Hey YouTube, Jim here!
Welcome to Top10 Archive!
Thanks to the scientists, doctors, and researchers of years gone by, we now have powerful medicines
and intelligent inventions that save lives, make tasks easier and generally improve our
quality of life.
But every now and again, experiments are done that are so crazy that it’s hard to believe
they actually happened.
Which is what brings us to the top ten craziest science experiments ever conducted.
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10.
Two-headed Dog You may have remembered this experiment from
our "Top 10 SCARY Pictures With CREEPY Backstories" video, but it's just too bizarre not to mention
again in this video.
An American physiologist named Charles Claude Guthrie was renowned for his work with vascular
surgery, and work that he collaborated on with French physician Alexis Carrel actually
won the Nobel Prize in Physiology for Medicine in 1912.
But Guthrie was denied the prize even though he clearly contributed to the work.
Why, you ask?
Well, it was probably because he loved to do head transplant experiments with dogs.
Yes, that’s right, this American Psycho loved to sew the head of one dog onto another.
Incredibly, he did actually have success with keeping some of his, erm, patients, alive.
Guthrie sadly wasn’t the only person to experiment with doggos – Russian Vladimir
Demikhov was also renowned for it.
His wild approach to medicine did lead to the birth of successful heart transplants,
which has saved the lives of millions of people, but his approach to creating two-headed dogs
to get to that point doesn't sit well with a lot of people.
9.
MKUltra Otherwise known as the CIA mind control program,
Project MKUltra was a sometimes illegal program of experiments on humans.
These experiments were designed to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used
in interrogations, with the aim of weakening people and forcing confessions through mind
control.
MKUltra used unwitting US and Canadian citizens as its test subjects, and methods of manipulation
included the administering of LSD and other drugs, hypnosis, isolation, and even abuse
and torture.
This was a huge experiment and tests were said to have taken place at 80 institutions
that included colleges, hospitals, and prisons.
These crazy experiments were sanctioned in 1953 and it’s thought that they were halted
in 1973 when the CIA Director at the time ordered all MKUltra files to be destroyed.
Although, there remains controversy over whether the experiments are actually secretly still
going on today.
8.
The Homunculus Paracelsus was a renowned 16th-century physician
and alchemist known for his work in psychotherapy and toxicology.
He also led the way in the conversation about our unconscious mind and was undoubtedly a
genius.
But, some of his experiments were odd, to say the least.
His weirdest work was probably his homunculus, which is basically a tiny human that is apparently
created when a human egg is transplanted into the womb of a horse and fed human blood.
I’ll give you a second for that to sink in.
Can you believe that there’s no proof of this out-there experiment ever working?
No, me neither.
7.
Prison Skin Experiments Dr. Albert M Kligman is credited with perhaps
the most disturbing quote in history: "All I saw before me were acres of skin.
It was like a farmer seeing a field for the first time."
Even without context, that’s creepy, but it gets crazier once you know what he’s
talking about.
Dr. Kligman is the man behind Retin-A, one of the most important ingredients for acne
treatments and anti-wrinkle creams.
But the way Kligman made his discovery was by testing his lotions and potions on incarcerated
men in Homesburg prison, Philadelphia.
It was the prisoners’ skin that he was referring to in his horrifying quote, and for two decades
he subjected them to biopsies, procedures, and many, many formulas which had varying
success.
The men tolerated the treatment though because they were given small cash prizes in exchange
for burns, rashes, and infections.
And we assume that they didn’t have too many other options at the time.
6.
Sleep Deprivation Remember the Russian sleep experiment story
where an airborne stimulant kept five participants awake for 30 days?
But after a few days of sleep deprivation, they lost their minds, mutilated themselves,
and demonstrated superhuman strength?
Well, that story turned out to be a creepypasta, or a complete hoax as it’s otherwise known.
But, crazy sleep experiments do exist and Randy Gardner’s is one of the best known.
Randy stayed awake for 11 days and 24 minutes during a scientifically observed experiment
in 1964.
Randy didn’t attempt to practice self-cannibalism as the subjects from the Soviet hoax did,
but he did show lower cognitive functioning and significant behavioral changes.
He became paranoid, suffered from hallucinations, and struggled to concentrate on anything.
Somehow Randy managed to win a game of ping pong against one of the researchers on day
ten though, but I can only conclude that the researcher was terrible at ping pong.
5.
Cat Telephone In 1929, two scientists named Ernest Glen
Wever and Charles W. Bray decided to turn a cat into a telephone.
The gruesome twosome began by extracting a piece of the cat’s skull and placing an
electrode on the animal’s hearing nerves.
This electrode was connected to an amplifier by a long cable, so when a sound went into
the ear of the cat, it could be heard via the receiver in the other room.
The experiment did work and sound was transmitted clearly.
This cruel and ridiculous experiment seemingly had no purpose - so what good does that information
do?
Well, although seemingly inhumane, their groundbreaking research helped to understand how sound is
perceived by the auditory nerve.
Without the foundation that they laid, we wouldn't have cochlear implants today.
4.
Nikola Tesla’s Superweapon Nikola Tesla is best known by most for his
research in electricity and electromagnetism, but to others, he was known as a bonkers scientist
who was fascinated with superweapons.
Specifically, he wanted to find a way to harness electricity to create a beam that was able
to shoot down 10,000 enemy planes at a distance of up to 200 miles or 321 kilometers away.
He also loved the idea of anti-gravity airships, time travel, and a thought photography machine
which would allow people to take snapshots of their imagination.
Tesla’s experiments weren’t the only weird thing about him either: he disliked anything
round, was obsessed with pigeons, and hated fat people.
As "out there" as Nikola Tesla seemed, his inventions and innovations changed the world
forever, especially with Alternating Current - while some of his biggest breakthroughs
never saw real-world applications.
3.
Real-life Frankenstein Frankenstein is one of the best-known horror
stories of all time, but did you know that it’s supposedly based on a real person?
Johann Conrad Dippel was born in 1673 in Castle Frankenstein, and in that castle, he loved
nothing more than to spend long days practicing alchemy and anatomy.
He was rumored to have tried to move the soul of one dead person to another dead person’s
body, and it’s said that he loved boiling up body parts, although I’m not entirely
sure why.
The mad scientist was credited with inventing Dippel’s Oil, a foul-smelling liquid made
from distilled bones.
This vile juice had a number of uses, including repelling insects and rendering wells undrinkable
for enemies during World War 2.
Dippel was also accused of grave robbing, and although none of this is fully proven
to have happened, he was eventually run out of town, so it’s clear that the townspeople
knew something was up.
2.
Guatemala Syphilis Experiment The Guatemala Syphilis Experiment sounds like
a sequel to the Hostel horror films, but this actually happened.
Back in the 1940s, STDs were running rampant but nobody really understood what they were
and how they could be treated.
Rather than infect their fellow US citizens, a group of medical professionals from Johns
Hopkins University made the incredibly unethical decision to travel to Guatemala and infect
unsuspecting residents of the Central American country.
For at least two years, a team infected soldiers, sex workers, patients of mental health facilities,
and anyone else that was deemed low class enough to be expendable.
These poor folks ended up with gonorrhea, syphilis, and a whole host of other STD's,
so doctors could see how the infections presented and spread.
Around 5,500 Guatemalans were involved in the research directly or by proxy, and only
around 700 of these people ever received treatment.
What’s worse is that a minimum of 83 subjects were dead just five years after the experiment
is said to have ended.
1.
Nazi Experiments The atrocities committed by the Nazis in the
20th century will haunt us all for eternity, but one of the worst villains was in no doubt,
Dr. Josef Mengele.
Auschwitz was hideous beyond words, and it was in this hellish place that Mengele liked
to do his experiments.
The monster was fascinated by identical twins, and he used them in unbelievably cruel tests.
Among other unspeakable things, he would inject one twin with a mysterious substance and monitor
them for illness, and if one twin died he would kill the other and perform comparison
autopsies on them both.
He also liked to induce gangrene, inject dye into their eyes, and do spinal taps in an
apparent effort to better understand twin genetics.
Mengele was captured after the war but released by mistake and he eventually fled to Argentina.
He was never re-captured and eventually died in a Brazilian holiday resort having never
been punished for his heinous crimes.