[WARNING] This list contains descriptions and
images of human experimentation which may
cause offense to some readers.] Human
experimentation and research ethics evolved
over time. On occasion, the subjects of human
experimentation have been prisoners, slaves, or
even family members. In some notable cases,
doctors have performed experiments on
themselves when they have been unwilling to
risk the lives of others. This is known as self-
experimentation. This is a list of the 10 most evil
and unethical experiments carried out on
humans.
10
Stanford Prison Experiment
The Stanford prison experiment was a
psychological study of human responses to
captivity and its behavioral effects on both
authorities and inmates in prison. The
experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of
researchers led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo
at Stanford University. Undergraduate volunteers
played the roles of both guards and prisoners
living in a mock prison in the basement of the
Stanford psychology building.
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their
roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what
had been predicted and leading to dangerous
and psychologically damaging situations. One-
third of the guards were judged to have
exhibited “genuine” sadistic tendencies, while
many prisoners were emotionally traumatized
and two had to be removed from the
experiment early. Finally, Zimbardo, alarmed at
the increasingly abusive anti-social behavior
from his subjects, terminated the entire
experiment early.
9
The Monster Study
The Monster Study was a stuttering experiment
on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa, in
1939 conducted by Wendell Johnson at the
University of Iowa. Johnson chose one of his
graduate students, Mary Tudor, to conduct the
experiment and he supervised her research.
After placing the children in control and
experimental groups, Tudor gave positive speech
therapy to half of the children, praising the
fluency of their speech, and negative speech
therapy to the other half, belittling the children
for every speech imperfection and telling them
they were stutterers. Many of the normal
speaking orphan children who received negative
therapy in the experiment suffered negative
psychological effects and some retained speech
problems during the course of their life. Dubbed
“The Monster Study” by some of Johnson’s peers
who were horrified that he would experiment
on orphan children to prove a theory, the
experiment was kept hidden for fear Johnson’s
reputation would be tarnished in the wake of
human experiments conducted by the Nazis
during World War II. The University of Iowa
publicly apologized for the Monster Study in
2001.

8
Project 4.1
Project 4.1 was the designation for a medical
study conducted by the United States of those
residents of the Marshall Islands exposed to
radioactive fallout from the March 1, 1954 Castle
Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which had an
unexpectedly large yield. For the first decade
after the test, the effects were ambiguous and
statistically difficult to correlate to radiation
exposure: miscarriages and stillbirths among
exposed Rongelap women doubled in the first
five years after the accident, but then returned
to normal; some developmental difficulties and
impaired growth appeared in children, but in no
clear-cut pattern. In the decades that followed,
though, the effects were undeniable. Children
began to suffer disproportionately from thyroid
cancer (due to exposure to radioiodines), and
almost a third of those exposed developed
neoplasms by 1974.
As a Department of Energy Committee writing
on the human radiation experiments wrote, “It
appears to have been almost immediately
apparent to the AEC and the Joint Task Force
running the Castle series that research on
radiation effects could be done in conjunction
with the medical treatment of the exposed
populations.” The DOE report also concluded
that “The dual purpose of what is now a DOE
medical program has led to a view by the
Marshallese that they were being used as
‘guinea pigs’ in a ‘radiation experiment.’”
7
Project MKULTRA
Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code
name for a CIA mind-control research program,
run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence, that
began in the early 1950s and continued at least
through the late 1960s. There is much published
evidence that the project involved the
surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well
as other methodologies, to manipulate individual
mental states and to alter brain function.
Experiments included administering LSD to CIA
employees, military personnel, doctors, other
government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill
patients, and members of the general public in
order to study their reactions. LSD and other
drugs were usually administered without the
subject’s knowledge and informed consent, a
violation of the Nuremberg Code that the U.S.
agreed to follow after WWII.
Efforts to “recruit” subjects were often illegal,
even discounting the fact that drugs were being
administered (though actual use of LSD, for
example, was legal in the United States until
October 6, 1966). In Operation Midnight Climax,
the CIA set up several brothels to obtain a
selection of men who would be too embarrassed
to talk about the events. The men were dosed
with LSD, and the brothels were equipped with
one-way mirrors and the “sessions” were filmed
for later viewing and study.
In 1973, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all
MKULTRA files destroyed. Pursuant to this order,
most CIA documents regarding the project were
destroyed, making a full investigation of
MKULTRA virtually impossible.
6
The Aversion Project
South Africa’s apartheid army forced white
lesbian and gay soldiers to undergo ‘sex-change’
operations in the 1970′s and the 1980′s, and
submitted many to chemical castration, electric
shock, and other unethical medical experiments.
Although the exact number is not known, former
apartheid army surgeons estimate that as many
as 900 forced ‘sexual reassignment’ operations
may have been performed between 1971 and
1989 at military hospitals, as part of a top-
secret program to root out homosexuality from
the service.
Army psychiatrists aided by chaplains
aggressively ferreted out suspected homosexuals
from the armed forces, sending them discretely
to military psychiatric units, chiefly ward 22 of 1
Military Hospital at Voortrekkerhoogte, near
Pretoria. Those who could not be ‘cured’ with
drugs, aversion shock therapy, hormone
treatment, and other radical ‘psychiatric’ means
were chemically castrated or given sex-change
operations.
Although several cases of lesbian soldiers
abused have been documented so far—including
one botched sex-change operation—most of the
victims appear to have been young, 16 to 24-
year-old white males drafted into the apartheid
army.
Dr. Aubrey Levin (the head of the study) is now
Clinical Professor in the Department of
Psychiatry (Forensic Division) at the University of
Calgary’s Medical School. He is also in private
practice, as a member in good standing of the
College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta.

North Korean Experimentation
There have been many reports of North Korean
human experimentation. These reports show
human rights abuses similar to those of Nazi
and Japanese human experimentation in World
War II. These allegations of human rights abuses
are denied by the North Korean government,
who claim that all prisoners in North Korea are
humanely treated.
One former North Korean woman prisoner tells
how 50 healthy women prisoners were selected
and given poisoned cabbage leaves, which all
the women had to eat despite cries of distress
from those who had already eaten. All 50 were
dead after 20 minutes of vomiting blood and
anal bleeding. Refusing to eat would have
meant reprisals against them and their families.
Kwon Hyok, a former prison Head of Security at
Camp 22, described laboratories equipped
respectively for poison gas, suffocation gas and
blood experiments, in which 3 or 4 people,
normally a family, are the experimental subjects.
After undergoing medical checks, the chambers
are sealed and poison is injected through a tube,
while “scientists” observe from above through
glass. Kwon Hyok claims to have watched one
family of 2 parents, a son and a daughter die
from suffocating gas, with the parents trying to
save the children using mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation for as long as they had the
strength.
4
Poison laboratory of the Soviets
The Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret
services, also known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory
12 and “The Chamber”, was a covert poison
research and development facility of the Soviet
secret police agencies. The Soviets tested a
number of deadly poisons on prisoners from the
Gulag (“enemies of the people”), including
mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin and many others.
The goal of the experiments was to find a
tasteless, odorless chemical that could not be
detected post mortem. Candidate poisons were
given to the victims, with a meal or drink, as
“medication”.
Finally, a preparation with the desired
properties called C-2 was developed. According
to witness testimonies, the victim changed
physically, became shorter, weakened quickly,
became calm and silent and died within fifteen
minutes. Mairanovsky brought to the laboratory
people of varied physical condition and ages in
order to have a more complete picture about
the action of each poison.
In addition to human experimentation,
Mairanovsky personally executed people with
poisons, under the supervision of Pavel
Sudoplatov.

3
The Tuskegee Syphilis Study
The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the
Negro Male was a clinical study, conducted
between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama,
in which 399 (plus 201 control group without
syphilis) poor — and mostly illiterate — African
American sharecroppers were denied treatment
for Syphilis.
This study became notorious because it was
conducted without due care to its subjects, and
led to major changes in how patients are
protected in clinical studies. Individuals enrolled
in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study did not give
informed consent and were not informed of
their diagnosis; instead they were told they had
“bad blood” and could receive free medical
treatment, rides to the clinic, meals and burial
insurance in case of death in return for
participating. In 1932, when the study started,
standard treatments for syphilis were toxic,
dangerous, and of questionable effectiveness.
Part of the original goal of the study was to
determine if patients were better off not being
treated with these toxic remedies. For many
participants, treatment was intentionally denied.
Many patients were lied to and given placebo
treatments—in order to observe the fatal
progression of the disease.
By the end of the study, only 74 of the test
subjects were still alive. Twenty-eight of the
men had died directly of syphilis, 100 were dead
of related complications, 40 of their wives had
been infected, and 19 of their children had been
born with congenital syphilis.
2
Unit 731
Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical
warfare research and development unit of the
Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal
human experimentation during the Second Sino-
Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It
was responsible for some of the most notorious
war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel.
Some of the numerous atrocities committed by
the commander Shiro Ishii and others under his
command in Unit 731 include: vivisection of
living people (including pregnant women who
were impregnated by the doctors), prisoners
had limbs amputated and reattached to other
parts of their body, some prisoners had parts of
their bodies frozen and thawed to study the
resulting untreated gangrene. Humans were also
used as living test cases for grenades and flame
throwers. Prisoners were injected with strains of
diseases, disguised as vaccinations, to study
their effects. To study the effects of untreated
venereal diseases, male and female prisoners
were deliberately infected with syphilis and
gonorrhea via rape, then studied. A complete
list of these horrors can be found here .
Having been granted immunity by the American
Occupation Authorities at the end of the war,
Ishii never spent any time in jail for his crimes
and died at the age of 67 of throat cancer.

1
Nazi Experiments
Nazi human experimentation was medical
experimentation on large numbers of people by
the German Nazi regime in its concentration
camps during World War II. At Auschwitz, under
the direction of Dr. Eduard Wirths, selected
inmates were subjected to various experiments
which were supposedly designed to help
German military personnel in combat situations,
to aid in the recovery of military personnel that
had been injured, and to advance the racial
ideology backed by the Third Reich.
Experiments on twin children in concentration
camps were created to show the similarities and
differences in the genetics and eugenics of
twins, as well as to see if the human body can
be unnaturally manipulated. The central leader
of the experiments was Dr. Josef Mengele, who
performed experiments on over 1,500 sets of
imprisoned twins, of which fewer than 200
individuals survived the studies. Dr. Mengele
organized the testing of genetics in twins. The
twins were arranged by age and sex and kept in
barracks in between the test, which ranged from
the injection of different chemicals into the eyes
of the twins to see if it would change their
colors to literally sewing the twins together in
hopes of creating conjoined twins.
In 1942 the Luftwaffe conducted experiments to
learn how to treat hypothermia. One study
forced subjects to endure a tank of ice water for
up to three hours (see image above). Another
study placed prisoners naked in the open for
several hours with temperatures below freezing.
The experimenters assessed different ways of
rewarming survivors.
From about July 1942 to about September 1943,
experiments to investigate the effectiveness of
sulfonamide, a synthetic antimicrobial agent,
were conducted at Ravensbrück. Wounds
inflicted on the subjects were infected with
bacteria such as Streptococcus, gas gangrene,
and tetanus. Circulation of blood was
interrupted by tying off blood vessels at both
ends of the wound to create a condition similar
to that of a battlefield wound. Infection was
aggravated by forcing wood shavings and ground
glass into the wounds. The infection was treated
with sulfonamide and other drugs to determine
their effectiveness.

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