Scientific development in medical research has liberated human beings from the fear of life-threatening diseases and has allowed us to live longer and healthier lives. However, this progress has been built on the sacrifices of innocent people who were unethically subjected to horrific experimentation.
It is essential that those of us who benefit from medical research today take a moment to recognize the voiceless victims of unethical research in the past. When scientists compromise on ethics in their research, it can cause individuals unimaginable pain. Yet, human history is filled with cover-ups of scientific misconduct, brutal experimentation on people, and incidents of cruel torture in the name of progress.
The Tuskegee Experiments
One of the most notoriously unethical exercises in medical experimentation committed by the American government was the Tuskegee Experiment of 1932. The experiments were prompted by the rising incidence of syphilis in the United States, an incredibly contagious venereal disease. Doctors working for the U.S Public Health Service were responsible for running the study, which saw hundreds of African American men suffer from untreated syphilis.
African American men were inducted into the experiment under the pretense that they would be provided free medical care. These men were then told that they were being treated for “bad blood”. Around the 1940s penicillin became widely regarded as the most effective drug to treat penicillin, but these men were never given any. Instead, many of them were given placebos and ended up having severe health problems because of untreated syphilis. Some of these men ended up suffering from blindness, whereas others ended up mentally insane or dead.
For years, the horrible nature of this experiment escaped the public eye. Ultimately the story broke out in 1972 by Jean Heller of the Associated Press. The report caused mass public outrage at its publicization, which finally forced the study to shut down completely. In addition to causing the deaths of more than a hundred African American men, the study caused intergenerational harm as it was passed onto 19 children at their birth.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
During the early 1970s, Phillip Zimbardo and his colleagues at Stanford University devised a psychological experiment that attempted to investigate the influence being a prisoner, or a prison guard has on individuals. Today, this study is widely regarded as one of the most unethical experiments conducted in the history of psychology as an academic discipline. Zimbardo created an artificial prison environment consisting of college students. Some college students had to roleplay as prison guards, whereas others were tasked with roleplaying the prisoners.
Eventually, the experiment took a turn for the worst as the pretend guards began inflicting violence onto the pretend prisoners. The college students acting as prison guards became influenced by their powerful position and displayed sadistic tendencies. As the prison guards enjoyed the pain they caused the prisoners; the prisoners ended up extremely distressed. The experiment illustrated the human potential to treat other human beings in a humiliating, cruel, and undignified fashion.
Although every participant in the experiment was a college student, delegating roles made one group of students act with extreme hostility against the other. In 2018 it was revealed that it was not just human nature bringing out the worst in the college students but that something much more sinister had happened during the experiment.
Shockingly, Zimbardo had actively encouraged the sadistic behavior and had even instructed some prisoners to pretend like they were emotionally distressed. The whole experiment had been a farce, yet for years Zimbardo’s conclusions served as the basis for modern-day psychological understandings of human behavior.
The Dark History Of American Gynecology
James Marion Sims is considered by many in the field of gynecology as a genius who was at the forefront of developments in women’s reproductive health. Yet, his successes are tainted by the horrifying abuse he subjected enslaved Black women to and the unethical nature of his research. In the late 19th century, Sims had spent years experimenting on Black women without proper medical care or concern for ethics.
The experimentation involved performing surgeries on many women without anesthesia that would have caused unimaginable pain. Sims even attempted to justify this horrific abuse in a lecture he delivered in 1857. He said that the surgeries were not painful enough to warrant the trouble of procuring anesthesia for these women. A slaveholder himself, Sims believed that developments in reproductive health trumped concerns about the treatment of enslaved black women.
However, many point towards the lack of care he had towards the volunteers of his experiments and even question whether sufficient consent was even possible for these women living under unimaginable duress. As a slave owner, Sims only viewed these Black women as property or subjects and not as living, breathing, and feeling human beings.
The Guatemala Syphilis Study
The Tuskegee experiments prompted fear that the American government may have even given people syphilis. Although that was not the case in the Tuskegee experiments, the American government did precisely that to hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners. From 1946–1948 roughly 5500 Guatemalans were involved in medical research funded by the US government that had American scientists and Guatemalan doctors working together.
In one of the most unethical acts of medical research, these researchers managed to infect hundreds of prisoners, sex workers, and psychiatric patients with syphilis in an effort to investigate the impact of penicillin in treating the disease. None of the participants in the experiment were ever informed of the consequences they would have to face. Just a few years after the experiment had been conducted, roughly 83 out of the 5500 subjects ended up dying.
The researchers involved in the experiment displayed great ignorance for people’s lives and exposed so many already vulnerable individuals with a life-threatening disease. In 2011, a group of people who had been part of the experiment decided to sue the US government for their horrible crimes against humanity.
The Japanese Army’s Brutal Medical Testing
During the mid-1930s the Japanese Imperial Army formed Unit 731, a group that would conduct deadly experiments on Chinese and Korean prisoners of war. Around 3000 prisoners became subject to horrific medical testing. The subjects were infected with lethal diseases like typhus and cholera and then experimented on for years. Subjects were nicknamed “logs” by the researchers, and they were actively tortured during the duration of the experiments. Some even had their body parts amputated and organs removed from their bodies. Beyond this, subjects were exposed to freezing cold temperatures to study the effects of frostbite and potential solutions.
Some media reports suggest that prisoners were exposed to lethal poisonous gas and put in gas chambers. The horrific torture did not end there for some, as some prisoners had surgery performed on them while fully conscious. They were alive yet being dissected by the vile and morally depraved researchers. In addition to the prisoners, Chinese civilians were experimented on by the unit.
Even today, the exact number of people who perished because of these experiments is unknown, but some studies suggest that the death toll may be as high as 200,000 people. Even the US government aided the Japanese in hiding the cruel nature of these experiments because they prioritized having the Japanese as allies.
The Nazis and Endless Evil
Widely considered the evilest government in modern history, the Nazis conducted an array of experiments on prisoners during their time in power. One of the most notorious of these experiments is the research carried out by SS physician Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Auschwitz is one of the more popular extermination camps the Nazis had constructed, where thousands of prisoners were subjected to inhumane torture and killed. Mengele had set up shop in Auschwitz to study racist notions of the biological supremacy of the Aryans.
Mengele primarily looked for twins amongst the prisoners who he could conduct experiments on and study. The cruel man had even managed to collect the eyes of many of his dead subjects. Mengele’s research is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the extent of savage crimes the Nazis committed. Nazi researchers used prisoners to investigate infectious diseases and ended up unethically exposing many prisoners to those infectious diseases. Additionally, the Nazis used prisoners as guinea pigs for the testing of efficient methods of chemical warfare. Even children were exposed to torture and treated as less than human.
One incident reported by the Holocaust Museum mentions how the Nazis would let babies starve to study how long they could survive. Often, the mothers of those babies would inject their babies with a lethal dose of morphine in a desperate attempt to end the consistent suffering. With the end of the Second World War, many Nazi scientists were put on trial as war criminals and sentenced to severe punishments. However, Mengele managed to evade justice and escaped to South America, where he died in 1979.
