Welcome back guys my name is Danny Burke and today were gonna be taking a look at the top
10 scary human experiment stories.
Throughout history, governments, university, scientists and researchers have strived to
learn more about the human body.
In order to achieve this, they sometimes over step a boundry and end up causing immense
suffering to real people.
Hopefully, the world has learnt from its mistakes - here are the very worst of them …
Starting off at number 10 now we have The Twin Studies.
Josef Mengle was the chief medical officer at Auschwitz concentration camp during the
holocaust.
Far from being a doctor to the people there, he used them as part of his twisted medical
studies.
Mengle had an obsession with twins.
From 1943 to 1944, he performed experiments on almost 1,500 sets of imprisoned twins.
Just 200 survived.
One study involved injecting different dyes into the eyes of twins to see whether it would
change their color.
Another involved sewing twins together in a sick attempt to create conjoined twins.
Some of the studies are far too graphic to even talk about in this video …
Next up at number 9 we have The Poison Labs.
This is the name given to the Soviet Unions secret testing labs for poisons.
During the 1950s, the researchers there would test deadly poisons on prisoners who came
from the Gulags - that translates to enemies of the people.
These poisons included mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin, curare, cyanide and many others.
All of these are deadly and many of them painful.
The goal of the studies was to find a tasteless, odourless chemical that could not be detected
after death.
In a final sick twist, the prisoners were told that the poison was actually medicine.
Next up at number 8 we have The Stanford Prison Experiment.
In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo led a research team to study human behavior when
it comes to authority and inmates in prison.
He set up a mock prison and got 24 volunteers to take part.
They were assigned as either prisoners or the guards watching over them.
Everything was designed to look and feel like a real prison - from the uniforms, to the
cells and the ID numbers.
The guards started to get way more involved than the researchers thought they would - verbally
and then physically abusing the prisoners.
By their 2nd day, the prisoners had already started to rebel, the guards put it down with
brutal violence.
The prisoners began to get emotionally traumatized day and on the 6th day the experiment was
ended 8 days early.
Moving on to number 7 now we have The Aversion Project.
This experiment was a medical torture program in South Africa conducted by Dr Aubrey Levin
during the 1970s and 80s.
It was the militaries attempt to root out homosexuality from the army as it was seen
as a mental illness.
Over the years, 900 gay servicemen and some women were sent to the infamous Ward 22 for
sexual reassignment surgeries - some of them as young as 16.
These surgeries involved chemical castration and electric shock treatment.
The surgery attempted to change the men into physical females.
Apart from the surgeries being horrifically unethical, they were also botched quite often
- leaving the victims cast out into the world without the hormones needed to maintain their
new identities.
Coming in at number 6 now we have Project 4.1 This was a US medical study of people
living on the Marshall Islands who were exposed to radiation from a nearby nuclear bomb test
in 1954.
The study effectively saw them as guinea pigs in a radiation experiment.
Many people accused the US government have having their primary goal as studying the
people and not helping them.
The residents of the Marshall islands suffered miscarriages, stillbirths, developmental difficulties
and impaired grown.
The government knew the American public would not react kindly to news of the experiment
and ordered everyone involved to keep it secret.
Next up at number 5 we have The Monster Study.
With a name like that, you know its not gonna be good.
This study took place at the University of Iowa in 1939 by Wendell Johnson.
They took 22 orphan children and split them into two groups.
One group was given positive speech therapy - they were praised and encouraged as they
became more fluent.
The other half got the exact opposite - they were belittled, even bullied every time they
made a mistake.
This had a serious negative affect on them - some of the children even stopped speaking
all together.
Their mental health and academic suffered greatly.
The university tried to sweep the study under the rug but the details eventually came out.
They were criticised for damaging vulnerable orphan children, maybe permanently, just to
prove a theory.
The university issued a public apology in 2001.
At the number 4 spot now we have the Willowbrook State School.
This was a school in New York for people with mental disabilities.
Starting from the late 1950s, medical researchers noticed that there were large hepatitis outbreaks
there.
They studied it to gain a better understanding of the illness.
However, the researchers seemed to soon started to cross the line when they began feeding
the live heapatitis virus to sixty healthy children in order to study them.
They watched their skin and eyes turn yellow.
Their livers got bigger and they began to vomit and refuse to eat.
The researchers justified it by saying they were going to get hepatitis anyway - but history
has condemned them.
Moving on to number 3 now we have The Tuskgee Experiment.
This clinical study by the US Public Health Service took place for an astounding 40 years,
beginning in 1932.
It involved offering 399 poor black males who had syphilis a treatment.
However, the researchers withheld the treatment as their real aim was to just study the progress
of syphilis on humans.
In 1947, penicillin became available as a treatment.
Some of the victims began to look elsewhere for help but the researchers told them not
to and continued to lie about their true condition.
When the study ended in 1972, just 74 of the 399 test subjects were alive.
28 of them had died of syphilis, 100 from other complications.
40 of their wives had been infected and 19 of their children were born with congenital
syphilis.
As part of a class action lawsuit, the US government paid 9 million dollars to the surviving
participants and their descendants.
For many though, the pain can never be healed with money.
Next up at number 2 we have Mustard Gas.
In 1943, the US navy exposed its own sailors to mustard gas in order to test the effectiveness
of their new protective clothing.
They wanted to see how it stood up in a real situation.
Perhaps the most infamous of these experiments involved 17 and 18 year old males, still in
boot camp, who were asked if they wanted to take part in an experiment that would shorten
the war.
It wasnt until they reached the lab that they were told it would involve mustard gas.
Some of them left at this point but many of them didnt.
Most of the participants suffered extreme external and internal burns.
They were largely ignored by the Navy after that because they didnt want to draw attention
to the experiment ..
And finally at number 1 we have Unit 731.
This was the secret chemical warfare research unit of Japan during WW2.
They wanted to study the human body in perverse ways and mainly did so on Allied Prisoners
of War as well as Chinese civilians.
Experiments included limb amputation to study the effects of blood loss and sometimes they
would even try and reattach amputated limbs to the other side of the body.
One other famous experiment involved freezing all of the subjects limbs and amputating them
one by one until only the victims head and torso remained.
This is only scratching the surface into the horrors that Unit 731 brought upon its many
victims …
Well guys, that was pretty disturbing.
If you want a pick me up - we do have a lot of happy top 10 videos on this channel - I
promise - let me know what you wanna see next, my name is Danny Burke, thanks for watching
and Ill see you all in the next video!