10 Ten Sadistic Experiments

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Top 10: Sadistic Experiments

Nerds are much more dangerous than they appear.

By Ross Bonander, Entertainment Correspondent

Drug companies blame FDA red tape for slowing the process of bringing a drug to market, but keen-eyed authors such as Carl Elliott and Dr. Marcia Angell know better: What really slows the process down is recruiting clinical trial participants. More than anything, researchers desperately need human participants who have given their consent to participate; recruitment is extremely expensive and time-consuming, and preclinical animal testing can only take a drug so far. Before the 1970s, this wasn't much of a problem for any researcher because many of them carried out their experiments on uninformed human test subjects.

The following top 10 scientific experiments from the past are considered sick, unethical or just plain sadistic by today's standards. For practical reasons, we've excluded from this list any experiments carried out by the Nazis at the concentration camps or the Japanese at infamous places like Unit 731.


The Monster Study

In 1939, University of Iowa researcher and childhood stutterer Wendell Johnson theorized that stuttering was not inborn, as was the prevailing belief, but rather something imposed on children during their upbringing. To test this, Johnson crafted an experiment that today is widely known as the "Monster Study." Twenty-two orphans were recruited and put into two groups; half received speech therapy and positive encouragement about their speaking abilities, while the other half were berated and ridiculed if they made a mistake in their speech, were consistently told they were stutterers, and were given negative therapy, advice that made them self-conscious. Several children in the latter group struggled with lifelong psychological effects.

 Porton Down Experiments

Following World War II, a variety of experiments were carried out to determine the efficacy of nerve agents, such as sarin and DX, at the UK's Porton Down government and military science park. These tests are alleged to have involved human subjects from the military who were not fully informed of the nature of these tests. The servicemen were exposed to various levels of toxic nerve agents, resulting in the death of at least one man. They were also given chemicals such as LSD without their consent. Much of the work done at Porton Down remains shrouded in mystery to this day. 

Program F

During World War II, the development in the U.S. of the atomic bomb was of the highest priority, and one of the key chemicals in the involved in the process of making the weapon was fluoride. Researchers at the time expressed concern over what they perceived to be clear neurological effects from exposure to high levels of fluoride, so an experiment was carried out, code-named Project F, to saturate the public drinking water in Newburgh, New York, for almost a dozen years, then researchers quietly gather blood and tissue samples from the citizens. The experiment was designed on its face to show that fluoride was safe for humans, but classified documents later revealed that the experiment was nothing more than an attempt to create useful evidence to fight future litigation from people suffering from fluoride toxicity on account of their participation in the atomic bomb program.

Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, researcher Philip Zimbardo sought to determine the underlying causes of violence and abuse in prisons by guards against inmates. He recruited 24 subjects and divided them into two groups; one set would be the prisoners, and the other, the guards who were armed with weapons. The experiment was carried out in a basement on the Stanford campus, and was meant to last for two weeks. The entire experiment was filmed. It didn't take long for things to spiral out of control; the guards began to act sadistically toward the prisoners, who in response rioted, but their revolt was met with a crackdown so severe that Zimbardo pulled the plug after just six days. The now-infamous experiment resulted in lasting psychological trauma for many of the subjects, both guards and prisoners.

Milgram Experiment

Researcher Stanley Milgram wanted to study the effects of authority on human behavior; in particular, whether people could be convinced to do anything under the auspices of authority. He developed a study in which participants would deliver electric shocks to actors if those people gave the wrong answers to a set of basic questions. They had been told that the experiment was an attempt to determine the relationship between punishment and learning.

The shocks got increasingly stronger, and the subjects' screams increasingly louder. If they displayed any reticence, they were told by a man in a lab coat to continue sending the shocks. Eventually, the subject stopped screaming. To the surprise of many, two-thirds of the participants followed through with the orders all the way to the end when they could only hear the screams of the patient.

Holmesburg Dermatological Experiments

From 1951 into the 1970s, an array of cruel dermatological research experiments were carried out on the inmates of Holmesburg prison in Pennsylvania on behalf of the Dow Chemical Company. Specifically, Dow employees had been developing a nasty skin condition called chloracne, and the company, which was involved in making Agent Orange for the military, wanted to know what was causing the condition. Researchers deliberately injected known cancer-causing chemicals such as dioxin into (mostly black) prisoners in order to determine exposure levels and better understand the health effects.

Project MKULTRA

The infamous CIA mind-control program code-named Project MKULTRA -- inspired, it has been alleged, by the Nazis -- was carried out in the 1950s and 1960s and involved the use of many uninformed human test subjects from both the United States and Canada in an effort to learn more about the possibility of gaining control over another person's mental awareness. The experiments involved the use of various chemicals, including LSD and other mind-altering drugs, along with sensory deprivation and, allegedly, verbal and sexual abuse. A number of deaths occurred as a direct result of the program, and allegations -- likely unfounded -- persist to this day that the CIA continues to carry out similar experiments.

 Willowbrook Hepatitis Experiment

Willowbrook State School was a home in New England for thousands of mentally disabled children who were often used as unwitting test subjects for various experiments. One experiment in particular in the 1960s was especially cruel and ultimately contributed to the shutting down of the home and the establishment of new standards to protect children. Researcher Saul Krugman, attempting to better understand hepatitis B and to develop a vaccine against it, deliberately inoculated a large number of the residents with the virus that caused the disease. While it was not uncommon for researchers to test vaccines on the residents (nor was it considered all that unethical), to first inoculate them with the target virus so as to create a patient population on whom to test a vaccine was another matter altogether.

The Aversion Project

During the 1970s and 1980s, apartheid-era South Africa's military was compulsory for white males and homosexuality was a crime. Thus, anyone in the army suspected of being homosexual was singled out and subjected to the theory that through electroconvulsive aversion therapy and other methods, homosexuality could be cured. In an effort to prove the theory, inhuman experiments were performed on soldiers in the infamous "ward 22" that included electroshock therapy, castration and forced sex-change operations. 

Tuskegee Experiment

In an effort to determine, by way of autopsy, what syphilis does to the human body, in 1932, researchers from the U.S. Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute began an experiment on about 400 poor black men from Alabama infected with syphilis. The men weren't told they had the disease, and despite the arrival in 1947 of penicillin, they received no treatment for the disease either. Rather, they were given free meals, free medical check-ups, and free burial insurance. Having never been told they had syphilis, the men went about their lives, infecting sexual partners along the way, with many of the men dying of the disease. The experiment lasted four decades.

Today's drug companies can look to the Tuskegee Experiment as a primary reason why there are so many controls in place today to protect clinical trial participants.