Human curiosity to know the reasons behind various phenomena is the prime cause of experimentation. However, over the years, stratification in the human race on terms of caste, race, wealth etc. have made some people think very low of the others and made them capable of falling down to the level of performing their experiments on fellow humans. Most of the times, these experiments are inhuman as the human who is made the test subject is made to go through unbearable suffering just to satisfy the curiosity and desires of some people. Here are ten such craziest experiments which were performed on humans.
1. STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
Philip Zimbardo, a professor in the Stanford University, designed an experiment called the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo wanted to make studies on the nature of human nature and to do so, he designed a jail in the university and paid college students to be guards and prisoners and tested their behaviour. However, over the time, the guards had become excessively abusive and treated the prisoners in very cruel ways and the prisoners were getting depressed. Due to this, the two-week long experiment had to be terminated in six days. However, later it was found out that Zimbardo had asked the guards to behave in such a manner with the prisoners.
2. NAZI MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS
The Nazi medical experimentations were a set of medical experiments performed on the prisoners in the concentration camps during Nazi rule in Germany. These included a number of experiments. At the camp in Auschwitz, Josef Mengele conducted horrifying experiments on twins, sewing them together, injecting colour to their eyes and much more and about 2800 people dies due to this. Several surgical experiments like transplantations of nerves, bones or muscle were done without anaesthesia. Infecting people with malaria and jaundice to experiment them for the cure of these disease, keeping people in freezing climate to study hypothermia, trying several poisons, drugs and gases on people were some other in this series of inhuman experiments.
3. SOVIET UNION’S HUMAN EXPERIMENTS
In 1921, the Soviet Union set up the poison laboratory. The aim behind setting it up was to invent a chemical which is tasteless and odourless and goes undetected post-mortem. In the efforts of doing so, the researchers in the laboratory came across several deadly chemicals which they tested on people who were mostly prisoners from the Gulags, i.e., Soviet Union’s labour camps housing political prisoners and criminals. The chemicals that were administered into people were the likes of mustard gas, cyanide, ricin, digitoxin etc. They were given these chemicals by telling them that these were medicines or by secretly mixing them in their food or drinks. Most of the experimented people died.
4. JAPAN’S UNIT 731
Unit 731 was a wing of the Imperial Japanese Army which focused on biological warfare research and development. It performed a series of experiments on the Chinese people and other prisoners during the Second World War. Nakagawa Yonezo, a professor who watched these experiments on video said that some of them were done just to see that what will happen if this is done. The list of experiments included surgical processes without anaesthesia, infecting wells with cholera and typhoid, infecting people with plague and frostbite, using human targets to test weapons, infecting people with syphilis and forcibly impregnating women to study the infection from mother to baby, keeping people hungry and thirsty just to see the duration for which it can be done etc. A New York Times report suggested that as many as 2,00,000 people may have to these experiments.
5. EXPERIMENT ON NEW-BORNS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
Experiments conducted on humans are themselves very heart-wrenching and horrifying but when the said humans are new-born babies, the evillest side of human character comes out. Something along the similar lines happened in the University of California in the 1960s. In an attempt to study the blood flow and blood pressure, researchers used 113 babies as test subjects. The range of the ages of these babies was one hour to three days. Some of the procedures of the study included seizing the babies on individual circumcision boards and tilting them so that blood flows to their heads and the blood pressure could be studied and inserting a catheter into the aorta and checking the aortic pressure while the babies’ feet were submerged in ice-cold water.
6. SIMS’ SURGERIES ON SLAVES
Known as the father of modern gynaecology, James Sims is a very controversial personality. It is basically because of the surgical experiments he conducted on the slave women in Alabama to develop his techniques. He was primarily looking for the cure of vesicovaginal fistula, a condition in which a fistula occurs between the bladder and the vagina and causes urine to drip from the vagina without the person’s control over it. This condition occurred due to quick and multiple childbirth that the slave women went through in the absence of contraceptive methods and was looked down upon by the society. To conduct his extremely painful surgical experiments on these women, Sims never used anaesthesia and even remarked that the pain was not so much that anaesthesia’s use could be justified.
7. THE GUATEMALA PROJECT
Between 1946 and 1948, the governments of the USA and Guatemala joined hands for an unbelievable experiment on humans. Under the Guatemala project, soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners and people in the mental asylums of Guatemala were infected with syphilis. The aim of the experiment was to see the prospects for chemicals that could stop the spreading of the disease and also to check the natural progression of the infected people in absence of any treatment. Reports suggest the death of about 30 people due to this horrifying experiment. In 2010, the government of USA had to issue a formal apology for its involvement in these experiments.
8. VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY’S EXPERIMENT ON PREGNANT WOMEN
The experiment conducted by the Vanderbilt University on pregnant women in the US is a prime example of how a nation’s constant desire of power accumulation through war can affect its citizens. US was involved in the Cold War after the Second World War ended and after seeing the power of radioactivity in the World War, it decided to conduct more researches on the matter. 829 pregnant women were given certain drinks and were told that these were vitamin drinks for the benefit of their baby. However, these were drinks infused with radioactive isotope of iron as researchers wished to check that how quickly does the isotope reach the placenta. Due to radioactivity related cancer, at least 7 babies died and several mothers faced radiation related complications.
9. THE MONSTER STUDY
The researchers at the University of Iowa conducted an unbelievable experiment on the orphans at the Ohio Sailors and Soldiers’ Orphan Home. The speech pathologists of the university had a theory that stuttering was a learned trait and they set out to prove it. They told the children in the orphans’ home that hey were showing signs of future stuttering. These children were berated when they spoke something g and were told to speak anything only if they are completely sure about it. As a result, the children didn’t stutter but normal children became increasingly silent, fearful and anxious. They had to retain these characteristics for the rest of their lives. The pathology students who studied in the university in the future named this study as ‘The Monster Study’.
10. THE TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY
One of the biggest examples of the cruelty of American medical history is The Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In 1932, researchers set out to study the effects of untreated syphilis. For this, they took 399 black men from Alabama as subjects and later, 201 healthy people were also made the test subjects, taking the total count up to 600. The people weren’t told that they are suffering from a dangerous disease and were brought into the program by promising them several benefits like free meals and healthcare. This study continued till 1972 when it was exposed in a newspaper report. In 1997, the then US President Bill Clinton had to present a formal apology to the people who were affected by this inhuman study.
