The Most Horrifying Human Experiments Of All Time | Random Thursday

this video is supported by brilliant when you were in school did you ever do one of those things where you would prick your finger and then put a drop of blood on a slide and look at it under a microscope if so then you took part in a human experiment to better understand our species congratulations you got learned human beings are experimented on every day all around the world the fact of the matter is you kind of have to you know there's only so much that you can learn from a lab like right now we're finally seeing the rollout of the covid19 vaccine and that was only made possible after testing on thousands of people so human medical experiments aren't necessary but of course they're carried out with strict protocols and stringent ethical standards this is part of the scientific process which has been perfected for centuries but unfortunately this has not always been the case throughout history there have been examples of horrible medical experiments conducted on humans under the guise of war national security or just straight up ethnic or racial purity in fact it's debatable they should even be called experiments the experiments are really just excuses for cruelty now i'm sure in many of these cases the people who carried out these experiments thought that they were doing a service to the world by finding out knowledge that they couldn't get any other way but did they let's find out as we take a look at some of the most horrible human experiments of all time [Music] now before we begin i need to give the disclaimer that what we're about to talk about in this video gets dark like dark this honestly might be some of the most disturbing stuff i've talked about on this channel and i'm the severed head guy but this stuff actually happened and this is a good example of just how far down human beings can go it's worth facing even if it's uncomfortable and it's gonna get uncomfortable grigore marianovsky was a russian biochemist who ran a lab that specialized in poison research and by that i mean he was finding new and innovative ways to poison people to death the facility went by several names laboratory 1 laboratory 12 and chimera meaning cell or chamber in russian and it was supervised by a high-ranking official named gingrich yagoda not to be confused with grogu yoda but it was marionoski who carried out these experiments and it seems like this was actually a job he was born to do i mean his phd was actually titled biological activity of the products of interaction of mustard gas with human skin tissues he chose that for his thesis so he brought that zeal for poisons with him to the lab where they carried out involuntary experiments on prisoners from the gulags including chemicals like digitoxin curare cyanide mustard gas and ricin ultimately what they're looking for is an odorless and tasteless combination of things that could kill somebody without being detected and they basically put the poisons and vitamins that they gave to the prisoners so the prisoners had no idea that they were taking poisons at all that is until they were unable to breathe or their heart stopped beating it's literally impossible to know how many prisoners died as a result of this testing but due to their research this actually led to some high profile assassinations in the real world including bulgarian dissident gregory markov who was famously killed by a poison pellet to his leg that was administered by a modified umbrella yeah some secret agent literally just jabbed him in the leg with an umbrella as he walked by in the street and it administered a little tiny pellet with ricin in it he died in the hospital four days later we still don't know the exact location of the lab because it was kept secret but a kgb defector in 1954 said that it was near a police station in lubyanka in fact some people think that the lab or some version of the lab is still experimenting on people to this very day but that's the soviet union they're evil we all know that the united states would never oh boy yes shocking i know but the united states doesn't come out completely clean in this either there's a few human experiment programs that happen including the san jose project in world war ii san jose island or isla san jose is in the gulf of panama and in world war ii the united states had a base there and at this base they conducted experiments on how mustard gas affected the human body on humans these particular humans were us troops which were kind of voluntold to do it which in itself is not that big a deal i mean soldiers put their bodies on the line in a million different ways sure but what makes this one a little bit sus is uh how they chose the troops they did it by race african american and puerto rican soldiers were singled out for these experiments because it was thought at the time that their darker skin would make them more resistant to mustard gas and thus make them more valuable on the front lines in japan and japanese american soldiers were tested on to see how mustard gas would affect enemy soldiers around 60 000 enlisted men were experimented on with mustard gas during world war ii meaning we probably gassed more of our own soldiers than we did enemy soldiers and i should point out it wasn't just minorities that were tested on white soldiers were tested on in control groups as well and the soldiers were exposed to mustard gas in three different ways patch tests applying liquid mustard gas directly to a subject's skin field tests which expose subjects to gas outside in simulated combat scenarios and chamber tests literally putting soldiers in a chamber and piping mustard gas inside of it that sounds horrible on a quick side note this buddy of mine was in the army and he told me all about the basic training and how they put them in the tear gas chamber to make them you know get exposed to tear gas so they understood what it felt like in combat situations and when he was talking about how like it was horrible and it stung your eyes and you were just puking and and just snot was flying out of your face and it was the worst experience of his entire life but afterwards he said i've never breathed freer in my life like all the mucus came out of me and so now every time i get sick and i'm laying down and i can't breathe and i'm all clogged up and everything i just think god just just put me in the gas chamber and get it over with you know yeah mustard gas is way worse than that mustard gas causes blisters to form immediately when it touches the skin or the inside of your lungs this isn't something you just cough out and then you're done with it this damages things permanently people who are exposed to mustard gas often come down with things like asthma and emphysema later on because the damage to the lungs but even worse than that it also damages dna which leads to leukemia and skin cancers mustard gas was first used widely in world war one by the germans the gas has a yellow brown appearance and can smell like garlic horseradish or well mustard it was after the germans used mustard gas on polish citizens in 1939 that the u.s decided we needed our own stockpile by the end of the war we had produced more than a hundred thousand tons of various types of mustard gas including 20 000 tons of leucite 100 tons of nitrogen mustard and 87 000 tons of sulfur mustard the mustard gas experiments were shocking but what might be even more shocking is how these soldiers were treated afterwards despite being told that they would be taken care of afterwards and despite the permanent injuries they sustained they still weren't able to get any kind of disability compensation from the veterans administration because the tests were carried out in secret it wasn't until npr did a report on this in 2015 that the survivors finally had their stories told and the department of veteran affairs finally stepped in and decided to do something about it that story won a peabody by the way of course it wasn't just americans that did this the british also did something with indian soldiers around that same time also for the same reasons they thought that the darker skin would make them more resistant to mustard gas it didn't and thousands of indian soldiers were permanently scarred for life for the love of god melanin does not turn you into wolverine in 1932 the u.s public health service began to recruit black men aged 25 to 60 to participate in the study this study was done in conjunction with the tuskegee institute and most of the participants were picked in the surrounding areas of macon county mostly poor and illiterate sharecroppers its purpose was to study the natural history of syphilis how it affected a person over time and how it spread through communities and the name of this study was the tuskegee study of untreated syphilis and the negro male people generally just call it the tuskegee syphilis experiment now fewer syllables they basically just chose 600 people 399 of them had syphilis and 201 of them didn't so they were in the control group and the idea was they were just going to watch them over a long period of time and see how the disease progressed now there's nothing really all that sketchy about that it's not like they gave people syphilis or anything they already had it and just for context syphilis is a bacterial infection and this was pre-antibiotics so it was untreatable at the time it is a sexually transmitted disease so it's usually spread by sexual contact and it can remain dormant in the body for years before it finally starts to really take over but once it does if it's not treated it's a horror show people with secondary syphilis break out with rashes and wart-like lesions all over the body and in tertiary syphilis inflammatory balls called gummas grow under the skin on bones and in organs causing damage to the heart the liver and the brain which leads to dementia psychosis and seizures and eventually death so yeah syphilis was a scourge back then and really had been throughout all of human history especially in militaries it would just decimate the ranks and officers were obsessed with controlling the spread of syphilis in fact spoiler alert this is not the last time you're gonna hear about selflessness video so to the guys in this study you know the dye had been cast there wasn't really any way to treat it there wasn't anything to do about it so to them this was just a way to contribute to the scientific understanding of it and they also got free meals and basic medical care out of it and all that seems fine i guess the problem is in 1947 they discovered that syphilis can be treated with penicillin and they just kind of did never tell the people in the study yeah you know that thing that you have that's gonna deform your body and make you go insane well there's a way that we can fix it but um i think we'd rather just see what happens hey yeah the flawed thinking that led to that decision is the same flawed thinking that led to this whole study in the first place they thought that the black community was more prone to syphilis infections than other people yeah so that's how the researchers justified the project they called it a study in nature and they also argued that they didn't think that they'd be able to talk people in the black community to take the treatments for syphilis but they also went way further than that like they really went out of their way to make sure that these people didn't possibly get any kind of treatment for their syphilis they even went as far as to give them fake drugs that didn't actually do anything so the people in the study thought that they were being treated and you know being taken care of and they weren't but on top of that they actually gave lists of the people in the study to all the doctors in macon county and they also appealed to the alabama health department to prevent them from getting treated they were told not to treat these people for syphilis if they came in and actually when some of these men got drafted into world war ii and the military tested them and found out they had syphilis instead of just treating them like they would any other draftee the researchers got the military to send them back home so that they wouldn't get treated thus denying them the opportunity to get tested on with mustard gas these men were allowed to just deteriorate unnecessarily for 40 years until 1972 when the new york times ran a piece about it at that point only 74 of the original 600 were still alive and also in that time 40 of their wives had been infected and 19 of their kids were born with congenital syphilis this led to public outrage in a lawsuit by the naacp and in 1974 congress passed the national research act and formed the office of human research protections to keep this from ever happening again remember earlier when i said that the uk tested mustard gas on their own troops will strap in brits because they tested on the general public as well the guardian reported in 2002 that the uk's ministry of defense turned large parts of the country into a giant laboratory to conduct a series of secret germ warfare tests on the public these tests took place between 1940 and 1979 and involved deadly chemicals microorganisms and an unsuspecting public they were told the tests were for air pollution and weather research projects the tests were carried out by port and down which is their biological weapons lab and actually the oldest biological weapons lab in the world but the point was to gauge the uk's vulnerability in case the soviets were to attack with the germ warfare agent when the story broke the ministry of defense claimed that what they actually used were alternatives to biological agents that were harmless but many families who had children born with birth defects disagreed one test that was carried out between 1955 and 1963 involved dumping large amounts of zinc cadmium sulfide on the general public zinc cadmium sulfide is a fluorescent powder which makes it easy to trace under uv light and they use it to kind of trace how biological agents might move through the public if it was dumped over people the problem with that is that cadmium is known to be carcinogenic it was also a story of a military ship called the ice whale that sprayed e coli bacteria in a five to ten mile radius around england's south coast throughout the 60s other experiments outlined in the report include sriracha maresense bacteria with an anthrax simulant and phenol sprayed in the air in large quantities bacteria released at lunchtime on the london underground and germs attached to spiders webs in several locations around the country including in london's west end now granted there may have been some data collected that would have been useful in the event of an attack from the soviet union but that attack never happened so the only country that actually sprayed biological poisons over the people of the uk was the uk government itself yeah it's all fun and games till the nazis show up the nazis with all their death camps had an ample supply of experimental subjects to test on which they managed over the years to completely dehumanize basically treating human beings as nothing more than lab rats millions suffered under the nazi regime but perhaps none so more than twins because they were obsessed with racial purity which led to some twisted and perverted ideas about genetics and one nazi doctor in particular thought that he could find all the answers he needed about genetics by experimenting on twins his name is joseph mengele and he has gone down as one of the biggest monsters in history when he arrived at auschwitz in 1943 he was considered one of the top doctors in the country but he soon earned a new nickname the angel of death he would scour the incoming prisoners coming into auschwitz looking for twins and ultimately he found 3 000 of them to do experiments on of those only 200 survived life for twins at the camp was actually better than other people at first they didn't have to do any hard labor they got to go to classes and they even got to play soccer every once in a while but then the trucks would come to take them from angela's experiments it would start with measurement tests in which every single part of the twins body were measured in great detail this would take hours and they would then be subjected to well basically any crazy idea that mengele had including transferring blood from one twin to the other injecting chemicals in the eyes to try to turn them blue this would usually just lead to infections or blindness injecting diseases like typhus and tuberculosis into one twin and not the other to see what would happen and if one twin died during this experiment the other one was killed to compare and examine the disease's effects also performing surgeries like amputations castration and organ removal without anesthesia the twins experiments were sadly just the beginning for example at the dachau camp they did high altitude tests to try to figure out exactly how high up say a german pilot could bail out of a damaged plane so yeah they just stuck prisoners in a low pressure chamber and then just lowered the air pressure until they died because science they also conducted hypothermia tests basically putting prisoners in cold water and made it colder and colder until they died and also they did sea water tests making them drink seawater until they died at other camps they infected prisoners with diseases like malaria typhoid fever and hepatitis to test treatments on it at the ravensburg camp doctors conducted bone grafting experiments and sterilization trials including everything from x-rays to surgeries to drugs all of them doing psychological and physical damage the human experiments were just part of the nazi atrocities that took place during world war ii which led to the nuremberg code which now works as sort of a foundation for ethical human experimentation ever since it's really hard to imagine a more cruel and inhumane system than the nazi death camps but believe it or not there was one and it took place at about the same time on the other side of the world unit 731 was a japanese biological weapons testing lab in japanese occupied china that opened in 1938 although the japanese government wouldn't acknowledge the atrocities that took place there until 1984. lieutenant shiro ishii led the operation which used prisoners of war as well as local villagers as human guinea pigs or as they were referred to by the researchers logs as in these flesh and blood human beings were nothing more than entries in a log book to them so what kind of experiments were done there let's just start with frostbite testing simply put the prisoners had their limbs put in ice until they froze solid the doctors would then try different ways to re-warm the limbs sometimes putting it in warm water sometimes just putting it over an open flame and there are times when the prisoners were just left untreated overnight to see if the blood would eventually warm the limb back up or just leave them outside in the winter until their limbs fell off now that's not cruel enough for you they also perform vivisections now if you don't know what a vivisection is it's basically an autopsy on a living person their reasoning was they wanted to see how diseases like cholera and typhus affected living tissue before it began to decompose so yeah they would tie prisoners to a table and remove their organs to examine them while they were still alive with no anesthesia of course and they do crazy things like crush limbs to see how long it would take for gangrene to set in or amputate a limb and attach it to the other side of the body real human centipede kind of stuff sometimes they would just tie a prisoner to a pole and do weapons testing on them with pistols and machine guns and grenades and flamethrowers and prisoners were placed in gas chambers to be tested on with nerve agents or they would just lock prisoners in rooms without food and water just to see how long they could survive without eating or drinking some other experiments included forcing prisoners to only drink seawater giving prisoners mismatched human or animal blood injections in order to study clotting and transfusions exposing human subjects to prolonged x-rays which resulted in sterilization and death and placing humans into centrifuges and spinning them at ultra high speeds until they lost consciousness or died and then there were the syphilis experiments told you it was coming back and just like syphilis it's coming back worse way worse because in this case they did actually infect prisoners and then without treatment to see how the disease progressed but they also wanted to study the disease's transmission which means that they um i've got to say this line they forced male prisoners with syphilis to rape female prisoners until they got syphilis on a similar note the guards would often rape the female prisoners to get them pregnant and then they would do weapons testing on them you know to see how much differently a pregnant woman responds to getting shot or they would give the pregnant woman various diseases and then cut the fetus out to see how it affected the fetus and last but not least unit 731 developed plague bombs by packing plague infested fleas into clay bomb casings japanese bombers deployed the bombs over a chinese village called kuzao in 1940. more than 2 000 people died of the plague there and another thousand died in a nearby town after the plague was spread there by sick railway workers unit 731 was disbanded in 1945 after japan surrendered and the site was destroyed so that no evidence would be available the 400 remaining prisoners were shot but the plague-infested rats were released eventually killing an estimated 30 000 people across the chinese countryside the prisoners were shot to prevent the truth of what happened there from getting out and the employees of unit 731 had to take oaths of secrecy and unfortunately that seems to have worked many of the researchers at unit 731 just went back to civilian life no consequences whatsoever in fact some of them became prominent members of universities so this is inexcusable stuff but the people who perform these experiments they they did have an excuse they they believed or claimed to believe anyway that they were gaining knowledge that couldn't be gained any other way but is that true i mean did any good actually come out of all these human experiments not really in the case of the nazi experiments the test subjects were not ideal they were underfed overworked overstressed and generally poor health plus the experiments were conducted haphazardly and a lot of the notes that were found and left over were just gibberish plus a big part of the scientific process is being able to recreate tests and get the same results and those tests that they did at the nazi death camps they can't be ethically recreated again which makes them kind of worthless but there is something we can learn about the researchers and the psychological mechanisms that make it possible for people to perform such horrible acts there's a famous psychology study called the stanford prison experiment i think i've covered it here before but the general thing that they were trying to figure out was whether brutality amongst u.s prison guards was because of the personalities that they brought in or the prison environment itself student volunteers were randomly divided up into prisoners and guards and then they were put into a prison situation and just left without any oversight just to see what would happen the experiment was supposed to last two weeks it was shut down after six days the prisoners were having emotional breakdowns and the guards were becoming extremely aggressive and violent even though none of them had those kinds of tendencies before the experiment started there's a term called de-individuation it's when a person gets so wrapped up in a group's norms that they lose all personal sense of self and responsibility and when this happens cruel and unusual activities to people who are outside the group lose all meaning to the people who are inside the group because that's the norm it's almost like the group is brainwashing itself from the inside out and determining what's right and wrong as a collective and when this group sees themselves as apart from others then they tend to dehumanize the other people they start to not see them as human at all and then treat them accordingly i would argue that this psychological tendency and the ultimate results of that psychological tendency are things we should probably keep in mind these days science is not good or bad it's just a tool a tool that can be used for good and can be used for evil but science done right can change the world that's why it's important to know the fundamentals of it so if you want to get a better handle on that a good place i can recommend is the science fundamentals course on brilliant through 22 interactive quizzes and 275 exercises you can learn the basics of scientific thinking the process by which we determine truth and the basic concepts like buoyancy physical forces heat flow and more and that is just the tip of the iceberg because from there you can advance through more than 60 courses covering everything from classical physics quantum mechanics applied science computer algorithms even logical thinking and deductive reasoning there's a ton of useful stuff to learn and you learn it by problem solving which kind of hacks your brain's natural learning skills so you can learn it in the way that makes the most sense to you and then you can apply it to other areas of your life plus you can do it on your mobile device and even take it offline so you can take it with you wherever you go if you want to get a taste of what i'm talking about they have free daily brain teasers and you can do the first section of any of their courses for free you know so you can see what they're all about and if you're one of the first 200 people to sign up at brilliant.org answers with joe you can get 20 off your premium subscription that gives you access to all their courses brand's a lot of fun if you haven't had a chance to check it out i do highly recommend them so it's brilliant.org excise answers with joe i've got a link down in the description for you big thanks to brilliant for supporting this video and to the answer files on patreon and the channel members who help keep things going around here if you enjoyed this video and you want to learn more google thinks you might like this one or you can check out any of the others over here with my face on it and if you enjoy what i do and you want to see more i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday and i think that's it you guys go out there and have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 2,176,447

Rating: 4.8608408 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, unit 731, josef mengele, tuskegee syphilis experiment, mustard gas, holocaust, human experimentation, soviet poison experiments, georgi markov

Id: MlYsm68RvOQ

Length: 23min 25sec (1405 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 28 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/cellis12]

Some humans make assholes look like nice people.