“All I saw before me were acres of skin, it was like a farmer seeing a fertile field
for the first time.”
If you saw part one of this show, you will have heard those words.
They were spoken by a doctor who entered a prison in the USA loaded with chemicals to
test on humans.
Imagine that, you’ve been punished, are serving time, and then you are punished again
because someone has been given the green light to use your skin as a testing surface.
Much of the time when such prisoners are used in testing they agree to do it, but often
in the past what they weren’t told is exactly what was being tested and the possible dangers
involved.
Let’s now have a look at how this was done.
It's ancient history We are going to start with a man that is sometimes
called the “the father of anatomy.”
That’s a compliment of course, but his ways could be said to have been rather unethical.
We are talking about a Greek physician called Herophilos of Chalcedon.
We are told that this physician did occasionally use dead people for his work in understanding
the human anatomy, but that didn’t always happen.
The website researchgate tells us that in ancient Greece and ancient Egypt looking under
the hood of dead folks was plain taboo, but this physician did do it and educated Greece
on anatomy like no one had done before.
But he also performed what are call live vivisections, which basically means opening a person up
while they are well and truly aware of it.
A Greek encyclopedist known as Celsus wrote in a second century medical book that Herophilos
used around 600 live prisoners for his research.
His work was groundbreaking as we said, and he was a gift to medical science.
But as one scientific paper asks, was he a butcher or an innovator?
In this paper Celus is quoted as saying, “Herophilus and Erasistratus did this in the best way
by far, when they laid open men whilst alive—criminals received out of prison from the kings—and
whilst these were still breathing, observed parts which beforehand nature had concealed.”
According to that thesis, this was a kind of execution, but still one that many people
at the time thought was very cruel.
No kidding.
Radiation experiments If you read the book, “The Plutonium Files”
you can find many, many examples of when the USA tested dangerous levels of plutonium on
American citizens.
The U.S. and other countries were trying to develop the atomic bomb and no one was exactly
sure what high levels of radiation would do to a person.
Some of these people were patients in hospitals and some were prisoners.
Sometimes they were just sick children and on one occasion pregnant women were chosen.
In Massachusetts, it’s said that 57 kids, many who were mentally retarded, were give
oatmeal poisoned with radioactive tracers and that was conducted by MIT and sponsored
by the Quaker Oats Company.
This was well after the development of the atomic bomb, and it was all about proving
the nutrients in the oatmeal.
It sounds like fake news, but it’s not.
The Smithsonian wrote that these boys were already maltreated and so seen as kids that
didn’t matter, adding, “As part of the study, the boys were fed oatmeal and milk
laced with radioactive iron and calcium; in another experiment, scientists directly injected
the boys with radioactive calcium.”
These kids weren’t exactly prisoners, but they were in the care of the authorities and
didn’t have any say in the matter.
That same article mentions a few instances when mentally handicapped kids, kids in institutions,
minorities, were tested on and given all kinds of ailments.
Back to radiation, in all, you can read about 100s, maybe 1000s, of people that were made
very sick as American scientists tried to figure out how the body dealt with radiation.
All these experiments remained top secret until the 90s when President Bill Clinton
said it’s time we talked about radiation experiment cover-ups.
The Plague in the Philippines During the second world war the Japanese were
trying to figure out how to drop diseases on the USA, but before this time the U.S.
was trying to figure out how to treat major diseases.
It’s said that while in the Philippines the U.S Army along with scientists purposely
gave five prisoners the bubonic plague and caused something called beriberi in another
29 prisoners.
Four of these people died.
According to the book, “When doctors kill: Who, Why and How,” they did this not to
try and spread disease but just to better understand it.
That book also says that one particular Harvard professor over there gave other Filipino prisoners
cholera.
The books says all became very sick and 13 people died.
Thankfully these experiments were investigated and they were called highly unethical.
In the book it is also written that during the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi doctors, who had
done a lot of awful stuff themselves, tried to justify their work by using the American
scientists in the Philippines as an example of similar malpractice.
Torture We should say here that we haven’t purposefully
picked out the USA and no doubt awful experiments have been done elsewhere, it’s just that
there is a lot of literature available on what the USA has done.
We can take torture for example, and as you probably know, many prisoners in the US have
been given mind-altering drugs that has had very negative consequences.
One of the most famous experiments was at Holmesburg Prison and it took place with 320
inmates from 1964-1968.
This is the same prison where that doctor talked about acres of skin.
Prisoners there were also subjects for radiation experiments.
But the torture experiment we are talking about involved incredibly powerful hallucinogens.
The scientists wanted to know how much they could give a person so they were completely
useless.
They tested 100s of people.
One person said later of this prison that has become well known for human Guinea pigs,
“He had a dozen or two experiments going at one time...
He turned Holmesburg into the K-Mart of human experimentation.
It was a real industry.”
He was talking about the head doctor there.
The doctor later told the press that he did everything according to what was asked of
him and followed protocol.
Even before the place became a giant lab it was terrible.
In 1938 a bunch of prisoners on hunger strike were sent to what were called bake ovens for
punishment.
It’s said four prisoners roasted to death.
But you don’t even have to go that far back to see how prisoners have been used so the
CIA can figure out the effects of torture.
When the CIA just a few years back had prisoners holed up at black sites it wasn’t just torturing
people to get information.
According to a paper written by the Physicians for Human Rights, waterboarding and sleep
deprivation and all manner of other tortures were merely tested on prisoners to see how
they might best work.
How else would they know?
They needed living, breathing subjects and human rights didn’t seem to be an issue.
Companies were brought in to what the report said was to “calibrate the level of pain
experienced by detainees during interrogation.”
The CIA denied this and the government didn’t investigate the matter.
Then in 2010 the authorities wanted to know just how effective its Active Denial System
was.
This is a powerful laser that can hit a person’s body, say people in a riot or protest, and
heat them up.
It was first made, though, for war.
It was decided that prisoners at Pitchess Detention Center in Los Angeles could be the
Guinea pigs for this laser.
The ray is said to cause intense heat, pain, but when taken off the body everything is
back to normal.
It’s also said, though, that there is a potential for death and there might be some
terrible long-term effects such as eye damage if it gets you there or even more chance of
developing cancer.
We should add that while this prison took the laser as an experimental trial, it did
that to use on people only if they got out of hand.
Mutants Welcome Dr. Carl Heller.
This man’s experiments were said by one person to have a bit of the “Buchenwald
touch”, meaning they were not unlike some of the Nazi experiments on humans in concentration
camps.
But this happened in the U.S.
According to Gizmodo he did the experiments on behalf of the Atomic Energy Commission.
He basically radiated the prisoners, but to the extreme.
Yes, that’s right.
And he told these prisoners from Oregon and Washington that he had to sterilize them after
the radiation so they would not contaminate the world with kids, but what he really said
was that he was preventing them from passing on what he called “radiation-induced mutants.”
He did in fact sterilize them, but a few of those guys later sued the government.
The experiments went on from 1963 to 1973 and each got around $5 for losing the ability
to make children and also get blasted with radiation.
There were other similar experiments performed on mostly poor, black people, but they were
often people suffering from cancer – so not prisoners.
What would happen is they would sign up for a trial in which doctors said they were testing
radiation and it might cure them of their cancer.
This was a lie.
What was actually happening is the U.S. government was trying to see what happens to the body
when hit with extremely high levels of radiation, far higher than anyone would receive now from
radiation therapy.
Cow Blood “The rejection of the blood was catastrophic.”
This is what one scientific paper says about this particular study in which 64 Massachusetts
prisoners were injected with cow blood in 1942 after the U.S. Navy had asked for it.
Why oh why, you might be thinking right now.
Well, all in the name of science, the same as when the 400 inmates at Stateville Correctional
Center in Illinois were injected with malaria; and the same year 200 female prisoners were
given viral hepatitis, or the prisoners injected with cancer cells without their consent in
the 50s by the renowned oncologist Chester Milton Southam… or as one book says, the
long list of prisoners given potentially fatal diseases in the USA in those days.
As for the cow blood, we are told that a Harvard University scientist was asked by the navy
to create a powerful biological weapon.
Well one source says this, but another says it was to purify the “process of extracting
album from blood plasma” in order to make better drugs.
It’s actually quite hard to find information about this, but some sources say the catastrophic
events we mentioned ended with the death of 64 prisoners.
We found another paper that said this, “Two prisoners at the Norfolk County jail died
of serum sickness induced by infusions of crystalline bovine albumin.
Harvard medical students were admitted to the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and bled until
they went into shock.”
Whatever the case, everyone agrees on, “catastrophic.”
If we extended this show to include more experiments performed on minorities, poor kids, mentally
handicapped kids, sick people, pregnant women, mentally ill people, we could have gone on
and on.
With that in mind, what do you think about this?
Tell us in the comments.
Also, be sure to check out our other show Worst Prison Experiments Conducted On Humans
#1.
Thanks for watching, and as always, don’t forget to like, share and subscribe.
See you next time.