9 Absolutely Evil Medical Experiments.

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▼  Evil experiments

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Credit: National Archives

Medical progress saves lives, but sometimes scientists let the hope of a breakthrough get in the way of ethics. For instance, the U.S. government issued a formal apology to Guatemala for experiments done there in the 1940s that involved infecting prisoners and individuals with mental illnesses with syphilis.

The Guatemala project is just one of many terrible experiments done in the name of medicine. Some ethical lapses are mistakes by people sure they're doing the right thing. Other times, they're pure evil. Here are eight of the worst experiments on human subjects in history.


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Credit: Richard Lee/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Separating triplets

In the name of science, or more specifically getting to the bottom of the nature-versus-nurture question, psychologists ran a secret experiment in the 1960s and 1970s in which they separated twins and triplets from each other and adopted them out as singlets. The experiment, said to have been partly funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, came to light when three identical triplet brothers accidentally found each other in 1980. They had no idea they had siblings.

''How can you do this with little children? How can you do this to a little baby, innocent children being torn apart at birth?'' asked Robert Shafran, as reported by the Orlando  Sentinel in 1997.

His brother, David Kellman, felt the same anger: ''We were robbed of 20 years together,'' said Kellman in the Orlando Sentinel article. Their brother, Edward Galland committed suicide in 1995 at his home in Maplewood, New Jersey, leaving behind a wife and daughter.

The child psychiatrists who headed up the study — Peter Neubauer and Viola Bernard — showed no remorse, according to news reports, going as far as saying they thought they were doing something good for the kids, separating them so they could develop their individual personalities, said Bernard, who was also a consultant for the Louise Wise adoption agency.

As for what Neubauer learned from his secret "evil" experiment, that's anyone's guess, as the results of the controversial study are being stored in an archive at Yale University, and they can't be unsealed until 2066, NPR  reported in 2007.

Director Tim Wardle chronicled the lives of the triplets in the film "Three Identical Strangers," which debuted at Sundance 2018.


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Nazi medical experiments

Perhaps the most infamous evil experiments of all time were those carried out by Josef Mengele, an SS physician at Auschwitz. Mengele combed the incoming trains for twins upon which to experiment, hoping to prove his theories of the racial supremacy of Aryans. Many died in the process. He also collected the eyes of his dead "patients," according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Nazis used prisoners to test treatments for infectious diseasesand chemical warfare. Others were forced into freezing temperatures and low-pressure chambers for aviation experiments. Countless prisoners were subjected to experimental sterilization procedures. One woman had her breasts tied off with string so SS doctors could see how long it took her baby to starve, according to an oral history collected by the Holocaust Museum. She eventually injected the child with a lethal dose of morphine to keep it from suffering longer.

Some of the doctors responsible for these  atrocitieswere later tried as war criminals, but Mengele escaped to South America. He died in Brazil in 1979 of a stroke.


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Credit: Wikipedia

Japan's Unit 731

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese Imperial Army conducted biological warfare and medical testing on civilians, mostly in China. The death toll of these brutal experiments is unknown, but as many as 200,000 may have died, according to a 1995 New York Times report.

Among the atrocities were wells infected with cholera and typhoid and plague-ridden fleas spread across Chinese cities. Prisoners were marched in freezing weather and then experimented on to determine the best treatment for frostbite. Former members of the unit have told media outlets that prisoners were dosed with poison gas, put in pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, and even dissected while alive and conscious. After the war, the U.S. government helped keep the experiments secret as part of a plan to make Japan a cold-war ally, according to the Times report.


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The "monster study"

In 1939, speech pathologists at the University of Iowa set out to prove their theory that stuttering was a learned behavior caused by a child's anxiety about speaking. Unfortunately, the way they chose to go about this was to try to induce stuttering in orphans by telling them they were doomed to start stuttering in the future.

Yes, orphans. The researchers sat down with children at the Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Orphans' Home and told them they were showing signs of stuttering and shouldn't speak unless they could be sure that they would speak right. The experiment didn't  induce stuttering, but it did make formerly normal children anxious, withdrawn and silent.

Future Iowa pathology students dubbed the study, "the Monster Study," according to a 2003 New York Times article on the research. Three surviving children and the estates of three others eventually sued Iowa and the university. In 2007, Iowa settled for a total of $925,000.


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Credit: Wikipedia

The Burke and Hale murders

Until the 1830s, the only legally available bodies for dissection by anatomists were those of executed murderers. Executed murderers being a relative rarity, many anatomists took to buying bodies from grave robbers — or doing the robbing themselves.

Edinburgh boardinghouse owner William Hare and his friend William Burke took this entrepreneurial activity one step further. From 1827 to 1828, the two men smothered  more than a dozen lodgersat the boardinghouse and sold their bodies to anatomist Robert Knox, according to Mary Roach's "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003). Knox apparently didn't notice (or didn't care) that the bodies his newest suppliers were bringing him were suspiciously fresh, Roach wrote.

Burke was later hanged for his crimes, and the case spurred the British government to loosen the restrictions on dissection. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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