10 Evil Medical Experiments | Healthy Living slideshows | Well Being center

Nazi Medical Experiments

Tens of thousands of people were subjected to horrific medical experiments in Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Some prisoners were subjected to crushing, amputation, poison, freezing, or gunshot so that doctors could improve their techniques for treating soldiers. In Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele performed experiments on 3000 twins, of whom fewer than 400 survived. In some experiements, Mengele injected dyes into the eyes of twins to see if they would change color, and in others, he sewed twins together to create conjoined twins. In 1942 and 1943 at the Ravensbrück prison camp, Nazi doctors tested the effectiveness of the newly discovered antibcterial sulfa drugs by injecting prisoners with Streptococcus and tetanus, and by tying off limbs to induce gangrene.

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Photo courtesy of USHMM by Wikimedia Commons : commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Buchenwald_Medical_Experiments_80622.jpg
Nazi Medical Experimentation&quot
. US Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male recruited poor, usually illiterate African-American farm workers who had syphilis to see whether giving no treatments at all would yield better results than using the toxic treatments available when the study began, in 1932. Involving 301 African-American men who had syphilis and 299 control subjects who did not, the Tuskegee Study went on for 40 years, ending only in 1972. Participants were given placebo treatments so doctors could observe the progression of the disease. Only 74 of the 600 men in the study were alive at its end. Over 100 had died from syphilis, and 40 women and 19 children had been infected with the disease. The participants in the study did, however, receive free burials, for which their families were expected to be grateful. President Bill Clinton apologized to families in 1997.

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Murphy, Timothy F. "The Tuskegee Syphilis Studies." Case Studies in Biomedical Research Ethics. Cambridge: MIT, 2004. 21. Print.

Atomic Bomb Testing

The US military conducted above-ground atomic explosions with soldiers stationed at various points with no more protection than sunglasses during the 1940's, but its scientists were not satisfied. In 1954, the United States implemented Project 4.1, in which residents of the Marshall Islands, a US territory in the western Pacific, were intentially subjected to radioactive fallout from explosions on Bikini atoll. For five years after the explosion, many Marshall Islands women had pregnancies ending in stillbirths. By 1974, 1/3 of the children on the Marshall Islands had developed cancer. The US government justified the experiment on the grounds that it would give them an opportunity to provide free medical care to the islanders.

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Edwin J. Martin and Richard H. Rowland, "Castle Series, 1951", Defense Nuclear Agency Report DNA 6035F (1 April 1982).

Japan's Unit 731

Some of the most horrific atrocities committed during World War II, which was preceded by the Japanese invasion of China in 1937, occurred in Japan's infamous Unit 731, headed by Dr. Shiro Ishii. Using captured Chinese civilians, Japanese doctors performed vivisections, sometimes on pregnant women bearing the doctors' own children. Some prisoners had limbs amputated and reattached. Others had body parts frozen and thawed to study the effects of gangrene. Prisoners were infected with diseases, told they were receiving vaccinations, to study their effects, and both male and female prisoners were raped and intentionally infected with venereal diseases. Dr. Ishii was granted immunity by American officials and never spent a day in jail despite having ordered 12,000 deaths.

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Yuki Tanaka, Hidden Horrors, Westviewpress, 1996, p.138.

Iowa Monster study

In 1939, just as the Nazis were emerging as the world's predominant threat to peace, and several years before word leaked out of their horrific medical experiments, Dr. Wendell Johnson of the University of Iowa conducted an experiment on 22 orphans who suffered speech impediments. Half of the orphans were given a positive treatment, speech therapy with his student Mary Tudor, and half were given negative treatment, scolding and belittling when they stuttered. When Nazi medical experiements came to light, Dr. Johnson's findings, dubbed the Iowa Monster Study, were kept out of the medical journals for several years to avoid propaganda value for Germany. The university only apologized to the orphans in 2001. What was really monstrous about the study? None of the children actually stuttered.

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Tudor, Mary (1939). An Experimental Study of the Effect of Evaluative Labeling of Speech Fluency. University of Iowa.

Burke And Hare Murders

In the early 1800's in the United Kingdom, the only bodies legally available to professors or anatomy and surgeons in training were those of recently executed murderers. Since bodies of murderers were relatively rare, anatomy institutes paid a premium for corpses which they could study. Two British entrepreneurs named William Hare and William Burke opened a lodging house at which they smothered over two dozen lodgers, selling their bodies to British anatomist Robert Knox. Dr. Knox apparently did not care that the bodies he received were unusually fresh. Burke, ironically, was later hanged as a murderer, and the Britist government changed the laws on the procurement of bodies for the study of anatomy with the Anatomy Act of 1832. The episode was the origin of the term "burking," killing someone quickly by compression to the chest.

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Howard, Amanda
Martin Smith (2004). William Burke and William Hare. River of Blood: Serial Killers and Their Victims. Universal.

Guatemala Syphilis Study

American scientists withheld treatment for syphilis for American citizens in the Tuskegee syphilis study, resulting in deaths of hundreds of African-American men and some of their family members. But at least the Tuskegee experiment victims were not intentionally infected. Between 1946 and 1948 the American and Guatemalan governments ran an experiment in which Guatemalan prison inmates and mental asylum inmates were. American researchers paid Guatemalan men to have sex with syphilis-infected prostitutes, and when that did not work, paid them to have the skin on their penises abraded and syphilis microbes poured on. Infected men were given penicillin, but there is no record of follow-up care. President Barack Obama apologized for the experiments in 2010.

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Wellesley professor unearths a horror: Syphilis experiments in Guatemala. Boston Globe. 1 October 2010.

Project MKUltra

Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code name for a research project run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence, a divison of the CIA, during the 1960's. Military officers, doctors, government employees, and psychiatric patients were given LSD to measure its effects as a tool of mind control. Usually these men were lured into brothels where they were given the drug. Since speaking of their experience with prostitutes would have ended their careers, the CIA was confident that there would be few complaints about receiving the LSD. In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all records of MKULTRA destroyed, and the project was never investigated. Families of several men who were given the drugs made the program public.

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Elizabeth Nickson (October 16, 1994). MIND CONTROL: MY MOTHER, THE CIA AND LSD. The Observer.

The Aversion Project

The technique of "conversion therapy" to change homosexual orientation to heterosexual orientation has finally fallen into disfavor in the United States. South Africa, however, had a more insidious approach during its apartheid years. Homosexual men were subjected to chemical castration and electrical shock, and as many as 900 underwent forced sex change operations, in an effort to eliminate homosexuality from the South African armed forces. Several lesbian soldiers also were forced to go through "treatment," including at least one unsuccessful sex change operation, but the majority subjected to these inhumane procedures were males aged 16 to 24 who had been drafted into the South African army.

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Robert Kaplan, The Aversion Project - Psychiatric Abuses In The South African Defense Force During The Apartheid Era, http://archive.samj.org.za. Accessed 20 November 2013.

Soviet Poison Lab

The KGB and other secret police services of the Soviet Union operated a poison research center known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and "The Chamber" where they tested various poisons on convicted "enemies of the state" from the gulag and other prisoners. Ricin, mustard gas, digitoxin, and other substances were tested on prisoners in the Soviet police system's quest to find a colorless, odorless, tasteless poison that could kill quickly. Victims were given a "meal" and observed by a toxicologist named Mairanovsky. When they did not obigingly die, they were executed by the toxicologist under the supervision of the facility's director.

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Ken Alibek and S. Handelman. Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World - Told from Inside by the Man Who Ran it. 1999. Delta (2000).