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Doctors, scientists, and governments have conducted experiments for hundreds of years.
In most cases, these experiments are ethical, controlled, and result in medical and scientific
advancements that we benefit from still to this day.
But, in other cases, things go wrong.
Horribly, horribly wrong.
I’m counting down ten experiments on humans that didn’t go to plan.
Be warned, some of the entries on today’s list are shocking, to say the least.
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10.
Surgical Experiments on Slaves J. Marion Sims was born in 1813 and is known
as the father of modern gynecology.
He helped develop procedures and instruments, including the modern-day speculum, but the
way that he developed them is sickening – he conducted experimental surgeries on enslaved
females.
Sims didn’t use anesthesia because he was said to hold the shocking opinion that black
people don’t feel pain.
But of course, everyone feels pain, and Sims himself even wrote that one of his so-called
patients was screaming in pain throughout the hour-long surgery he subjected her to.
At least one woman, a 17-year-old enslaved woman named Anarcha, endured 30 surgeries
over four long years of experimentation.
And, when his patients sometimes died as a result of his experimental procedures, he
always blamed others.
There have been debates as to whether the women would have consented to the surgeries
had they been entirely free to choose, but my money is on absolutely not.
Despite this clear manipulation of those poor women, Sims is still widely respected and
there are statues of him in New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania.
9.
The Monster Study The monster study was a stuttering experiment
conducted in Iowa in 1939.
It was performed on 22 orphaned children whose lives, in some cases, it went on to ruin.
The study, conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa, gave half of the 22
children positive speech therapy where they were praised on the fluency of their speech.
The other half, however, were given negative speech therapy and were belittled for speech
imperfections.
Many of the kids that had been given negative feedback suffered terrible psychological effects,
and in some cases, they went on to develop real speech problems that would plague them
for the rest of their lives.
The study was christened The Monster Study because, well, defenseless orphans were being
cruelly tested and studied.
The experiment was actually kept a secret for fear that it would ruin the reputation
of Johnson and the results were never published.
In 2007, seven of the orphaned victims were finally awarded compensation for the trauma
caused by the experiments.
8.
Stanford Prison Experiment The Stanford Prison Experiment is one of the
most infamous human experiments of all time.
The idea for the experiment was pretty straightforward and seemingly completely ethical.
A group of volunteers were given one of two roles: prison guard or prisoner.
They were then placed in a jail-setting and left to their own devices to see what would
happen.
The prisoners, who were referred to only by their numbers, soon rebelled and blockaded
themselves inside their cells.
And the guards, who had initially seemed hesitant to get into character, soon took their new
authority way too far.
Prisoners were stripped naked, humiliated, and were forced to do press-ups and other
exercises.
Guards even started disrupting the prisoners’ sleep, which is a well-known torture technique.
The experiment was planned to last for two weeks, but after just six days it was called
off due to extreme sadism, mental breakdowns, and even a hunger strike.
7.
Fatal Drug Trial In the mid-90s, Jay Hoofnagle and his staff
at the National Institutes of Health were conducting an experiment using fialuridine,
a new drug that was being tested to treat chronic hepatitis B. Several of the patients
involved had been complaining of side effects for months, including nausea, weight loss,
and painful tingling in their feet.
But those complaints were ignored.
That is until those patients started dying.
The first fatality was Howard Tichenor, a 44-year-old man who arrived in the emergency
room with failure of his liver and other organs.
This was enough to finally make Hoofnagle pay attention to the severity of the patients’
symptoms and he stopped the trial the very next day.
Of the 15 patients in the trial, ten had taken the dangerous drug for over one month.
Seven of those eventually needed liver transplants, and five have since died.
The trial was called a catastrophe by Hoofnagle, and I’m inclined to agree.
6.
Sexual Reassignment David Peter Reimer was born in 1965 as a biological
male.
But, when he was 7 months old, his penis was destroyed during a circumcision which unconventionally
used cauterization.
John Money, a psychologist who believed that gender is learned, convinced David’s parents
that it would be better if they brought him up as a girl.
As the years went by, Money continued to report that his experiment on David had been a success.
But, David’s account is much different.
He says that he never identified as a female and his childhood was marred with bullying
and being ostracized.
David fell into a deep depression which he never recovered from, and at the age of 38,
he committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.
5.
Tuskegee Syphilis Study Back in 1932, the U.S Public Health Service
began looking at the effects of untreated syphilis.
To do so, they headed to Macon Country, Alabama, and collected 600 illiterate, poor, African
American males.
399 of these men already had syphilis, but the Public Health Service chose to keep this
information from them.
Instead of disclosing to the men that they had a potentially fatal illness, they told
them they were receiving free healthcare, free food, and even burial insurance in exchange
for their participation.
The study continued until 1972, despite the fact that penicillin had been proven to cure
syphilis way back in 1947.
It wasn’t just the original male participants that were studied, either: it also tracked
the wives that contracted the disease, as well as the children who were born with congenital
syphilis.
These cruel and inhumane tests were labeled the most infamous biomedical experiment in
U.S history, and in 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized to the victims of the
botched study.
4.
Radioactive Pregnancies After World War 2 had ended, the U.S’s attention
turned to the impending Cold War.
Medical researchers became focused on radioactivity and chemical warfare because of this, so they
decided to conduct some pretty terrible experiments.
During a study at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, 829 pregnant women were
given a drink which they were told contained vitamins.
They were convinced that the drink would improve the health of their unborn babies, but what
they were actually drinking was radioactive iron.
Researchers wanted to see how quickly the radioisotope crossed over into the placenta.
Unsurprisingly, this experiment went horribly wrong.
At least seven of the babies later died from the experiment.
The women themselves suffered, too.
Their teeth and hair fell out and they experienced bruises, rashes, and anemia.
And, in some cases, even developed cancer.
3.
Soviet Poison Experiments The KGB was the main security unit of the
Soviet Union, and it’s no secret that it was fond of assassinating anyone who spoke
out against their regime.
The KGB’s weapon of choice was often poison, which they referred to as liquid affairs.
So, it set up a secret laboratory where gruesome experiments could be done.
The Soviet facility was to perfect the art of poison – they wanted to develop a tasteless,
odorless substance that could not be detected during an autopsy.
And of course, to do this, they needed some humans to experiment on.
It’s said that deadly substances were administered to more than 100 prisoners that were awaiting
execution.
These prisoners, which had been condemned to death by firing squad, instead suffered
a much worse fate.
They were lead into the laboratory, isolated in cells, and given fake medicine by fake
doctors.
One man quickly realized he’d been tricked when he developed extreme stomach pains.
Blood began pouring from his eyes as he banged on the door begging for help, but eventually,
he died.
This was what the Soviets would have referred to as a successful experiment, but there were
many that went wrong.
Some substances would fail to kill the prisoners and instead, they would become very sick.
These unfortunate souls would be nursed back to health, only to be poisoned once again.
It sometimes took as many as three attempts to kill prisoners, but in the end, there were
no survivors.
2.
The Aversion Project This next experiment was destined to go wrong
from the moment it was devised.
The Aversion Project was a cruel and shortsighted experiment in South Africa which ran between
1971 and 1989.
It’s aim?
To cure homosexuality in the military.
The treatment, which was carried out under the racial segregation of apartheid, used
electric shock therapy and chemical castration in attempt to fix homosexuals.
See, it was believed at the time that homosexuality was a mental illness that could be cured.
As part of these unthinkable experiments, as many as 900 unwanted sex change operations
were carried out.
This is clearly wrong in so many ways, but what’s perhaps worse is that some would
be abandoned part way through their forced transition.
The vile project went wildly off course and lead to suicides and allegedly some murders.
The sheer unethicality of these experiments was finally recognized and Dr. Aubrey Levin,
the man that headed the project, was accused of human rights abuse and went to prison for
his dastardly crimes.
1.
Unit 731 Unit 731 was a unit of the Imperial Japanese
army that conducted research on biological and chemical warfare.
As part of this research, the unit conducted horrific experiments on humans that often
killed people – and not always by accident.
At least 3,000 men, women, and children fell victim to Unit 731.
They were mostly Chinese but victims included Soviet, Mongolian, and other allied prisoners
of war.
The so-called experiments included sick surgeries without anesthesia which were often fatal,
deliberately infecting victims with diseases, and frostbite testing where victims’ limbs
would intentionally be frozen.
Unit 731 also forced pregnancy on women and tested weapons like grenades and flamethrowers
on prisoners.
This unit was responsible for many of the notoriously terrible war crimes carried out
by Imperial Japan.
But, shockingly.
Instead of being tried for war crimes, the USA gave Unit 731 researchers immunity in
exchange for the data they gathered through their hideous experiments.