.
We imagine they weren’t very pleasant.
What horrible experiments have you heard of?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other video The Horrors of Unit 731.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.