The Most Unethical US Government Experiments On Humans
At times, the American government has been caught conducting inhumane experiments on humans without their consent and/or knowledge. Many even involved the participation of medical professionals, who ironically became hypocrites to their Hippocratic Oath.
Many of these stories sound like conspiracy theories, but sadly, they all really happened. Some are so awful, you'll be left asking yourself, did the US government really infect its own citizens with syphilis and not tell them? Did other government agencies test nuclear weapons, resulting in radiation fallout on multiple innocent Pacific islands? And did top US officials condone the research of corrupt doctors who were allegedly torturing research subjects? Click through the list below to learn more.
- Photo: Dmcdevit / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
Project MKUltra, Subproject 68 Involved Child Abuse
The CIA-run Project MKUltra (also written MK-Ultra) paid Dr. Donald Ewen Cameron for Subproject 68, AKA experiments involving mind-altering substances. The entire goal of the project was to look into methods of influencing and controlling people's minds and extracting information from resisting minds.
To accomplish this, the doctor took patients admitted to the Royal Victoria Hospital's Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal (mostly for issues like bipolar disorder and anxiety disorders) and conducted "therapy" on them - treatment that was life-altering and scarring.
Between 1957 and 1964, Cameron administered electroconvulsive therapy as frequently as twice daily, as opposed to the recommended limit of three times a week. He would put patients into drug-induced comas and play back tapes of simple statements or repetitive noises over and over again.
The victims often lost the ability to speak, forgot about their parents, and suffered serious amnesia. All of this was performed on Canadian citizens because the CIA wasn’t willing to risk such operations on Americans. To ensure funding, Cameron experimented upon admitted children, and in one situation filmed a child engaging in intimate acts with high-ranking government officials, thus securing himself a valuable bargaining chip - blackmail.
- Photo: Willem van de Poll / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
US Soldiers Were Involuntary Guinea Pigs For Chemical Weapon Gasses
As research on biological and chemical weapons intensified in the 1940s, American officials also began testing repercussions and defenses on the US Army itself. To determine the effectiveness of various chemicals, officials were known to have sprayed mustard gas (dichlorodiethyl sulfide) and other skin-burning, lung-destroying chemicals like lewisite on soldiers - many of whom were Black - without their consent or knowledge of the experiment. Upon contact with skin or mucous membranes, the gases can cause itching, swelling, blistering, and extreme burning pain.
The US Government also tested the effectiveness of gas masks and protective clothing by locking soldiers in chambers and exposing them to mustard gas and lewisite, mimicking the gas chambers of Nazi Germany.
It was also rumored that along with soldiers, Veterans Administration hospital patients may have been used as guinea pigs in experiments involving biological warfare chemicals, but that all experiment designations were changed to "observations" to ward off suspicions.
- Photo: Masao Takezawa / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
As head of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Unit 731 (a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit during WWII), Dr. Shiro Ishii carried out gory surgeries on thousands of Chinese and Allied prisoners of war during the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II.
Among other things, Ishii tested vivisection techniques - experimental surgery without anesthesia on living creatures and examining their insides. As would be imagined, this causes excruciating pain and terror for patients, and often costs them their lives. Ishii was also known for forcing pregnant women to endure abortions of their babies, and subjecting his prisoners to changes in physiological conditions to induce strokes, heart attacks, frostbite, and hypothermia. He dehumanized his patients by calling them maruta, the Japanese word for "logs."
Following imminent defeat in 1945, Japan blew up the Unit 731 complex and Ishii ordered all remaining "logs" to be executed. Soon after, he was arrested. American General Douglas MacArthur allegedly struck a deal with Ishii - if the US granted him immunity, he in turn must reveal information about his experiments and about Japanese biological warfare.
- Video: YouTube
Secret Human Experiments Tested The Effects Of The Atomic Bomb
While testing out and trying to harness the power of the atomic bomb, American scientists in the 1940s also secretly tested the bomb's effects on humans. During the Manhattan Project, which gave way to the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scientists resorted to human testing via plutonium injection on 18 unsuspecting, nonconsenting patients. Some also received uranium or polonium.
The experiment involved injecting males and females - ranging in age from children to 50-somethings, with varying micrograms of weapons-grade plutonium. Of the patients, who were known only by their code names and numbers at the time, their causes of death were just as likely to be cardiovascular disease or pulmonary issues as cancer, which was surprising.
The US Government Approved Spraying Deadly Chemicals Over American Cities
Showing once again that the US tends to test worse-case scenarios by getting to them first, the US military and the CIA conducted a series of biochemical warfare simulations upon American cities to see how the effects would play out in the event of an actual chemical attack.
They conducted the following campaigns, without public knowledge:
- In 1950, the US Navy sprayed bacterial pathogens in the sky above San Francisco; it claimed the bacteria were harmless, but many people developed respiratory infections, with at least one fatal case.
- The CIA released whooping cough virus in 1955 near Tampa, FL, using boats, and nearly caused an epidemic. Twelve people succumbed to the illness.
- Between 1956 and 1958, the US Army unleashed millions of mosquitoes carrying the yellow fever virus in the vicinity of Savannah, GA, and Avon Park, FL. The resulting infections caused many people to suffer acute and chronic symptoms including fevers, bronchitis, encephalitis, and stillbirths. Adding insult to injury, Army personnel, posing as public health workers, arrived after each swarm to photograph, document, and test victims, after which they simply left.
American Physicians Infected Guatemalans With STDs
In the 1940s, with penicillin as an established cure for syphilis, the US decided to test its effectiveness on Guatemalan citizens. To do this, American physicians in Guatemala recruited infected prostitutes to have relations with unknowing prison inmates, mental hospital patients, and soldiers. When spreading the disease through prostitution didn't work as well as they'd hoped, they instead went for a rather gruesome inoculation route.
Researchers poured syphilis bacteria onto men's genitals, arms, and/or faces. In some cases, they even exposed the men through spinal punctures. After all the infections were transmitted, researchers then gave most of the subjects penicillin treatment, although “not everyone received what was even then considered adequate treatment,” according to Susan Reverby, a Wellesley College professor who was among the experiment's whistleblowers in 2010.
In October of that year, Hillary Clinton apologized for the inhumane program and said new research was happening to see if anyone affected is still alive and battling syphilis. Because many subjects never received penicillin, it's possible and likely that some people spread the virus to future generations.
- Photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 141-1880 / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0 DE
Following WWII, the American government covertly instituted Operation Paperclip, a program of the Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency and Office of Strategic Services in which approximately 1,600 German scientists and engineers (and their families) from Nazi Germany and other foreign countries were brought to the US for employment.
This took place in part to keep German scientific expertise and knowledge from the Soviet Union and to keep post-war Germany from redeveloping its military research capabilities. The US government "bleached" the scientists of their Nazi ties, removing and/or destroying any documents or records tying them to the party.
Any Germans had special skills or knowledge were taken to detention centers, to be held and interrogated. Some were then driven to countryside towns without actual research facilities; they received stipends to purchase necessities, but also received orders to check in at police headquarters twice weekly, ostensibly to prevent them from trying to leave. A US Joint Chiefs of Staff directive stated they should only be released "after all interested agencies were satisfied that all desired intelligence information had been obtained from them."
American Prison Inmates Were Agent Orange Guinea Pigs
With funding he received from the US Army and the Dow chemical company (main producer of Agent Orange), Dr. Albert Kligman used prisoners at Pennsylvania's Holmesburg Prison as subjects in what was deemed “dermatological research.” The dermatology aspect was testing the effects of Agent Orange (a highly toxic dioxin plus two forms of acetic acid) on human skin.
Kligman injected dioxin into non-consenting prisoners to study its effects, which included severe, disfiguring skin lesions as well as respiratory issues. He allegedly exposed his subjects to more than 400 times the “recommended safe dosage” of the chemical. His documentation, if any, has never come to light. He did, however, describe a goal of “learn[ing] how the skin protects itself against chronic assault from toxic chemicals, the so-called hardening process.”
He even described his excitement when presented with his incarcerated test subjects from Holmesburg:
All I saw before me were acres of skin… It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.
An American Oncologist Infected Puerto Ricans With Cancer
In the early 1930s, Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads, an oncologist, was sponsored by the Rockefeller Institute to conduct experiments in Puerto Rico. He infected citizens with cancer cells, presumably to study the effects. Thirteen of them didn't survive. Even more striking is the doctor's lack of compassion:
They [Puerto Ricans] are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them. They are even lower than Italians.
It's not clear how someone of Rhoads's caliber was appointed to the US Atomic Energy Commission to study the effects of radiation - but it happened all the same. In the 1970s, the American Association for Cancer Research even created the annual Cornelius Rhoads award to recognize exemplary cancer researchers. In 2003, however, the program ceased.
- Photo: Historicair / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
The Pentagon Treated Black Cancer Patients With Extreme Radiation
From 1960 to 1971, the US Department of Defense performed a series of irradiation experiments on nonconsenting, Black cancer patients of low socioeconomic status. Radiologist Dr. Eugene Saenger and colleagues simply told the patients they were receiving treatments that might be of benefit; no informed consent forms were involved.
Some 88 patients were exposed to enough ionizing radiation in one hour to equal 20,000 medical X-rays. Most soon suffered from nausea, vomiting, gastrointestinal pain, appetite loss, and cognitive issues. Purportedly up to 25% of patients succumbed to radiation poisoning.
Operation Midnight Climax Was Even More Than What It Sounds Like
Here's a government experiment that, when you Google it, has completely different image results from its web results. Operation Midnight Climax involved safe houses in San Francisco, built to study LSD's effects on unaware individuals. The CIA enlisted the help of prostitutes to lure men to the houses, where the ladies slipped them LSD so agents could study the drug's effects via two-way mirrors and hidden microphones.
Furthermore, it's alleged that those who ran the so-called “CIA carnal operations” enjoyed their assignment perhaps a bit more than they should have. According to George White, a high-ranking member of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics: “I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun!”
- Photo: US Army Photographic Signal Corps / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
Radioactive Fallout Contaminated Unsuspecting Pacific Territories
After unleashing nuclear explosives on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US embarked on numerous thermonuclear bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean in response to increased Soviet bomb activity. They were intended to be a secret affair. However, this secret wasn't well kept.
Detonated March 1, 1954, over Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands, Castle Bravo was the largest nuclear explosion the US ever set off. What officials didn't expect was for the fallout to inadvertently get blown upwind onto nearby residents of other islands, many of whom went on to suffer thyroid atrophy, several types of cancers, radiation sickness, miscarriages, stillbirths, and deformed infants.
This created Project 4.1, a study to examine the effects of radiation fallout on humans. Essentially, it was the latest in a long string of studies where humans act as guinea pigs without giving consent,, and a project remembered by the US as a way to gather data that would otherwise be unobtainable. The American moral standard that history best remembers is that even though the radiation fallout on the Marshall Islands was an accident, it might as well have been intended.
- Photo: National Archives Atlanta, GA / Wikimedia Commons / Public domain
The Tuskegee Study Withheld Treatment From Men With Syphilis
In 1932, researchers from the US Public Health Service and Alabama's Tuskegee Institute recruited 600 Black men of low socioeconomic status to study the natural progression of syphilis. The initial study comprised 399 infected patients and 201 without the disease. None had the opportunity to give informed consent; they thought they were simply being treated for “bad blood,” which colloquially at the time referred to anything from STDs to anemia to fatigue. As compensation, they received free medical exams, free food, and burial insurance.
Penicillin became the gold standard for syphilis treatment by 1943, but researchers never offered it to the men in the Tuskegee study, many of whom didn't even know they were infected. The study continued for nearly 30 years more.
In 1972, the Associated Press broke the story of “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” and backlash was swift from the patients, the public, and the medical community. “I don’t know why the decision was made in 1946 not to stop the program,” remarked Don Prince, an official with the CDC. "I was unpleasantly surprised when I first came here and found out about it. It really puzzles me.”
The patients filed a lawsuit and eventually shared a $9 million settlement. In May 1997, then-President Bill Clinton issued a formal apology, which included the passage: “I am sorry that your federal government orchestrated a study so clearly racist. That can never be allowed to happen again.”
