Any scientist will tell you that a hypothesis is no good until it's tested. We often turn to the animal kingdom for particularly intense experiments, but sometimes only a human body will do the job. In this feature, we'll tell you about ten cases of humans conscripted as lab rats in some seriously twisted studies.
Testicle Radiation Tests
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Convicts are a very appealing population for scientists to experiment on. After all, they're not going anywhere, and people on the outside of prison walls don't care all that much about what's happening behind them. So in 1963, NASA scientists curious as to the
effects of radiation on the male reproductive system approached prison officials in Washington and Oregon and asked them to offer inmates $25 to take a blast of radiation to the nutsack. Scientists told the subjects that they were just "glorified X-rays," but in reality the dose was over 2000 times as powerful, and many of the men developed testicular cancer in the decades afterwards. (Photo credit: Clinical Imaging Science)
Football Player Concussion Tests
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In the 21st century, the science of brain trauma is pretty clear: take a hard hit and your gray matter will smash against your skull and make you dumber. But back in 1958, people didn't know that, so when Dr. Henry Montoye of Michigan State University decided to
test the durability of football helmets, he did it by putting them on college football players, strapping them down in chairs and dropping weights directly on top of their heads to see how it felt. For heavier weights, Montoye used wooden dummy noggins, but that just begs the question as to why he used students at all. (Photo credit:
Purdue University photo/Andrew Hancock)
Mary Rafferty's Brain
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Sometimes a subject comes along that's just too perfect to ignore. When a woman named
Mary Rafferty walked into the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1874 with an ulcer in her scalp, it gave a curious doctor named Roberts Bartholow a chance to perform one of the most demented experiments of all time. The ulcer gave Bartholow access to the woman's brain, so he inserted electrified needles into her gray matter and delivered shocks of a level sufficient to send her into a seizure, then a coma. He repeated the process until she eventually died. Bartholow tried to blame the ulcer, but an autopsy revealed he'd caused her death. Amazingly, he didn't lose his license and went on to become Professor Emeritus of the Jefferson Medical College. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
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Sexually transmitted diseases are like catnip to doctors, giving them the opportunity to study the spread of a pathogen in society. However, for the 600 men involved in the
Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, some serious breaches in ethics resulted in them spreading their STDs even wider. The study, which focused on poor rural farmers in Alabama, didn't actually tell the subjects that they had syphilis. Instead, the men were told they had "bad blood" and were not treated with penicillin, which had been proven to clear up the infection. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Alexis St. Martin's Stomach
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Necessity is the mother of invention, and what makes a scientist truly great is his ability to take advantage when an opportunity arises. For doctor William Beaumont, that time came when he was stationed on Michigan's remote Mackinac Island. When a man named
Alexis St. Martin accidentally took a shotgun blast to the gut, it essentially opened up a window into his digestive system. Beaumont kept him alive and used St. Martin as a kind of living laboratory, inserting a variety of objects into St. Martin's open stomach over the course of the next ten years! Beaumont's experiments proved that digestive juices in the stomach were in fact responsible for breaking down food into nutrients, but he picked a gross way to go about it. (Photo credit: Godfather politics)
Heat Tolerance Box
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You have to give it up for those brave scientists who act as their own guinea pigs. In 1948, the U.S. Air Force commissioned the University of California to figure out exactly what the maximum temperature the human body could withstand was. The idea was to determine how much heat shielding jet pilots would need, so Dr. Craig Taylor built a specially-designed "
hot box" and locked himself in it as it heated up to 262 degrees Fahrenheit. A steel plate in front of him fried eggs while he and his assistants suffered the insane temperatures for as long as 15 minutes. (Photo credit: Modern Mechanic)
David Reimer's Penis
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Here's a particularly insane experiment that basically ruined the life of one poor kid. When twin boys David and Brian Reimer were born, a surgeon decided for some unknown reason to circumcise David with an electrocautery needle. He ended up completely destroying the baby's penis. Things then got worse. The young parents were referred to psychologist Dr. John Money, who recommended that
David be raised as a girl. Money wanted to prove that gender was entirely a social construct, not a biological one. Now called Brenda, David lived a nightmarish existence of discomfort in his own body until he was 14 and his parents told him the truth. He underwent grueling surgery to remove his estrogen-fueled breasts and have an artificial penis and testicles attached to his body. Tragically, David committed suicide in 2004. (Photo credit: Bilimsokak)
Stanford Prison Experiment
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A psychology professor named Philip Zimbardo wanted to study the mental effects of power dynamics in captivity, so he conducted one of the most notorious behavioral science experiments of all time, the
Stanford Prison Experiment. 24 Stanford students were locked in the basement of a campus building for two weeks and randomly assigned the roles of "convict" or "guard." Over the span of a few days, the experiment degenerated into absolute torture, with guards subjecting prisoners to a variety of abusive acts. The experiment was canceled after six days when Zimbardo realized things were going wildly out of control. (Photo credit: YouTube)
The Bobo Doll Experiment
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Experimenting on grown adults is one thing, but kids? Good lord, science, get it together. Psychologist Albert Bandura had theories that watching violent media made kids behave violently, so in 1961 he began what would become known as the "
Bobo doll" experiment, where preschoolers watched an adult beat the crap out of an inflatable clown doll and then were asked to interact with the doll themselves. Surprise! Most of the kids beat the crap out of the doll, too. Some people weren't convinced, so in 1963 Bandura repeated the experiment with an actual live clown. Yes, this dude actually had kids whale on a circus clown for science. (Photo credit: Personal PSU)
Project MK-ULTRA
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The Cold War saw intelligence agencies on both sides of the Iron Curtain throw off their gloves and really get down to business, and science was an important part of that. During the 1960s, the rise of psychedelics inspired some of the CIA's spymasters to investigate their effects. Because you couldn't tip off a target before a bad trip, they experimented on unwitting American civilians as part of a program code-named
MK-ULTRA. From 1953 to 1964, the CIA dosed people with LSD, mescaline and other substances without them knowing. Two of their subjects (that we know of) died as a result. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons)
