There can be no arguing that science has
furthered our knowledge of the world and mostly made our lives better. However, this
has come at a cost. Scientific experiments are not always done in the most ethical ways.
You are about to hear about the most brutal, malicious, and shocking science experiments
ever conducted. By the end of the video, you will question whether
the ends justified the means. San Quentin Testicular Transplants. Leo Stanley was the chief surgeon at San
Quentin State Prison in California and identified as an eugenicist. Eugenics is
a pseudoscience that claims the human race can be perfected using experimentation
and genetic manipulation. In reality, eugenics is a racist way of thinking with
the goal of removing certain traits from the human gene pool. In the past, this led
to people of color being considered inferior and anyone with a mental or physical ailment
labeled as subhuman by eugenicists. Many who followed eugenics believed these traits
needed to be removed from the gene pool. Stanley had been performing vasectomies on
prisoners at San Quentin in an attempt to better understand the male reproductive system
and perfect certain procedures. He made empty promises to prisoners that his experiments would
improve their health and vigor. In reality, he had no interest in helping the inmates
themselves, but hoped that his research would further aid in the eugenics agenda.
Eventually, Stanley started focusing his attention on endocrinology, which is the study
of how glands and hormones regulate the body. In particular, Stanley was interested in
the hormones produced by the testicles. Leo Stanley believed that as men get older,
the resulting decrease in hormone production was a main cause of aging, immorality, and an
eventual life of crime. Therefore, his hypothesis was that if he could replace the testicles of
older individuals with those of younger men, it would reverse this hormone imbalance and
also reverse the effects of aging. However, Stanley ran into some problems, the biggest of
which was access to fresh young human testicles. At first, Stanley used the testes of executed
prisoners. Moments after the inmate died, Stanley would surgically remove their testicles and store
them for his procedures. He would promise older inmates that they would get their virility back if
they allowed him to chop off their old and damaged testes and replace them with the younger ones.
To be clear, this process was not only dangerous but had no measurable effect on improving the
health or life of those who were operated on. When Leo Stanley ran out of human testicles,
he resorted to attaching animal testes to the inmates instead. He would implant goat and
deer testicles into inmates and connect them to the vas deferens. Unsurprisingly,
this did not work. But Stanley would not give up. He chalked up the failure of his
experiments to unknown causes and switched to a new delivery method to get the hormones
produced by testicles into his subjects. Stanley began grounding up the animal testes
into a fine paste which he then injected into the abdomens of inmates. He theorized that all
of the components and hormones needed to reverse the aging process were still present, and all he
would need to do was inject the testicle puree directly into the bloodstream. It’s estimated
that during his time at San Quentin, Leo Stanley conducted around 10,000 testicular procedures
in some of the most unethical ways possible. Leo Stanley may have been injecting
people with ground-up testees, but in this next experiment, people
were injected with something much worse. Cancer injections. Cancer research has come a long way over
the years, but some experiments conducted to better understand the disease were absolutely
horrific. Perhaps the worst example happened at the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City
during the 1950s and 60s. During this time, an oncologist by the name of Chester Southam
was researching how the immune system reacts to cancer cells. This was and still
is incredibly important research, but the way Southam conducted
his studies will make you sick. In order to gather the data he needed,
Chester Southam injected his patients with live cancer cells, which then
did exactly what cancer cells do: they began to multiply in the subject’s body.
Southam’s injections were often given without informing the patients of what they were being
injected with and without their consent. When patients were told about what was happening,
they were never given the whole truth because no one in their right mind would have agreed to
be a subject in Southam’s twisted experiments. At first, Southam was injecting patients who
were already terminally ill. This was because he had easy access to the population of the
Sloan-Kettering Institute. Unsurprisingly, some individuals injected with the cancer cells
developed nodules, which eventually metastasized, killing them. But Southam wasn’t done.
Experimenting on already sick patients was one thing, but he wanted to know how a healthy
human immune system would react to the cancer. Southam started recruiting prisoners as test
subjects. Again, the chosen individuals were misinformed about what was being done to their
body. The healthy immune system responded much more aggressively to the cancer cells than
the terminally ill patients. Southam wanted even more data, so he asked other doctors to
participate in his study. This was a mistake as not everyone agreed with his methods. Three
doctors at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn immediately resigned from the study
and alerted the press to what Southam was doing. Unsurprisingly, people were outraged. A legal
hearing was immediately scheduled to evaluate the unethical practices that Chester Southam
had been using. But the craziest part of this entire series of events is what happened next.
The medical community broke into two factions, those who condemned the experiments and
those who supported them in the name of progress. Southam’s medical license was
initially suspended for just one year, but even that was reduced to
a short probationary period. After this, Chester Southam was allowed to
practice medicine once again and was eventually elected president of the American Association
for Cancer Research. The victims of his studies never received justice, even though some died
as a direct result of Southam’s experiments. The next brutal experiment
lasted for an astonishing 40 years before it was eventually stopped. The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment. In 1932 the United States Public Health
Service worked in conjunction with the Tuskegee Institute to gather data on the
effects of untreated syphilis. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease that initially
causes sores to develop around the sex organs, but if left untreated, the disease
can become life-threatening. The syphilis bacteria eventually spread to the
brain and the rest of the nervous system, which can cause organ failure. In order to
learn more about how the infection progressed, 399 poor black farmers from Alabama were chosen
to be test subjects. Two-thirds of the population that was targeted for the study were diagnosed
with syphilis when the experiment began. By 1940, only eight years into the study,
the medical community knew that syphilis could be cured using penicillin to kill
the bacteria. However, this is not what the researchers wanted. Their goal was to
study the long-term effects of the disease, so rather than giving their test subjects the
medicine they needed to kill the bacteria, they just observed them instead. The black
farmers continued engaging in the study because they were never told what was actually
happening. They were given a fresh meal after every session and had access to doctors
that they could not afford otherwise. The researchers that took part in the experiment
told the subjects that they were being treated for “bad blood,” which was a common name for syphilis
but could also mean a variety of other ailments as well. Therefore, the medical professionals
never really disclosed what they were doing or even mentioned that there was a cure for
their subject’s sickness. This experiment was not only unethical but deeply racist. All
of the doctors were white, while all of the test subjects were black. Over 100 of the 399
people in the study died either of syphilis or complications due to the disease. Keep in mind
that all of these people could have been cured if the researchers had given them penicillin,
which had become widely available by then. Even more troubling was that some of the
test subjects were given mercury and arsenic, which were also thought to be treatments
at the time but were much more effective as poisons than as medicines. The Tuskegee
Syphilis Experiment continued until 1972, when the Associated Press was tipped off
about what was going on and published an article about the unethical nature of the study.
The Assistant Secretary for Health and Scientific Affairs launched an investigation and concluded
that the experiment was “ethically unjustified.” One of the most terrible aspects uncovered about
the study was that since the men weren’t told they had syphilis, they unknowingly spread
the disease to their sexual partners. Again, this all could have been prevented if the
researchers had provided their subjects with the medicine they needed or, at the very
least, informed them about the disease they had. In March of 1973, the Secretary of
the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare instructed the United States Public
Health Services department to provide aid and medical care to the test subjects that were still
alive and to the families of all individuals who were a part of the experiment. Yet, the fact
that the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment lasted for 40 years and was only stopped because the
press uncovered what was happening is abhorrent. It may seem unbelievable, but
this wasn’t the worst syphilis experiment conducted by the U.S. government. Spreading STDs in Guatemala. During World War II, medical researchers were
tasked by the U.S. government to find a way to keep soldiers from contracting STDs while in
the field. It was no secret that troops were consorting with prostitutes around the
world, and many would catch infections that kept them from being effective in
the field. Penicillin was found to be a great way to treat the STDs soldiers were
protracting, but the government needed to know if it provided long-term protection and if
it was effective against multiple kinds of STDs. In 1946 the United States government started an
inhumane experiment in Guatemala that wouldn’t be revealed to the public until 2005. In this study,
researchers intentionally infected Guatemalan citizens with STDs without their consent. The
researchers injected people with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid to study
how penicillin and other medicines, such as arsenic-based orvus-mapharsen
would work against each infection. But the atrocities committed by U.S. researchers
didn’t stop there. They didn’tt just inject people with STDs; scientists also set up
a sex ring where infected prostitutes were paid to make conjugal visits with prison
inmates and infect them. The researchers could then study the effect medications had
on transmission. Later in the experiment, the U.S. researchers infected Guatemalan soldiers and
psychiatric patients to increase their data set. Documents suggest that approximately 83
people died as a result of the tests. However, it took until 2010 for the then Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen
Sebelius to officially apologized for the unethical experiments the United
States conducted on the Guatemalan people. To be fair to the United States, other governments
around the world have also engaged in horrible experiments, especially in times of war.
Unit 731 Unit 731 refers to a Japanese research complex
that operated during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. It was run by a microbiologist
by the name of Shiro Ishii. The facility was located in Japanese-occupied Manchuria,
and the experiments done at Unit 731 were beyond inhumane. Ishii and other scientists
at the facility would conduct vivisections on fully awake subjects who hadn’t been given any
type of anesthetic. Patients would be exposed to excruciating pain as their organs were
poked and prodded. The scientists at Unit 731 were particularly interested in how the
body reacted under extreme circumstances. Ishii and his team would amputate
arms and legs from their subject, freeze them for a period of time, and
then sew them back onto the test subject, all while they were fully awake. The
horrors of what happened at Unit 731 cannot be understated. These experiments were
brutal and had no regard for human rights. The Japanese researchers at Unit
731 didn’t just cut people open; they also injected them with all sorts of
substances to see how the body would react. Animal blood and seawater were flushed
into their systems. Subjects were also infected with STDs and a variety of other
deadly pathogens. There are even accounts of people being spun around in circles
for so long that they ended up dying. The individuals being experimented on were also
used to identify the effectiveness of different weapons. They would be placed at different
distances from grenades, and when the device exploded, the subject's wounds would be recorded.
Obviously, these experiments were often fatal. But Shiro Ishii wasn’t satisfied with just
cutting people open or blowing them up. He was a microbiologist, and a lot of his
research was based around biological warfare. Ishii bred plague infected flies and
used planes to drop huge swarms of them over Chinese cities to infect their inhabitants.
Although, it’s worth noting that oftentimes, the flies would be swept up by the wind and
end up biting Japanese troops in nearby areas. All the biological and chemical weapons that Shiro
Ishii and his team developed needed to be tested first. They would infect Chinese prisoners of war,
innocent civilians, and anyone else they could get their hands on. The researchers at Unit 731 did
not discriminate when carrying out their inhumane experiments. Documents uncovered from the site
indicate that test subjects were infected with anthrax, the bubonic plague, cholera, syphilis,
typhus, and a number of other pathogens. It’s estimated that around 100,000
people either died or underwent some kind of experimentation over the
course of Unit 731’s history. However, the number of deaths caused by biological weapons
developed at the site is closer to 250,000. It wasn’t until 1945, when Japan surrendered,
ending World War II, that a plane of American soldiers landed at the complex and uncovered
the atrocities that had been carried out there. When it was clear that his darkest secrets
and experiments were about to be uncovered, Shiro Ishii offered the Americans a deal.
He promised to give up all of the files, documents, and data collected
at Unit 731. In exchange he wanted to avoid him and his team
being trialled as war criminals. Astonishingly the United States agreed, and
the scientists at Unit 731, including Ishii, were never charged with war crimes. In
fact, Shiro Ishii never spent a day in jail for his unethical experiments and
died of natural causes at the age of 67. He lived a relatively normal life as
the Japanese government refused to admit that Unit 731 existed until the 1980s,
around 20 years after the Shiro’s death. If that shocked you prepare yourself. The
most horrible experiments ever carried in the history of humanity were conducted
by this next group of scientists. The Nazis. Eduard Wirths and Josef Mengele were two
Nazi scientists that carried out some of the most appalling experiments in history.
The Nazis committed countless crimes against humanity. The most heinous Nazi experiments
were done by eugenicists who were trying to create the perfect human race, but the Nazis
were also engaging in experimentation that had no real purpose other than to
satisfy their grotesque curiosity. A perfect example of this was the willingness
of Nazi scientists to cut open twins and half-siblings and then sew them together into
what they called a “new creature.” There was no scientific need to do such a procedure.
And at some point, you have to wonder if Nazi experiments were becoming more and more
terrible as they tried to one-up each other. Prisoners of war, Jews, and other test subjects
were thrown into ice water until they froze to death just to see exactly how someone would perish
from the cold. Nazi scientists carried out this experiment repeatedly on Russians, who they
believed had a genetic resistance to the cold, which they absolutely did not. To test the
effect that salt water had on the body, Nazi scientists locked 90 Romani people in a
room with no food or water. In the middle of the chamber was a bucket of saltwater for them
to drink. Eventually, the test subjects became so thirsty that they drank from the bucket.
The Nazi scientists recorded the saltwater's effects on the group each day. Eventually,
the test subjects died of dehydration. A lot of the research conducted by Nazi scientists
was done to better understand how certain elements would affect their soldiers. For example, subjects
were put in decompression chambers to see what would happen to their bodies at high altitudes.
After they were taken out of the chambers, their head was cut open, and their brain
dissected, all while they were still alive. Other experiments were carried out to find
the most effective treatments for wounds. Victims of Nazi experiments would be intentionally
stabbed, shot, or wounded and then infected with various pathogens so scientists could figure
out which medicine worked and which didn’t. You might say: “This was done during war time,
give these scientists a break!” Well, our next set of scientists also did some equally evil things
in the name of science, but during peace time. The Aversion Project. The apartheid in South Africa was a dreadful time
in human history. Hardline segregation between the majority black population and the minority white
population–which controlled the government–was in full swing. The State controlled many aspects of
daily life during this time, and the South African government had strict anti-homosexual laws.
Being gay was seen as a disease that needed to be cured. Therefore, scientists conducted
experiments to identify how to remedy being gay. Let’s be very clear. Being gay is not a disease,
disorder, or infection. Whether someone is heterosexual, gay, bisexual, or anything else,
their sexual preference is a part of who they are. And just as heterosexual people don’t
choose to be attracted to the opposite sex, people who are gay don’t choose to be attracted
to the same sex. However, in apartheid South Africa and around the world today, some people
still do not believe or understand this. Between 1969 and 1987, Ward 22 at a hospital in
Pretoria, the capital of South Africa, attempted to “cure” people who were gay using
drugs and electroconvulsive behavior therapy. The test subject would be restrained and
forced to look at a series of images. Some of these images were of same-sex erotic scenes.
The test subject received a painful electric shock when presented with these pictures.
Scientists at this hospital believed that using negative reinforcement could change
a person’s sexual preference. Therefore, these so-called doctors thought that the more pain
a subject associated with same-sex relationships, the better the aversion therapy would work.
Obviously, this was wrong and unethical, which is why modern medical institutes have
condemned aversion therapy. However, this has not stopped some from still trying to use these
methods to change someones sexual orientation. In South Africa, when
aversion therapy didn’t work, doctors started to conduct experiments using
hormone therapy. In extreme circumstances, doctors chemically castrated subjects to stop them
from being intimate. It was a horrible, horrible series of experiments and medical practices
to find ways to “convert” the gay population. Aversion therapy never actually changed
a gay subject to a heterosexual one, so the South African government had doctors
try another abhorrent tactic. It’s estimated that around 900 people were forced into gender
reassignment surgery so they could technically be considered heterosexual. To be clear, this was
rarely done with the patient’s consent and is very different than gender reassignment surgery for
people who want it to match their gender identity. All these experiments failed to change
people’s sexual orientation because that’s not how it works. When this became clear, many
surgeries and therapies were left unfinished. This caused even more suffering for subjects
in what were almost two decades of pain for the queer population in South Africa.
These experiments are one of the main reasons why the medical community no longer
condones such actions in most of the world. Electric shocks have been used in many studies, each one more terrible than the last. And
this next experiment was one of the most manipulative tests ever conducted
in the history of this procedure. The Milgram shock experiments. Social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted
a series of shock experiments in the 1960s. In the study, Stanley recruited a group of people
who were labeled “teachers.” These people were told they were participating in a study that
was supposed to test how shock therapy can affect memory and learning. The “teachers” would
ask a series of “learners” who were, in reality, just actors a series of questions. When a
“learner”got a question wrong, the experimenter would tell the “teacher” to shock the “learner”
across the table from them. The “teachers” were the only subjects in the experiment that
did not know the true intent of the study. Stanley Milgram was actually studying obedience
to authority and how far someone was willing to go when told what to do. The “teachers”
were informed that the shocks being delivered ranged from 15 to 450 volts. Each time
a “learner” would get a question wrong, the observer told the “teacher” to turn
up the voltage and shock them again. No shocks were actually delivered during the
experiment, but the “teachers” did not know this. Around two-thirds of the subjects in
the experiment continued to deliver shocks all the way up to the highest voltage, even
as the actors screamed in pain and agony. Milgram’s experiment was deemed unethical because
the test subjects were being tricked. However, a more concerning result of
this study was just how much pain people were willing to inflict onto
others when told to do so by authority. And speaking of authority, in the next experiment,
people really allowed it to go to their heads. Stanford Prison Experiment In August of 1971, Stanford researchers set up an
experiment to study the cause of conflict between prisoners and guards, but they found out much
more than they expected. In order to do this, the scientists recruited 24 male students and
randomly assigned them the role of either inmate or guard. A prison was built in the basement
of the psychology building on the campus, complete with locking doors and dimly lit
hallways. It was here that the scientists would observe the power dynamics between the students
to see where points of conflict would arise. It quickly became apparent that the students
who were assigned the role of guard were overcome with the power of authority. They began
implementing harsher and harsher rules for the “prisoners” to follow. It’s important to remember
that the people involved in the experiment were just college students. Except for the scientists
who set up the experiment of course. There were no actual prisoners, and no one in the study had
committed any crimes in real life. Even so, the “guards” started implementing different kinds of
psychological torture to subdue their “prisoners”. Within the first few days, the prisoners had
enough of their guards' oppressive nature and started to form a rebellion. However,
when the guards got wind of their plans, they broke into the cells, stripped their
classmates naked, removed their beds, and put anyone who they thought organized the rebellion
into solitary confinement. The researchers watched and took notes as the students in their
study devolved into authoritarian guards and oppressed prisoners. On day 4 of the experiment,
Prisoner 819 showed serious symptoms of distress, crying uncontrollably in his cell. No one could
calm him down, and the student kept asking for a medical doctor. The researchers removed
Prisoner 819 but continued the experiment. As Prisoner 819 was escorted out of the fake
prison, the guards told the remaining inmates that "819 is a bad prisoner" and started making
fun of him while verbally abusing the students who were still in their cells. In the next couple
of days, the students who were assigned the role of prisoners began to lose hope. Many even seemed
to accept their role and just took the abuse as if they were really locked up in a penitentiary with
no way out, even though it was all just part of the experiment. The abuse continued to escalate
to the point where the experiment had to be shut down after only six days as the researchers
were put under pressure by parents and other scientists who observed what was happening in
the basement of Stanford’s psychology building. The next experiment was called the
“Monster Study,” and rightly so. The subjects of this experiment
were children who stuttered, and the methods used to try and cure their
speech impairment were absolutely awful. The Monster Study. Wendell Johnson was a speech pathologist who
suffered from severe stuttering as a child. His experience was the driving motivation for a series
of experiments to cure the stutters of children. The premise was that negative reinforcement could
change a behavior, in this case, stuttering. In 1939 Wendell Johnson and a graduate
student named Mary Tudor gathered 22 children from an orphanage
in Iowa to participate in their experiment . A quarter of the children with
stutters received positive reinforcement, while another quarter were stutterers who had
their speech insulted and criticized by the experimenters. The results were absolutely
horrible when you consider that the test subjects were just children who thought they were
receiving help with their speech impediments. Tudor and Johnson found that the children who
were ridiculed and given negative feedback started to manifest more speech issues, and
their stutters became worse. But there was an even sadder outcome during the experiment.
Along with the two groups of stutterers, there were two groups of non-stutterers.
As part of the Monster Study, Tudor and Johnson wanted to see if stuttering
was partially a learned behavior. The children who had no speech impediment
were lied to by the experimenters and told they were beginning to stutter. This group
of subjects actually developed a series of negative behaviors. The children subjected
to this form of negative reinforcement didn’t actually develop stutters but did develop
low self-esteem and self-conscious behaviors associated with stutterers. Basically,
the Monster Study scarred these children so badly that they developed all of the side
effects of stuttering without actually having the speech impediment. The study didn’t end up
helping any of the children and instead caused serious harm to the children who were
part of the negative feedback groups. The next experiment literally had
inmates trying to rip their skin off. Prison dermatologist. Albert Kligman invented Retin-A, a cream that
treats a series of skin conditions. He worked as a dermatologist at the University of
Pennsylvania but needed test subjects to perfect his skin ointments. In 1951 Kligman
started performing a series of experiments on prisoners. He did this research on
behalf of some of the leading companies in the field of dermatological care,
such as DuPont and Johnson & Johnson. Unfortunately for the prisoners that Klingman was
experimenting on, many had to endure intense pain, rashes, and extreme discomfort as he tried
to perfect his formula. Imagine having the most intense sunburn of your life and then double
the pain. This is what some subjects experienced. Klingman would test new brands of deodorants, foot
powders, and ointments that would often have nasty side effects on his poor subjects. Obviously,
these products didn’t make it to market. However, at some point, things got even more out
of hand. Kligman accepted a contract from Dow to test the effects of dioxin on the human
body. Dioxin was one of the components in Agent Orange. It’s highly toxic and can cause
reproductive issues, weaken the immune system, cause hormone imbalances, and even lead
to cancer. 75 inmates at Pennsylvania's Holmesburg Prison were exposed to the chemical
by Kligman and suffered many of its side effects. In Albert Klingman’s obituary, it
says he was a “giant in the field” but “also experienced his fair share
of controversy,” which is a little bit of an understatement when you
consider the suffering he caused. The scientists that took
part in this next experiment literally tortured a baby to prove a theory. Little Albert In 1920 Doctor John Watson—a very different
man than Sherlock Holmes's sidekick—worked with his graduate student Rosalie Rayner
to prove humans are born as a blank slate and their behavior is shaped by
life experiences. To prove this, they needed access to a newborn infant,
who they could then subject to a series of tests to determine if they could shape the
baby’s perception of the world around it. Right off the bat, you can probably see
the ethical issues of this experiment. Watson and Rayner eventually convinced a
nurse who worked at John Hopkins to let them use her child for their study.
She was paid one whole dollar for subjecting her offspring to the experiment,
something she would soon come to regret. The child was referred to as Little Albert
during the experiment to hide his identity. It started innocently enough; the baby was
introduced to a furry white rat. Since Albert had no reason to fear the animal, he only
showed curiosity but was not scared. Then the second part of the experiment began with
the re-introduction of the rat accompanied by an incredibly loud sound. Obviously, this
scared Albert, and he showed signs of distress. This same procedure was carried out with different
animals, including a rabbit. Watson and Rayner continue to terrify the child time and time
again. It got to the point that Albert would break out into tears of terror whenever an animal
was brought into the room, even if the loud sound wasn’t playing. The child now connected cute furry
animals with a scary sound. The scientists proved that they could condition Little Albert,
similar to how Pavlov conditioned his dogs. Watson and Rayner continued experimenting on
Albert until they had enough data to conclude they influenced the baby’s perception of the
world around him. It wasn’t until 2010 that the identity of Albert was discovered to be
Douglas Merritte. But the tragedy doesn’t end there. After tracing records back in
time, it was discovered that Merritte suffered from a neurological impairment,
never learned to walk or talk, and died at the age of six from hydrocephalus, which is a
condition where fluids build up in the brain. It’s not clear if Watson and Rayner’s experiment
caused any of these problems in development, but it’s not out of the realm of possibility.
At the very least, their experiment likely exacerbated any underlying neurological
problems that Douglas Merritte had. Due to the fact that he died at such a young
age, no one knows if Merritte’s fear of animals would persist for the remainder of his
life. However, we can agree that experimenting on an infant and scaring Merritte into being
terrified of animals was incredibly unethical. Irradiation of Prisoners. At the height of the Cold War, the Atomic Energy
Commission wanted to know as much as they could about the effects of nuclear fallout and radiation
on the human body. They turned to endocrinologist Carl Heller to study the effects of radiation on
male reproductive functions. He ended up using prisoners at the Oregon State Penitentiary between
1963 and 1973 as test subjects for his experiment. In order to collect data and examine the
effects of radiation on the reproductive system, Heller built a contraption that would
bombard the testicles of the inmates with radiation. This device could be adjusted
to deliver various amounts of radiation to the subject’s testes in order to see how
different doses would affect each person. Heller was mainly focused on how irradiating
the testicles would affect sperm production. Once he was done with the experiment, he
required all patients to get vasectomies. Throughout the process, each prisoner was given
numerous biopsies to get a better idea of what was happening in the cells of the reproductive
tract. Like in so many questionable scientific experiments, the inmates were only
partially informed of the risks. They were told bombarding their testicles
with radiation could cause skin burns but were not informed about the risks
of developing testicular cancer. Unethical scientific experiments are nothing
new. Since the beginning of civilization, humans have been abusing one
another in the name of science. Vivisections of Herophilus. The Greek physician Herophilus is often considered
to be the father of anatomy. He learned about the human body by dissecting criminals. During the
reign of Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II, people found guilty of certain crimes were sentenced
to dissection and vivisection while still alive. It’s estimated that Herophilus conducted
these experiments on around 600 living prisoners. We wouldn’t forgive ourselves
if we didn’t include one of the most infamous science experiments
to ever go wrong in this video. Project Mk-Ultra. Once again, during the Cold War, the U.S.
government wanted to learn as much as it could to gain an edge over the Soviets. In the
1950s, the CIA was working on ways to weaken people’s mental state, suppress information, and
engage in mind control. What we know about the Mk-Ultra program has been compiled together using
different testimonies, and first-hand accounts, as most of the program's documentation
was destroyed by the government in 1973. One major part of this experiment was
giving prisoners LSD without their knowledge to see what would happen. The
test subjects consisted of drug addicts, people who were mentally unstable,
and prostitutes. In one instance, an inmate was given LSD for 174 days straight.
In other experiments, prisoners on a bad trip were told that it would last forever unless they
divulged their deepest darkest secrets. There were even plans put in place to slip some LSD
into Fidel Castro’s food without his knowledge. But these researchers took things a step
further. They began sneaking LSD into the coffees of CIA agents. Unsurprisingly, some of
these people literally went out of their minds. One CIA employee ran out into the streets of
Washington D.C., screaming about seeing monsters due to the secret dose of LSD administered
to him earlier that day. Tragically another operative jumped through a 13-story window
to his death because of the LSD experiments. Even after numerous mishaps, the Mk-Ultra program
continued. When the program finally ended, the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs estimated that around 7,000 soldiers were experimented on without their
consent. One of the conclusions of Mk-Ultra was that LSD makes people behave radically and
therefore is not a good drug for mind control. That being said, recent research suggests that
certain psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin may have numerous psychological benefits,
such as treating addiction, anxiety, and PTSD. Of course, these drugs should be
administered by medical professionals who have devoted their lives to ethical
research around using psychedelics. And this brings up a very important point.
Although we’ve talked a lot about unethical and truly evil science experiments, the majority of
scientists conduct research without causing harm. Science experiments have led to countless
breakthroughs that have improved our lives and helped those who are suffering from diseases
and illnesses. If we hope to continue improving humanity and innovating, it’s important to fund
scientific research and experiments. Numerous oversight boards now ensure that experiments
are being conducted in ethical ways. And even though some scientists are undoubtedly still
running experiments that violate human rights, the vast majority are working within guidelines
and regulations to make sure we don’t have to make “Most EVIL Experiments in
the History of Mankind (Part 2)”. Now watch “Scientists Finally
Explain Why We See Ghosts.” Or check out “Ancient Technologies
Scientists Still Can't Explain.”
