When most people take a break, they go on a trip somewhere or just hang out with their
friends - today I'm taking a break from Urban Legends and I've come here, to talk about
human experimentation.
We did a video about it ages ago and a lot of you have wanted to hear more stories ever
since so here we are, I hope you're ready, they're very intense - my name is Danny Burke
and this is the top 10 scary human experiment stories - part 2
Starting off at number 10 now we have the Manhattan Project.
Some of you may recognize the name of this one - it was the secret name for Americas
project to produce the atomic bombs that brought WW2 to an end.
Harry Daghlian was a young physicist who worked on the project.
During an experiment on August 21st, 1945, he was attempting to build a neutron reflector
manually by stacking a set of 4.4-kilogram tungsten carbide bricks in an incremental
fashion around a plutonium core.
Unfortunately, he dropped a brick which set of a reaction.
He tried to stop the reaction but by the time it was over, he received a high dose of neutron
radiation.
Harry received intensive medical care for severe radiation poisoning.
His mother and sister flew out to New Mexico to care for him but Harry fell into a coma
- he died 25 days after the accident.
His death resulted in new safety regulations when handling radioactive material.
Next, up at number 9, we have the Dioxin Tests.
In 1965, dermatologist Dr. Albert Kligman conducted a study on behalf of the US army
and some pharmaceutical companies.
They wanted to know how human skin reacts to harsh chemicals, a process known as hardening.
Most of the information about these tests have been destroyed or covered up.
We do know that he described his patients as -acres of skin- to experiment on.
We also know he used dioxin on them, the active ingredient in Agent Orange.
This happened around the time the US was covering Vietnam with Agent Orange in an attempt to
push the fight against the Vietcong in their favor.
To speed up the experiments, Dr. Kligman injected his victims with a reported 468 times the
recommended safe dose of dioxin.
After that, not much more has been uncovered.
Its thought there are about 70 of the patients out there still, their identities and current
condition unknown.
Next up at number 8, we have Operation Sea Spray.
In September 1950, the US Navy spent 6 days spreading the bacterium Serratia Marce-scens
into the air about two miles off the northern California coast.
That bacterium lives in soil and water and is best known for its ability to produce bright
red pigment.
This trait makes it useful in experiments because it's so bright, its very easy to say
where it is.
The project was called -Operation Sea Spray-, its aim was to determine the susceptibility
of a big city like San Francisco to a bioweapon attack by terrorists.
In the following days, the military took samples at 43 sites to track the spread of the bacteria.
They found that it had infested the whole city and all the surrounding suburbs as well.
During this test, residents of San Francisco inhaled millions of bacterial spores.
The military deemed the experiment a success, they got to see how far chemical warfare could
spread and anyway, they knew the bacterium wasn't harmful - or so they thought.
People started getting urinary tract infections and it was even linked to the death of a patient
recovering from prostate surgery.
This experiment wasn't even public knowledge until 1976, a full 26 years after the event.
Moving on to number 7 now we have Project MK Ultra.
This is a particularly famous one that you may have heard me talk about in a previous
video.
During the 1950s and 60s, at the height of the cold war, the US feared that communist
countries were using mind control techniques to brainwash US prisoners of war in Korea.
They wanted in on the action.
So, in response, the CIA authorized Project MK-Ultra in 1953.
The secret operation was aimed at developing a defense against drugs or other manipulators
that could control human behavior.
Such was the secrecy of this project, that even today, not much is known - but we do
know this: the program involved more than 150 human experiments involving psychedelic
drugs, paralytics and electroshock therapy.
Sometimes, the test subjects were aware that they were participating in a study but shockingly,
many did not - even when they hallucinogenic effects starting kicking in.
Can you imagine how scary that would be?
Many of the tests took place at universities, hospitals or prisons in the US and Canada
between 1953 and 1964.
The CIA didn't keep many records though and any good ones were destroyed when the program
came to an official end in 1973.
Moving on to number 6 now we have North Korea.
Some of the things we've all heard about North Korea may not be true, but some of them may
be worse than we could even imagine.
In 2014, a former North Korean officer stepped forward to say that the nation's military
was using mentally and physically disabled children as test subjects in chemical experiments.
He said this was the last straw that caused him to defect and leave the country.
The man was called I'm Cheon Yong and he said he was taken to special training at the military
academy.
It was there where they taught him to confuse the enemy without revealing your own forces,
how to carry out assassinations and how to use chemical weapons.
He was close to defecting at this alone and then came to -field learning- … this involved
testing biological and chemical weapons on so-called -objects- … at first, these objects
were mice but soon, they were using humans.
I'm saying that he saw, with his very own eyes, disabled people, sometimes children,
being killed by these chemical weapons - just to show the soldiers how they worked.
One expert said that this is not surprising, anyone who visits the capital will never see
disabled people because they are allegedly taken away as children and incarcerated in
special camps.
Perhaps these evil experiments are what the camps are leading up to …
Moving on to number 5 now we have Project QKHILLTOP.
This was a CIA Project developed to study Chinese brainwashing techniques, which they
used to develop new methods of interrogation.
The research was led by a man named Dr. Harold Wolff.
He was a researcher at Cornell University's Medical School.
Dr. Wolff requested the CIA provide him with information on imprisonment, deprivation,
humiliation, torture, brainwashing, hypnosis and more.
Base on this, the team began to formulate a plan.
They wanted to develop secret drugs and various brain damaging procedures.
According to a letter that he wrote, in order to fully test the effects of this, Wolff wanted
the CIA to -make available suitable subjects- … once they had provided the poor souls
to test on, Cornell also detailed the next step his research team would take.
They would then - …assemble, collate, analyze and assimilate this information and will then
undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive
intelligence use … Potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures)
will be similarly tested in order to ascertain the fundamental effect upon human brain function
and upon the subject’s mood …- basically, the stuff of nightmares.
Nothing more is known about the test subjects or victims as they are often referred to now
…
Moving on to number 4 now we have Dr. Lauretta Bender.
This Dr has gone down in history for her experiments on children.
She was a child psychiatrist who specialized in children believed to have schizophrenia.
For almost 3 decades, from 1942 to 1969, she was a highly respected expert in her film.
Her preferred choice of treatment was electroshock therapy.
These days, the practice has been banned in most of the world and is seen as ineffective,
cruel and borderline torture in some cases.
Still, this was a different time - and that's what Dr. Bender did to the children.
Her methods involved interviewing and analyzing a sensitive child in front of a large group.
She would they apply a gentle amount of pressure to the child's head.
The theory was, any child who moved with the pressure was showing early signs of schizophrenia.
These days, that's referred to as total pseudoscience but it took a while to figure that out.
By the time her treatments were shut down, Bender had used electroshock therapy on over
100 children - the youngest of whom was age 3.
Reports described her as uncaring and the study as unethical.
The shocks can cause memory loss, nausea, headaches, jaw pain or even serious heart
trouble.
Some say all of this was a result of Benders misunderstood childhood, that she was the
product of her environment and family.
Now that is proper psychology - I'm just saying.
Moving on to number 3 now we have the Burke and Hare Murders.
William Burke as a guy who has probably tainted by surname forever.
Along with William Hare, these two men from northern Ireland were famous grave robbers
in Scotland.
One day, an old man they knew died and to cover his outstanding debt to them, they decided
to sell his body for medical science.
Edinburgh university gave them 7 pounds and 10 shillings - a handsome sum on those days.
With that, they were hooked.
When another associate fell ill, they couldn't even wait to see if he would die and suffocated
him in his bed.
Again, they sold his body for money.
The killing spree began, the pair murdered and sold bodies almost as their full-time
jobs.
They killed an old grandmother with an overdose of painkillers.
Hare even killed his blind grandson by breaking his back across his knee.
Eventually, though, their whole operation was discovered when they got too sloppy.
William Burke as hanged in front of a cheering crowd of over 25,000.
Fittingly, after being put on public display, his body was donated to medical science.
Next up at number 2, we have J Marion Sims.
This doctor was once praised as the father of modern gynecology, now his reputation has
been tarnished forever.
It was found that he practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved
women.
They included Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey - the rest are unknown.
He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia.
His legacy has long been questioned for the disturbing ethical questions it raises - especially
by those who believe he used black women as medical guinea pigs without their consent.
The Black Youth Project 100, a group of activists aged between 18 and 35, staged protests at
a statue of Sims in New York.
They wore hospital gowns splashed with red paint dripping down their legs.
In a Facebook post, they explained that Sims had “purchased Black women slaves and used
them as guinea pigs for his untested surgical experiments.
He repeatedly performed genital surgery on Black women WITHOUT ANESTHESIA because according
to him, ‘Black women don’t feel pain.’
Despite his inhumane tests on Black women, Sims was named ‘the father of modern gynecology’,
and his statue currently stands right outside of the New York Academy of Medicine.-
And finally, at number 1 we have The Pregnant Women.
In January 2018, it emerged that after the second world war, the US military gave nearly
1,000 pregnant women radioactive iron by their doctors without their knowledge, as part of
a series of experiments to test the effects.
Between 1945 and 1947, researchers at Vanderbilt University conducted this sick experiments
that were funded by the US Public Health Service.
All of the women were poor and had no knowledge of the experiment.
Afterward, they were not informed that they had been part of the study either.
The radioactive iron was given as part of a -medicine cocktail- by health officials
they trusted.
Their aim was to record the absorption of iron during pregnancy.
However, in the years since, investigators have said this too was a lie and that the
real reason was for the military to learn more about radiation exposure.
In the 1990s, Vanderbilt university finally acknowledges and investigate the experiments.
The story broke when 2 women and one of their daughters filed a lawsuit against the university
for exposing them to radiation.
One of the women was Emma Craft, she said at a Senate hearing that the experiments caused
the death of her 11-year-old daughter due to cancer.
The true effects of this study are still being investigated today.
Well, guys, I would say we learned something today but to be honest - I think all of us
already knew that human experimentation is a very shady business.
I hope you found the stories interesting though and a reminder to question everything in life!
But be cool about it.
I don't know if I'm making sense, probably time to end the video - thanks for watching
as always guys, my name is Danny Burke and Ill see you all in the next video.