These Medical Studies Wouldn’t Fly in Today’s Modern World

During the 1940s, the University of Vanderbilt began an experiment that gave more than 800 pregnant women radioactive iron. The researchers were trying to determine how long radioisotopes would take to transfer to the placenta. The women, most of whom were from a low-income background, were never told they were ingesting radioactive material. Many of the women experienced side effects attributed to radiation poisonings, such as hair loss and cancer.

Perhaps one of the most infamous and longest human experiments in U.S. history, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study wasn’t exposed until the Washington Star reported on it in 1972, 40 years after it started. With the help of the Tuskegee Institute, researchers from the U.S. government wanted to study the effects of syphilis on Black men. They infected 399 sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, with the disease without telling them what it was. At the time, they told them that they had “bad blood.”

It should be no surprise that some of the shadiest experiments often involve prison inmates. That was the case in an investigation conducted by the University of Washington from 1963 to 1973 on prisoners in Washington and Oregon. Researchers wanted to know how radiation affected men’s private parts and convinced prisoners to sign up by offering them cash and making insinuations of parole. However, the prisoners were never told just how dangerous the experiment would be.

Aptly named the “Monster Study,” two researchers from the University of Iowa conducted an experiment to study stuttering in children in 1939. The researchers, Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor took children and separated them into two groups. In one of the groups, the researchers practiced positive reinforcement by giving the children compliments for speaking correctly. However, the other group of children received harsh criticism whenever they mispronounced a word.

In the mid-1950s, the U.S. Army conducted multiple experiments to see whether mosquitos and fleas could be used as weapon systems to carry biological agents. During operations Big Buzz, Drop Kick, and Big Itch, the military dropped bombs that contained millions of mosquitos infected with diseases like yellow fever and dengue fever on Savannah, Georgia, and Avon Park, Florida. A number of people were infected and suffered from respiratory problems, stillbirths, and typhoid, among other complications.

Believe it or not, a man named John Money managed to convince two parents to reassign their baby son’s gender in 1965. John was a strong proponent that gender is learned and advised the parents to do the gender reassignment after their son’s circumcision went wrong. Because of the physical damage, Money argued that their son would be better off in life if he grew up as a woman.

Dr. Leo Stanley was a medical officer at San Quentin prison in California from 1913 to 1951. During that time, he performed thousands of highly unethical experiments on the prisoners under his care. He subjected some to sterilizations and unnecessary body transplants, the latter of which he used body parts from animals and inmates who had kicked the bucket. It’s estimated that he performed around 10,000 of these gland transplants.

While some pretty awful experiments are on this list, a University of California study involving newborns has to be among the worst. The experiments, done in the 1960s, aimed to study blood pressure in newborns. Researchers did this by dipping babies’ feet into ice-cold water, laying them down on a board, and then tilting them, so their blood flowed to their heads. These methods were used to measure aortic pressure and blood pressure, respectively.

It might sound like something out of a movie, but the CIA truly conducted several experiments to see if it was possible to control someone’s mind or actions. One such program was codenamed Operation Midnight Climax, established in the 1950s. The CIA lured test subjects to their safehouse using seductive women. Unconsenting subjects were then given drugs like LSD while officers observed from a one-way mirror. The experiments also aimed to measure the effectiveness of blackmail.

With memories of chemical warfare during WWI still fresh on many’s minds, the U.S. Navy set out to test experimental protective gear against mustard gas in 1943. The tests were carried out on their own troops, who volunteered without knowing the full extent of the danger. The volunteers, mostly young men fresh out of boot camp, only learned that the experiments involved mustard gas after arriving at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington.

It’s no secret the U.S. conducted several nuclear experiments on and around Pacific islands during the Cold War. However, the largest nuclear device the country set off, codenamed Castle Bravo, ended up contaminating parts of the Marshall Islands and seriously exposing residents to radiation. Most researchers agree that this was an accident and the scientists made a colossal mistake in predicting the bomb’s yield. However, that was little comfort to the residents, many of whom (understandably) believed the whole thing was planned.

Dr. Lauretta Bender worked at Creedmoor Hospital in New York when she began her electroshock therapy experiment on children. Dr. Bender had been labeled “mentally defective” by her teachers when she was younger, which probably influenced her decision to study children as an adult. However, she never expressed sympathy for the children she performed electroshock therapy on at Creedmoor to study childhood schizophrenia, a term primarily used to describe what we know today as autism.

The Soviet Union invested heavily in experimenting with poisons throughout much of the 20th century. Known as laboratories 1, 12, and Kamera, researchers would bring prisoners from the gulags and force them to take various medications or meals containing different poisons. Ultimately, the Soviet Union wanted to find the “perfect” poison or something that was nearly undetectable. Among the many different things they tested were mustard gas, ricin, and digitoxin.

When Willowbrook State School invited Dr. Saul Krugman, they hadn’t planned on running experiments on their patients. However, they were suffering from an outbreak of hepatitis, and things quickly got even further out of hand. Dr. Krugman had been invited to investigate the outbreak, but he instead offered to find a cure by experimenting on the children housed there. The school, located in New York, was an institution for children with mental illnesses.

Possibly one of the CIA’s most extensive human experimentation programs and one that spawned multiple sub-programs, MKULTRA began in 1953. The project involved both U.S. and Canadian citizens, who were often given drugs like LSD without their knowledge, to study how to manipulate and control people using different mental techniques. There were also incidents of abuse and just all-around torture. The program was halted in 1973, and a congressional investigation was launched.

Although it might seem like common knowledge today, in the 1960s, psychologist Albert Bandura wanted to prove that children could learn violent behavior. He collected 72 young children and put a group of them in a room while an adult physically and verbally hurt a blow-up doll. The adult then left the room, and researchers watched the children to see what they’d do next. Unsurprisingly, the children began to hurt the doll just as the adult had.

Philip G. Zimbardo’s notorious Stanford Prison Experiment took place in 1971 on the university campus. The study brought together 24 male students and separated them into two groups — prisoners and guards. The guards were given mirrored glasses, and the prisoners were subjected to mistreatment to simulate life inside a prison. However, things escalated so quickly that Zimbardo ended the experiment after only six days. 

Ron Jones was a teacher at Cubberley High School in 1967 when he decided to conduct an experiment. He could not clearly convey to his students how the Holocaust was allowed to happen, so he decided to show them. He started acting like a dictator inside his classroom, encouraging loyalty to him and only him and creating an atmosphere of suspicion. The movement quickly spread throughout the school. Students even began saluting and wearing symbols in a similar fashion to the Nazis.

The Little Albert experiment is a now well-known experiment about human conditioning that took place in 1920. John B. Watson, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University, took an 8-month-old baby and subjected him to numerous tests. The child was introduced to a rat and then would be startled using loud sounds. These sounds grew louder and more startling until the baby learned to fear the rat and cry every time he saw it, whether there were noises or not.

Laud Humphreys’s “tearoom” study dispelled a number of stereotypes about homosexuality when it was released. Humphreys decided to write his doctorate dissertation about “tearoom sex” (intimacy in public restrooms) after growing curious about why so many arrests occurred involving this activity. He acted as a lookout at one of the tearooms and later interviewed many of the men who used them. He found that around 54% of the men were married, and another 38% were neither bisexual nor homosexual.

In an effort to study schizophrenia and if there was any way to predict psychosis, UCLA and two professors began an experiment in 1983. They took a group of patients who lived with schizophrenia off of their medicine to study and record how they reacted. A court later determined that the university failed to get proper consent from patients to take them off their medications. The experiments continued until after 1994 – and with grave consequences.

In what’s probably one of the creepiest lines ever spoken by a medical professional, Dr. Albert M. Kligman once told a reporter, “All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a field for the first time.” He was talking about the inmates at the Holmesburg Prison in Philidelphia in 1951. That’s where Dr. Kligman spent 20 years conducting experiments on humans involving things like foot powders, shampoo, deodorants, and eye drops. Not surprisingly, Dr. Kligman went on to invent Retin-A, a skin cream.

After the Nuremberg and subsequent trials of Nazi collaborators, many were left wondering how an entire country could be coerced into going along with the atrocities committed during the war. In 1961, Stanley Milgram set out to find out if it was genuinely possible that people were just “following orders,” as many claimed. While at Yale, he devised his experiment. Two people were put into two separate rooms, with only a thin wall separating them. The person in one of the rooms would read the other a set of questions and then be told to administer a shock every time they answered the question wrong.

The Nazis conducted some of the most well-known experiments during WWII, often committing heinous acts against Jews, Romani, and POWs from concentration and prisoner camps. The experiments made headlines during the Nuremberg Trials and even led to the introduction of the Nuremberg Code, a set of medical research ethics. Experiments included mass sterilizations, amputations, genetic manipulation of twins, and nerve transplants. Nazi doctors were also given broad discretion to conduct their experiments, meaning they could do almost anything.

Like other military campaigns throughout history, the U.S. found itself suffering losses due to diseases like malaria when it entered the Pacific theater during WWII. The Malaria Research Project was quickly ordered to try and find a cure for the disease. With their consent, researchers from the University of Chicago infected a whopping 441 prisoners at the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois, and the study lasted for an astonishing 29 years.

After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, Jane Elliot decided to prove a point using her third-grade class. She wanted to demonstrate that racism affects learning and education. She moved all her students with blue eyes to the front of the class and those with brown eyes to the back. Then, she gave the blue-eyed children perks, like extra recess time and more attention, while chastising the brown-eyed children for things the others got away with.

Henrietta Lacks’s contributions to science and medicine are probably some of the most important of the 20th century. Despite this, she and her family hadn’t received recognition until recently. Lacks, who was Black and from a low-income background, was diagnosed with cervical cancer at John Hopkins University in 1955. The doctor collected her cells and sent them off to a lab for testing, where they were successfully kept alive and even multiplied, which doctors had been trying to do for years but weren’t successful until that point.

Some of the most horrific experiments in history came from a little-known Japanese unit during WWII called Unit 731. The crew conducted its experiments on civilians and captured POWs, mainly from China, Russia, and Korea. They also released rats that’d been infected with diseases on Chinese civilians and towns. However, some of their most vile acts involved conducting amputations and other body part removals on live subjects without anesthesia.

Only brought to light in 2010, the syphilis experiments on unknowing Guatemalans in the early 20th century are some of the most disturbing. The U.S. worked with the former Guatemalan president and some health officials from 1946 to 1948 and infected around 1,300 people without them knowing. They then tracked the progression of the infection without giving them proper treatment. It’s still unclear what the exact purpose of the experiments was, as official documents mention a number of different aims.

Dr. Aubrey Levin worked as the chief of psychiatry for the South African military during Apartheid. So, it shouldn’t be surprising that Dr. Levin performed electroconvulsive aversion therapy on thousands of homosexual men starting in 1969. He aimed to “cure” homosexuality by submitting them to severe shocks after telling them to fantasize about men. He later fled to Canada, where he continued to live and teach at a hospital until a bizarre incident in 2014.

Although these are hard to verify because of North Korea’s isolation, several defectors have reported seeing the government conduct experiments on human subjects. Some of these might be related to chemical warfare, such as one report that detailed a group of women being given poisoned cabbage and then passing away 20 minutes later. However, others seem to have no aim, such as claims that test subjects are beaten, used as target practice, and families ended in gas chambers. It’s thought that a van collects around 50 workers from camps monthly for these “tests.”

A fur trader who was accidentally shot in the stomach in 1822 probably thought he was destined for the grave shortly after the accident. Indeed, when Dr. William Beaumont began treating him, it was suspected that he wouldn’t make it through the ordeal. However, he ended up making a recovery with a hole in his stomach to show for it. After seeing this, Dr. Beaumont thought it’d be a perfect opportunity to study the human digestive system.

Amid a furor of interest in mind control and substances, the CIA began to initiate Project QKHILLTOP in 1954. They tapped Dr. Harold Wolff of Cornell University Medical School to lead the project, which aimed to study possible Chinese brainwashing techniques for use in their own programs and interrogations. Dr. Wolff was one of the country’s premier experts on human ecology at the time, but that didn’t stop him from being more than willing to conduct tests on human subjects.

Sigmund Freud is known today for his many contributions to psychology. However, he isn’t without controversy. A 27-year-old Emma Eckstein sought Freud’s help for symptoms like “slight depression” but ended up being treated for something entirely different. Freud treated her for hysteria and excessive touching of herself, which were considered ailments during the time. He did this by cauterizing the inside of her nose, which ended badly for Eckstein.

Among the CIA’s many human experiments in the 1950s, Project Artichoke sought to study mind control using substance use, withdrawal, hypnosis, and amnesia. Unlike some other experiments, Project Artichoke went a step further and asked, “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature?” So what exactly resulted from this serious inquiry?