From purposefully infecting people with STD’s to developing the perfect poison we look at 15 horrific human experiments.
15 – Stanford Prison,
- What happens when you take a bunch of students and play prison down in the psych buildings basement? This horrible experiment is what.
- Stanford University conducted the experiment to see what psychological behaviours would happen with some of the students assigned as guards and the others well prisoners. Turns out that power went to the heads of guard students and they went all sadist on the others.
- Two students were removed early suffering from psychological trauma and eventually the experiment was deemed “too fucked up” for a renowned university to continue.
14 – Project 4.1,
- Back in the dawn of the atomic age the USA were testing nukes like they were candy, but surely they were responsible about it right?
- Turns out there was a few small islands downwind from the famous Bikini Atoll site that were being exposed to fallout and instead of warning them the US military saw it as great way to just sit back and see what radiation did to humans.
- Doesn’t take a nuclear physicist to tell you what happened to the islanders, with side effects lasting generations. But hey at least they learned fallout is bad. The only fallout humans should be exposed to is on a games console.
13 – J. Marion Sim’s Gynaecological Operations,
- Take the father of gynaecology and the racist attitudes of the 19th century and you have a recipe for terrible atrocities against other humans.
- “treating” slave women who had suffered traumas to their genitals, Sim would perform many new medical surgeries without anaesthetic as he deemed the procedure “not painful enough to need it”.
- I’m sure if someone were sowing Sim’s ball sack back together he would certainly want some damn painkillers but hey these were just slaves so that made being an asshole okay. Oh and it’s for science after all.
12 – The Monster Study,
- Finally a study that answers the question, can you raise a child evil enough to be such a monster that they would then conduct this experiment?
- Well almost, basically researchers at the University of Iowa took a group of orphans and gave positive speech therapy to one group and negative speech therapy to the other. Basically meaning they took normally speaking children and told them they had a stutter.
- So other than flat out abusing orphan children the study also left them with speech problems for the rest of their lives. We all know who the real monster of the study is riiight.
11 – Irradiating Black Cancer Patients,
- Another amazing experiment birthed from the horrors of the nuclear arms race. Did I say amazing? I mean awful.
- Fearing the prospect of US citizens being poised by radiation in an atomic attack, Dr. Eugene Saenger from the University of Cincinnati experimented with exposing 88 poor cancer patients who mostly were black. Oh and they told them that this was a possible treatment for their cancer.
- At least a quarter of the patients died from radiation poisoning and the rest were left with now suffering radiation sickness as well as still having cancer. But again at least we learned radiation is BAAAAD.