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The 10 Cruelest Human Experimentation Cases in History

“First, do no harm,” is the oath taken by physicians the world over. And this has been the case for centuries now. For the most part, these men and women of science stay faithful to this oath, even defying orders to the contrary. But sometimes they not only break it, they do so in the worst way imaginable. There have been numerous instances of doctors and other scientists going way beyond the limitations of what’s moral or ethical in the name of ‘progress’. They have used humans as experimental guinea pigs for their tests.

In many cases, the test subjects were either kept in ignorance about what an experiment involved or they were simply in no position to offer their resistance or consent. Of course, it may well be the case that such dubious methods produced results. Indeed, some of the most controversial experiments of the past century produced results that continue to inform scientific understanding to this day. But that will never mean such experiments will be seen as just. Sometimes, the perpetrators of cruel research lose their good names or reputations. Sometimes they are prosecuted for their attempts to ‘play God’. Or sometimes they just get away with it.

You might want to brace yourself as we look at the ten weirdest and cruelest human experiments carried out in history:

Dr. Shiro Ishii and Unit 731

During World War II, Imperial Japan committed a number of crimes against humanity. But perhaps few were crueler than the experiments that were conducted at Unit 731. Part of the Imperial Japanese Army, this was a super-secret unit dedicated to undertaking research into biological and chemical weapons. Quite simply, the Imperial authority wanted to build weapons that were deadlier – or just crueler – than anything that had gone before. And they weren’t opposed to using human guinea pigs to test their creations.

Based in Harbon, the biggest city of Manchuko, the part of north-east China that Japan made its puppet state, Unit 731 was constructed between 1934 and 1939. Overseeing its construction was General Shiro Ishii. Though he was a medical doctor, Ishii was also a fanatical soldier and so he was happy to set his ethics aside in the name of total victory for Imperial Japan. In all, it’s estimated that as many as 3,000 men, women and children were used as forced participants in the experiments conducted here. For the most part, the horrific tests were carried out on Chinese people, though prisoners-of-war, including men from Korea and Mongolia, were used.

For more than five years, General Ishii oversaw a wide range of experiments, many of them of dubious medical value to say the least. Thousands were subjected to vivisections, usually without anaesthetic. Often, these were fatal. Countless types of surgery, including brain surgery and amputations, were also carried out without anaesthetic. At other times, inmates were injected directly with diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhoea, or with chemicals used in bombs. Other twisted experiments included tying men up naked outside and observing the effects of frostbite, or simply starving people and seeing how long they took to die.

Once it was clear Japan was going to lose the war, General Ishii tried to destroy all evidence of the tests. He burned down the facilities and swore his men to silence. He needn’t have worried. Senior researchers from Unit 731 were granted immunity by the U.S. In exchange, they contributed their knowledge to America’s own biological and chemical weapons programs. For decades, any stories of atrocities were dismissed as ‘Communist Propaganda’. In more recent years, the Japanese government has acknowledged the Unit’s existence as well as its work, though it maintains most official records have been lost to history.

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“The Little Albert Experiment”

After many months observing young children, John Hopkins University psychologist Dr. John B. Watson concluded that infants could be conditioned to be scared of non-threatening objects or stimuli. All he needed was first-hand proof. Since it was 1919 and experimental ethics were nowhere near as strict as they are today, Watson, along with his graduate student Rosalie Rayner, set about designing an experiment to test their theory. Thanks to their connections at the Baltimore hospital, they were able to find a young baby, named ‘Albert’, and ‘borrow’ him for the afternoon. While Albert’s mother might have consented to her son helping out scientific research, she had no idea what Watson was actually planning.

The young Albert was just nine months old when he was taken from a hospital and put to work as Watson’s guinea pig. At first, Watson carried out a series of baseline tests, to see that the child was indeed emotionally stable and at the accepted stage of development. But then the tests got creepier. Albert was shown several furry animals. These included a dog, a white rat and a rabbit. Watson would show these toys to Albert while at the same time banging a hammer against a metal bar. This was repeated a number of times. Before long, Albert was associating the sight of the furry animals with the fear provoked by the loud, unpleasant noise. Indeed, within just a short space of time, just seeing the furry rat could distress the child.

Watson noted at the time: “The instant the rat was shown, the baby began to cry. Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on [his] left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table.” The scientist and his research partner had achieved their goal: they had proof that, just as in animals, classical conditioning can be used to influence or even dictate emotional responses in humans. Watson published his findings the following year, in the prestigious Journal of Experimental Psychology .

Even at the time, Watson’s methods were seen as unethical. After all, isn’t a doctor supposed to ‘do no harm’? What’s more, Watson never worked with Little Albert again, so he wasn’t able to reverse the process. But still, the results were heralded as a breakthrough in our understanding of popular psychology. Notably, Watson recorded the Little Albert Experiment, and the videos can be seen online today. And, for what it’s worth, most experts now agree that, though he would have most likely feared furry objects for a short spell of time during his childhood, Little Albert probably lost the association between cute toys and loud noises.

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The “Monster” Study

These days, any tests carried out on children are subject to strict ethical rules and guidelines. This wasn’t the case back in the 1930s, however. So, when Wendell Johnson, a speech pathologist at the University of Iowa, wanted to carry out research on young participants, his institution was happy to oblige. Along with Mary Tudor, a grad student Johnson was supervising, work began in 1939. Over the next few years, dozens of kids would be subject to speech-related tests, with the effects of the experiment lasting for decades.

The purpose of the research sounded noble enough: Johnson wanted to see how a child’s upbringing affects their speech. In particular, he was fascinated by stuttering and determined to see what made one child stutter, yet another speak fluently. Thankfully, a local orphanage was able to ‘supply’ Johnson and Tudor with 22 children for them to work with. All of the young participants spoke without a stutter when they arrived at the University of Iowa labs for the first time. They were then divided into two equal groups, and the experiment got underway.

Both groups were asked to speak for the researchers. How they were treated, however, was completely different. In the first group, all of the children received positive feedback. They were praised for their fluent speech and command of the English language. The second group received the opposite kind of treatment. They were ridiculed for their inability to speak like adults. Johnson and Tudor would listen carefully for any little mistakes, and above all for any signs of stuttering, and criticize the children harshly for them.

Johnson’s methods shocked his academic peers. Not that they would have been so surprised. As a young researcher at the University of Iowa, he gained a reputation for experimenting with shock tactics. For instance, as a postgraduate student himself, Johnson would work with his colleagues trying to cure his own stutter, even electrocuting himself to see if that made a difference. But still, inflicting deliberate cruelty on children was seen as a step too far. As such, the Iowan academics nicknamed Johnson’s 1939 research ‘The Monster Study’. And the name was just about the only thing of significance it gave us.

With the University of Iowa keen to distances itself from news of human experimentation being carried out by the Nazis in war-torn Europe, they hushed-up the Monster Study. None of the findings were ever published in any academic journal of note. Only Johnson’s own thesis remains. The effects were clear, however. Many of the children in the second group went on to develop serious stutters. Some even had serious speech problems for the rest of their lives. The university finally acknowledged the experiment in 2001, apologising to those involved. Then, in 2007, six of the original orphan kids were awarded almost $1 million in compensation for the psychological impact Johnson’s work had on them.

Interestingly, however, while the methods used for the Monster Study have widely been condemned as being cruel and simply indefensible, some have argued that Johnson may have been onto something. Certainly, Mary Tudor said before her death that she and her research partner might have made serious contributions to our understanding of speech and speech pathology had they been allowed to publish their work. Instead, the experiment is now shorthand for bad science and a complete lack of ethics.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Off all the ill-advised – and indeed, cruel – experiments North American universities have carried out over the decades, none is more infamous than the Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s so famous, in fact, that movies have been made based on the experiment which took place at Stanford University for one week in August 1971. Furthermore, while undoubtedly cruel, its findings are still used to inform popular understanding of psychological manipulation. Moreover, the behaviour of the participants involved is often held up as a warning about what can happen if humans are given power without accountability.

The experiment was led by Professor Phillip Zimbrano. As a psychologist, he was eager to see whether abuse in prisons can be explained by the inherent psychological traits of both guards and prisoners. Given the topic, he received funding from the U.S. Office of Naval Research. Funding in hand, Zimbrano set about recruiting participants. This turned out to be no problem at all, as a number of Stanford students volunteered to take part. Zimbrano then appointed some of the volunteers as guards and the others were designated as prisoners. The experiment could begin.

In the basement of the university’s psychology department, Zimbrano had built a makeshift ‘prison’. In all, 12 prisoners were kept here in small cells, while 12 guards were assigned a different part of the basement. While the prisoners had to endure tough conditions, the guards enjoyed comfortable, furnished quarters. The participants were also dressed for their parts, with the guards given uniforms and wooden batons. They were also kitted out with dark sunglasses so they could avoid eye contact with the people they were tasked with guarding.

Within 24 hours, any semblance of calm had gone. The prisoners started to revolt and the guards started to react. Special cells were set up to give well-behaving prisoners preferential treatment. The guards – who were barred from actually physically hitting their charges – started to use psychological methods to keep prisoners down. They would deny them food or put prisoners in darkened cells. Sleep was also denied to the prisoners. Within six days, Zimbrano agreed to halt the experiment. He did, at least, have more than enough evidence – some of it filmed – to draw on when making his conclusions.

Professor Zimbrano noted that around one third of the guards – again, young men taken randomly from the Stanford student population – exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. At the same time, most of the inmates were seen to ‘internalise’ their roles. They took on the mentality of prisoners. While they could have left at any time, they instead gave up and became weak and passive. In the end, the experiment received, and continues to receive, criticism for the harsh methods used. Nevertheless, the findings of the Stanford Prison Experiment actually changed the way U.S. prisons are run and they are often held up as proof that most people can inflict cruelty and suffering on another human being if they are given a position of power and ordered to do so.

The South African ‘Aversion Project’

In Apartheid-era South Africa, national service was compulsory for all white males. At the same time, homosexuality was classed as a crime. Inevitably, therefore, any gay men who found themselves called into service were in for a tough time. But it wasn’t just name-calling or casual discrimination they had to contend with. Many were subjected to cruel experiments. The so-called ‘Aversion Project’, run throughout the 1970s and then the 1980s, was aimed at ‘treating’ homosexuals. As well as psychological treatments, it also used physical ‘treatments’, many of which would rightly be regarded as torture.

The project first really got started in 1969, with the creation of Ward 22. The creepily-named ward was part of a larger military hospital just outside of Pretoria and was designed to treat mentally-ill soldiers. For the unit chief Dr Aubrey Levin, this including homosexuals, regarded as unstable, or even ‘deviants’. For the most part, the doctor was determined to prove that electric shock therapy and conditioning could ‘cure’ the patients of their desires. Hundreds of men were electrocuted, often while being forced to look at pictures of gay men. The electric current would then be turned off and pictures of naked women shown instead in the hope that this would alter the mindset.

Inmates subjected to such experimental treatment would sometimes be tested, given temptations to see if they really were ‘cured’. Persistent ‘offenders’ were given hormone treatments, almost always against their will, and many were even chemically castrated. Even by the middle of the 1970s, when numerous, more ethical, studies had proven that ‘conversion therapies’ could change a person’s sexuality, Ward 22 carried on with its work. In fact, in only ended with the fall of the apartheid regime. To the very end of the project, Dr Levin maintained that all the men he treated were volunteers and asked for his help. Many of his peers disagreed, as did a judge, who sentenced him to five years in prison in 2014.

Project 4.1

On March 1, 1954, the United States carried out Castle Bravo , testing a nuclear bomb on the Bikini Atoll, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The test not only went without a hitch, it actually went better than expected. The yield produced by the bomb was much higher than scientists had anticipated. At the same time, the weather conditions in this part of the Pacific turned out to be different to what had been predicted. Radiation fallout from the blast was blown upwind, towards the Marshall Islands. But, instead of alerting the islanders to the danger, the project heads sensed an opportunity. How many times would they be able to see the affect of radiation fallout on a population for real?

Making the most of the opportunity, the American scientists simply sat back an observed. That is, they watched innocent people be affected by the fallout of an American nuclear bomb. Over the next decade, the project observers noted an upturn in the number of women on the Marshall Islands suffering miscarriages or stillbirths. But then, after ten years or so, this spike ended. Things seemingly returned to normal, and so scientists were unable – or unwilling – to make any formal conclusions. But then, things started to go downhill again.

At first, children on the Marshall Islands were observed to be growing less than would be expected. But then, it became clear that not only were they suffering from stunted growth, but a higher-than-expected proportion of youngsters were developing thyroid cancer. What’s more, by 1974, the data was showing that one in three islanders had developed at least one tumor. Later analysis, published in 2010, estimated that around half of all cancer cases recorded on the Marshall Islands could be attributed to the 1954 nuclear test, even if people never displayed any obvious signs of radiation poisoning in the immediate aftermath of the explosion.

Given that the initial findings of Project 4.1 as it was known were published in professional medical journals as early as 1955, the American government has never really denied that the experiment took place. Rather, what has been, and continues to be contested, is whether the U.S. actually knew that the islands would be affected before they carried out the test. Many on the Marshall Islands believe that Project 4.1 was premeditated, while the American authorities maintain that it was improvised in the wake of the explosion. The debate continues to rage.

The Tuskegee Experiments

For four decades, African-American men in Macon County, Alabama, were told by medical researchers that they had ‘bad blood’. The scientists knew that this was a term used by sharecroppers in this part of the country to refer to a wide range of ailments. They knew, therefore, that they wouldn’t question the prognosis. And neither would they raise any concerns or questions when the same researchers gave them injections. Which is how doctors working on behalf of the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) were able to look on as hundreds of men went mad, blind or even died as a result of untreated syphilis.

When the experiment began back in 1932, there was no known cure for syphilis. As such, PHS researchers were determined to make a breakthrough. They went to Tuskegee College in Alabama and enlisted their help. Together, they enlisted 622 African-American men, almost all of them very poor. Of these men, 431 had already contracted syphilis prior to 1932, with the remaining 169 free from the disease. The men were told that the experiment would last for just six years, during which time they would be provided with free meals and medical care as doctors observed the development of the disease.

In 1947, penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis. Surely the doctors would give this to the men participating in the Tuskegee Experiment? Not so. Even though they knew the men could be cured, the PHR workers only gave them placebos, including aspirin and even combinations of minerals. With their condition untreated, the men slowly succumbed to syphilis. Some went blind, others went insane, and some died within a few years. What’s more, in the years after 1947, 19 syphilitic children were born to men enrolled in the study.

It was only in the mid-1960s that concerns started to be raised about the morality of the experiment. San Francisco-based PHS researcher Peter Buxton learned about what was happening in Alabama and raised his concerns. However, his superiors were unresponsive. As a result, Buxton leaked the story to a journalist friend. The story broke in 1972. Unsurprisingly, the public were outraged. The experiment was halted immediately, and the Congress inquiries began soon after. The surviving participants, as well as the children of those men who had died, were awarded $10 million in an out-of-court settlement. Finally, in 1993, President Bill Clinton offered a formal and official apology on behalf of the U.S. government to everyone affected by the experiment.

Project MK-Ultra

Though they had the Bomb, in the 1950s, the CIA were still determined to enjoy every advantage over their enemies. To achieve this, they were willing to think outside of the box. Perhaps the best example of this was MK-Ultra, a top-secret project where the CIA attempted to alter brain function and explore the possibility of mind control. While much of the written evidence, including files and witness testimonies, were destroyed soon after the experiments were brought to an end, we do know that the project involved a lot of drugs, some sex and countless instances of rule bending and breaking.

Project MK-Ultra was kick-started by the Office of Scientific Experiments at the start of the 1950s. Central to the project was determining how LSD affects the mind – and, more importantly, whether this could be turned to America’s advantage. In order to learn more, hundreds, perhaps even thousands of individuals, were given doses of the drug. In almost all cases, they were given LSD without their explicit knowledge or consent. For example, during Operation Midnight Climax in the early 1960s, the CIA opened up brothels. Here, the male clients were dosed up with LSD and then observed by scientists through one-way mirrors.

The experiments also included subjecting American citizens to sleep deprivation and hypnosis. Not all of the tests went plainly. Several people died as a direct result of Project MK-Ultra, including a US Army biochemist by the name of Frank Olsen. In 1953, the scientist was given a dose of LSD without his knowledge and, just a week later, died after jumping out of a window. While the official reason of his death was recorded as suicide, Olsen’s family have always maintained that he was effectively killed by the CIA.

When President Gerald Ford launched a special Commission on CIA activities in the United States, the work of Project MK-Ultra came to light. Two years previously, however, the-then Director of the CIA, Richard Helms, had ordered all files relating to the experiments to be destroyed. Witness testaments show that around 80 institutions were involved in the experiments, with thousands of people given hallucinogenic drugs, usually by CIA officers with no medical background. And so, in the end, was it all worth it? The CIA has acknowledged that the experiments produced nothing of real, scientific value. Project MK-Ultra has, however, lived on in the popular imagination and has inspired numerous books, video games and movies.

Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment

For more than two years in the middle of the 20 th century, the United States worked directly with the health ministries of Guatemala to infect thousands of people with a range of sexually transmitted diseases, above all syphilis. Since they wanted to do this without the study subjects knowing about it – after all, who would give their consent to being injected with syphilis? – it was decided that the experiment should take place in Guatemala, with soldiers and the most vulnerable members of society to serve as the guinea pigs.

The Guatemalan Syphilis Experiment (it was not given an official codename or even a formal project title) began in 1946. It was headed up by John Charles Cutler of the US Public Health Service (PHS). Despite being a physician himself, Cutler was happy to overlook the principle of ‘First, do no harm’ in order to carry out his work. Making use of local health clinics, he tasked his staff with infecting around 5,500 subjects. Most of them were soldiers or prisoners, though mental health patients and prostitutes were also used to see how syphilis and other diseases affect the body. Children living in orphanages were even used for the experiments.

In all cases, the subjects were told they were getting medication that was good for them. And, while all subjects were given antibiotics, an estimated 83 people died. In 1948, with the wider medical community hearing rumors of what was being done in Central America, and with the American government wary of the potential fallout, the experiments were brought to an abrupt end. Cutler would go on to carry out similar experiments in Alabama, though even here he stopped short of actually infecting his subjects with life-threatening diseases.

It was only in 2010, however, that the United States government issued a formal apology to Guatemala for the experiments it carried out in the 1940s. What’s more, President Barack Obama called the project “a crime against humanity”. That didn’t mean that the victims could get compensation, however. In 2011, several cases were put forward but then rejected, with the presiding judge noting that the U.S. government could not be held liable for actions carried out in its name outside of the country. A $1 billion lawsuit against the John Hopkins University and against the Rockefeller Foundation is still open.

Mengele’s Twins

A world at war gave the Nazi regime the ideal cover under which they would carry out some of the most horrific human experiments imaginable. At Auschwitz concentration camp, Dr Josef Mengele made full use of the tens of thousands of prisoners available to him. He would carry out unnecessarily cruel and unusual experiments, often with little or no scientific merit. And, above all, he was fascinated with twins. Or, more precisely, with identical twins. These would be the subjects of his most gruesome experiments.

Mengele would personally select prospective subjects from the ramps leading off the transport trains at the entrance to the concentration camp. Initially, his chosen twins were provided with relatively comfortable accommodation, as well as more generous rations than the rest of the inmate population. However, this was just a temporary respite. Mengele’s experiments were as varied as they were horrific. He would amputate one twin’s limbs and then compare the growth of both over the following days. Or he would infect one twin with a disease like typhoid. When they died, he would kill the healthy twin, too, and then compare their bodies.

Gruesomely, the records show that on one particularly bloody night, Mengele injected chloroform directly into the heart of 14 sets of twins. All died almost immediately. Another infamous tale tells of Mengele trying to create his own conjoined twins: he simply stitched two young Romani children back-to-back. They both died of gangrene after several long and painful days. Mengele also had a team of assistants working for him, and they were no less cruel.

Nobody will ever know just how many children or adults were victims of Mengele’s experiments. Despite being meticulous record keepers, the Nazis kept some things secret. Tragically for his victims and their relatives, Mengele never faced justice for his actions. He was smuggled out of Europe by Nazi sympathisers at the end of the war and lived for another 30 years, in hiding, in South America.

Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:

“Unmasking Horror: A special report.; Japan Confronting Gruesome War Atrocity”. Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 1995.

“Little Albert regains his identity”. American Psychology Association, 2010.

“Unit 731: Japan discloses details of notorious chemical warfare division”. Justin McCurry, The Guardian, April 2018.

“The Stuttering Doctor’s ‘Monster Study'”. Gretchen Reynolds, The New York Times, March 2003.

“The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment” . Maria Konnikova, The New Yorker, June 2015.

“Gays tell of mutilation by apartheid army” . Chris McGreal, The Guardian, July 2000.

“Nuclear Savage: The Islands of Secret Project 4.1” . The Environment & Society Portal.

“Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study” . Elizabeth Nix, History.com, May 2017.

“The secret LSD-fuelled CIA experiment that inspired Stranger Things” . Richard Vine, The Guardian, August 2016.

“Guatemala victims of US syphilis study still haunted by the ‘devil’s experiment'” . Rory Carroll, The Guardian, June 2011.

“Nazi Medical Experiments” . The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

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5 Unethical Medical Experiments Brought Out of the Shadows of History

Prisoners and other vulnerable populations often bore the brunt of unethical medical experimentation..

Most people are aware of some of the heinous medical experiments of the past that violated human rights. Participation in these studies was either forced or coerced under false pretenses. Some of the most notorious examples include the experiments by the Nazis, the Tuskegee syphilis study, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the CIA’s LSD studies.

But there are many other lesser-known experiments on vulnerable populations that have flown under the radar. Study subjects often didn’t — or couldn’t — give consent. Sometimes they were lured into participating with a promise of improved health or a small amount of compensation. Other times, details about the experiment were disclosed but the extent of risks involved weren’t.

This perhaps isn’t surprising, as doctors who conducted these experiments were representative of prevailing attitudes at the time of their work. But unfortunately, even after informed consent was introduced in the 1950s , disregard for the rights of certain populations continued. Some of these researchers’ work did result in scientific advances — but they came at the expense of harmful and painful procedures on unknowing subjects.

Here are five medical experiments of the past that you probably haven’t heard about. They illustrate just how far the ethical and legal guidepost, which emphasizes respect for human dignity above all else, has moved.

The Prison Doctor Who Did Testicular Transplants

From 1913 to 1951, eugenicist Leo Stanley was the chief surgeon at San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest correctional institution. After performing vasectomies on prisoners, whom he recruited through promises of improved health and vigor, Stanley turned his attention to the emerging field of endocrinology, which involves the study of certain glands and the hormones they regulate. He believed the effects of aging and decreased hormones contributed to criminality, weak morality, and poor physical attributes. Transplanting the testicles of younger men into those who were older would restore masculinity, he thought.  

Stanley began by using the testicles of executed prisoners — but he ran into a supply shortage. He solved this by using the testicles of animals, including goats and deer. At first, he physically implanted the testicles directly into the inmates. But that had complications, so he switched to a new plan: He ground up the animal testicles into a paste, which he injected into prisoners’ abdomens. By the end of his time at San Quentin, Stanley did an estimated 10,000 testicular procedures .

The Oncologist Who Injected Cancer Cells Into Patients and Prisoners

During the 1950s and 1960s, Sloan-Kettering Institute oncologist Chester Southam conducted research to learn how people’s immune systems would react when exposed to cancer cells. In order to find out, he injected live HeLa cancer cells into patients, generally without their permission. When patient consent was given, details around the true nature of the experiment were often kept secret. Southam first experimented on terminally ill cancer patients, to whom he had easy access. The result of the injection was the growth of cancerous nodules , which led to metastasis in one person.

Next, Southam experimented on healthy subjects , which he felt would yield more accurate results. He recruited prisoners, and, perhaps not surprisingly, their healthier immune systems responded better than those of cancer patients. Eventually, Southam returned to infecting the sick and arranged to have patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, NY, injected with HeLa cells. But this time, there was resistance. Three doctors who were asked to participate in the experiment refused, resigned, and went public.

The scandalous newspaper headlines shocked the public, and legal proceedings were initiated against Southern. Some in the scientific and medical community condemned his experiments, while others supported him. Initially, Southam’s medical license was suspended for one year, but it was then reduced to a probation. His career continued to be illustrious, and he was subsequently elected president of the American Association for Cancer Research.

The Aptly Named ‘Monster Study’

Pioneering speech pathologist Wendell Johnson suffered from severe stuttering that began early in his childhood. His own experience motivated his focus on finding the cause, and hopefully a cure, for stuttering. He theorized that stuttering in children could be impacted by external factors, such as negative reinforcement. In 1939, under Johnson’s supervision, graduate student Mary Tudor conducted a stuttering experiment, using 22 children at an Iowa orphanage. Half received positive reinforcement. But the other half were ridiculed and criticized for their speech, whether or not they actually stuttered. This resulted in a worsening of speech issues for the children who were given negative feedback.

The study was never published due to the multitude of ethical violations. According to The Washington Post , Tudor was remorseful about the damage caused by the experiment and returned to the orphanage to help the children with their speech. Despite his ethical mistakes, the Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic at the University of Iowa bears Johnson's name and is a nod to his contributions to the field.

The Dermatologist Who Used Prisoners As Guinea Pigs

One of the biggest breakthroughs in dermatology was the invention of Retin-A, a cream that can treat sun damage, wrinkles, and other skin conditions. Its success led to fortune and fame for co-inventor Albert Kligman, a dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania . But Kligman is also known for his nefarious dermatology experiments on prisoners that began in 1951 and continued for around 20 years. He conducted his research on behalf of companies including DuPont and Johnson & Johnson.

Kligman’s work often left prisoners with pain and scars as he used them as study subjects in wound healing and exposed them to deodorants, foot powders, and more for chemical and cosmetic companies. Dow once enlisted Kligman to study the effects of dioxin, a chemical in Agent Orange, on 75 inmates at Pennsylvania's Holmesburg Prison. The prisoners were paid a small amount for their participation but were not told about the potential side effects.

In the University of Pennsylvania’s journal, Almanac , Kligman’s obituary focused on his medical advancements, awards, and philanthropy. There was no acknowledgement of his prison experiments. However, it did mention that as a “giant in the field,” he “also experienced his fair share of controversy.”

The Endocrinologist Who Irradiated Prisoners

When the Atomic Energy Commission wanted to know how radiation affected male reproductive function, they looked to endocrinologist Carl Heller . In a study involving Oregon State Penitentiary prisoners between 1963 and 1973, Heller designed a contraption that would radiate their testicles at varying amounts to see what effect it had, particularly on sperm production. The prisoners also were subjected to repeated biopsies and were required to undergo vasectomies once the experiments concluded.

Although study participants were paid, it raised ethical issues about the potential coercive nature of financial compensation to prison populations. The prisoners were informed about the risks of skin burns, but likely were not told about the possibility of significant pain, inflammation, and the small risk of testicular cancer.

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• 20 Most Unethical Experiments in Psychology

Humanity often pays a high price for progress and understanding — at least, that seems to be the case in many famous psychological experiments. Human experimentation is a very interesting topic in the world of human psychology. While some famous experiments in psychology have left test subjects temporarily distressed, others have left their participants with life-long psychological issues . In either case, it’s easy to ask the question: “What’s ethical when it comes to science?” Then there are the experiments that involve children, animals, and test subjects who are unaware they’re being experimented on. How far is too far, if the result means a better understanding of the human mind and behavior ? We think we’ve found 20 answers to that question with our list of the most unethical experiments in psychology .

Emma Eckstein

Electroshock Therapy on Children

Operation Midnight Climax

The Monster Study

Project MKUltra

The Aversion Project

Unnecessary Sexual Reassignment

Stanford Prison Experiment

Milgram Experiment

The Monkey Drug Trials

Featured Programs

Facial expressions experiment.

Little Albert

Bobo Doll Experiment

The Pit of Despair

The Bystander Effect

Learned Helplessness Experiment

Racism Among Elementary School Students

UCLA Schizophrenia Experiments

The Good Samaritan Experiment

Robbers Cave Experiment

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• 30 Most Unethical Psychology Human Experiments

Disturbing human experiments aren’t something the average person thinks too much about. Rather, the progress achieved in the last 150 years of human history is an accomplishment we’re reminded of almost daily. Achievements made in biomedicine and the f ield of psychology mean that we no longer need to worry about things like deadly diseases or masturbation as a form of insanity. For better or worse, we have developed more effective ways to gather information, treat skin abnormalities, and even kill each other. But what we are not constantly reminded of are the human lives that have been damaged or lost in the name of this progress. The following is a list of the 30 most disturbing human experiments in history.

30. The Tearoom Sex Study

Image Source Sociologist Laud Humphreys often wondered about the men who commit impersonal sexual acts with one another in public restrooms. He wondered why “tearoom sex” — fellatio in public restrooms — led to the majority of homosexual arrests in the United States. Humphreys decided to become a “watchqueen” (the person who keeps watch and coughs when a cop or stranger get near) for his Ph.D. dissertation at Washington University. Throughout his research, Humphreys observed hundreds of acts of fellatio and interviewed many of the participants. He found that 54% of his subjects were married, and 38% were very clearly neither bisexual or homosexual. Humphreys’ research shattered a number of stereotypes held by both the public and law enforcement.

29. Prison Inmates as Test Subjects

Image Source In 1951, Dr. Albert M. Kligman, a dermatologist at the University of Pennsylvania and future inventor of Retin-A, began experimenting on inmates at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison. As Kligman later told a newspaper reporter, “All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a field for the first time.” Over the next 20 years, inmates willingly allowed Kligman to use their bodies in experiments involving toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, skin creams, detergents, liquid diets, eye drops, foot powders, and hair dyes. Though the tests required constant biopsies and painful procedures, none of the inmates experienced long-term harm.

28. Henrietta Lacks

Image Source In 1955, Henrietta Lacks, a poor, uneducated African-American woman from Baltimore, was the unwitting source of cells which where then cultured for the purpose of medical research. Though researchers had tried to grow cells before, Henrietta’s were the first successfully kept alive and cloned. Henrietta’s cells, known as HeLa cells, have been instrumental in the development of the polio vaccine, cancer research, AIDS research, gene mapping, and countless other scientific endeavors. Henrietta died penniless and was buried without a tombstone in a family cemetery. For decades, her husband and five children were left in the dark about their wife and mother’s amazing contribution to modern medicine.

27. Project QKHILLTOP

Image Source In 1954, the CIA developed an experiment called Project QKHILLTOP to study Chinese brainwashing techniques, which they then used to develop new methods of interrogation. Leading the research was Dr. Harold Wolff of Cornell University Medical School. After requesting that the CIA provide him with information on imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing, hypnoses, and more, Wolff’s research team began to formulate a plan through which they would develop secret drugs and various brain damaging procedures. According to a letter he wrote, in order to fully test the effects of the harmful research, Wolff expected the CIA to “make available suitable subjects.”

26. Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study

Image Source During World War II, malaria and other tropical diseases were impeding the efforts of American military in the Pacific. In order to get a grip, the Malaria Research Project was established at Stateville Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois. Doctors from the University of Chicago exposed 441 volunteer inmates to bites from malaria-infected mosquitos. Though one inmate died of a heart attack, researchers insisted his death was unrelated to the study. The widely-praised experiment continued at Stateville for 29 years, and included the first human test of Primaquine, a medication still used in the treatment of malaria and Pneumocystis pneumonia.

25. Emma Eckstein and Sigmund Freud

Image Source Despite seeking the help of Sigmund Freud for vague symptoms like stomach ailments and slight depression, 27-year old Emma Eckstein was “treated” by the German doctor for hysteria and excessive masturbation, a habit then considered dangerous to mental health. Emma’s treatment included a disturbing experimental surgery in which she was anesthetized with only a local anesthetic and cocaine before the inside of her nose was cauterized. Not surprisingly, Emma’s surgery was a disaster. Whether Emma was a legitimate medical patient or a source of more amorous interest for Freud, as a recent movie suggests, Freud continued to treat Emma for three years.

24. Dr. William Beaumont and the Stomach

Image Source In 1822, a fur trader on Mackinac Island in Michigan was accidentally shot in the stomach and treated by Dr. William Beaumont. Despite dire predictions, the fur trader survived — but with a hole (fistula) in his stomach that never healed. Recognizing the unique opportunity to observe the digestive process, Beaumont began conducting experiments. Beaumont would tie food to a string, then insert it through the hole in the trader’s stomach. Every few hours, Beaumont would remove the food to observe how it had been digested. Though gruesome, Beaumont’s experiments led to the worldwide acceptance that digestion was a chemical, not a mechanical, process.

23. Electroshock Therapy on Children

Image Source In the 1960s, Dr. Lauretta Bender of New York’s Creedmoor Hospital began what she believed to be a revolutionary treatment for children with social issues — electroshock therapy. Bender’s methods included interviewing and analyzing a sensitive child in front of a large group, then applying a gentle amount of pressure to the child’s head. Supposedly, any child who moved with the pressure was showing early signs of schizophrenia. Herself the victim of a misunderstood childhood, Bender was said to be unsympathetic to the children in her care. By the time her treatments were shut down, Bender had used electroshock therapy on over 100 children, the youngest of whom was age three.

22. Project Artichoke

Image Source In the 1950s, the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence ran a series of mind control projects in an attempt to answer the question “Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature?” One of these programs, Project Artichoke, studied hypnosis, forced morphine addiction, drug withdrawal, and the use of chemicals to incite amnesia in unwitting human subjects. Though the project was eventually shut down in the mid-1960s, the project opened the door to extensive research on the use of mind-control in field operations.

21. Hepatitis in Mentally Disabled Children

Image Source In the 1950s, Willowbrook State School, a New York state-run institution for mentally handicapped children, began experiencing outbreaks of hepatitis. Due to unsanitary conditions, it was virtually inevitable that these children would contract hepatitis. Dr. Saul Krugman, sent to investigate the outbreak, proposed an experiment that would assist in developing a vaccine. However, the experiment required deliberately infecting children with the disease. Though Krugman’s study was controversial from the start, critics were eventually silenced by the permission letters obtained from each child’s parents. In reality, offering one’s child to the experiment was oftentimes the only way to guarantee admittance into the overcrowded institution.

20. Operation Midnight Climax

Image Source Initially established in the 1950s as a sub-project of a CIA-sponsored, mind-control research program, Operation Midnight Climax sought to study the effects of LSD on individuals. In San Francisco and New York, unconsenting subjects were lured to safehouses by prostitutes on the CIA payroll, unknowingly given LSD and other mind-altering substances, and monitored from behind one-way glass. Though the safehouses were shut down in 1965, when it was discovered that the CIA was administering LSD to human subjects, Operation Midnight Climax was a theater for extensive research on sexual blackmail, surveillance technology, and the use of mind-altering drugs on field operations.

19. Study of Humans Accidentally Exposed to Fallout Radiation

Image Source The 1954 “Study of Response of Human Beings exposed to Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation due to Fall-out from High-Yield Weapons,” known better as Project 4.1, was a medical study conducted by the U.S. of residents of the Marshall Islands. When the Castle Bravo nuclear test resulted in a yield larger than originally expected, the government instituted a top secret study to “evaluate the severity of radiation injury” to those accidentally exposed. Though most sources agree the exposure was unintentional, many Marshallese believed Project 4.1 was planned before the Castle Bravo test. In all, 239 Marshallese were exposed to significant levels of radiation.

18. The Monster Study

Image Source In 1939, University of Iowa researchers Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor conducted a stuttering experiment on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa. The children were separated into two groups, the first of which received positive speech therapy where children were praised for speech fluency. In the second group, children received negative speech therapy and were belittled for every speech imperfection. Normal-speaking children in the second group developed speech problems which they then retained for the rest of their lives. Terrified by the news of human experiments conducted by the Nazis, Johnson and Tudor never published the results of their “Monster Study.”

17. Project MKUltra

Image Source Project MKUltra is the code name of a CIA-sponsored research operation that experimented in human behavioral engineering. From 1953 to 1973, the program employed various methodologies to manipulate the mental states of American and Canadian citizens. These unwitting human test subjects were plied with LSD and other mind-altering drugs, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and various forms of torture. Research occurred at universities, hospitals, prisons, and pharmaceutical companies. Though the project sought to develop “chemical […] materials capable of employment in clandestine operations,” Project MKUltra was ended by a Congress-commissioned investigation into CIA activities within the U.S.

16. Experiments on Newborns

Image Source In the 1960s, researchers at the University of California began an experiment to study changes in blood pressure and blood flow. The researchers used 113 newborns ranging in age from one hour to three days old as test subjects. In one experiment, a catheter was inserted through the umbilical arteries and into the aorta. The newborn’s feet were then immersed in ice water for the purpose of testing aortic pressure. In another experiment, up to 50 newborns were individually strapped onto a circumcision board, then tilted so that their blood rushed to their head and their blood pressure could be monitored.

15. The Aversion Project

Image Source In 1969, during South Africa’s detestable Apartheid era, thousands of homosexuals were handed over to the care of Dr. Aubrey Levin, an army colonel and psychologist convinced he could “cure” homosexuals. At the Voortrekkerhoogte military hospital near Pretoria, Levin used electroconvulsive aversion therapy to “reorientate” his patients. Electrodes were strapped to a patient’s upper arm with wires running to a dial calibrated from 1 to 10. Homosexual men were shown pictures of a naked man and encouraged to fantasize, at which point the patient was subjected to severe shocks. When Levin was warned that he would be named an abuser of human rights, he emigrated to Canada where he currently works at a teaching hospital.

14. Medical Experiments on Prison Inmates

Image Source Perhaps one benefit of being an inmate at California’s San Quentin prison is the easy access to acclaimed Bay Area doctors. But if that’s the case, then a downside is that these doctors also have easy access to inmates. From 1913 to 1951, Dr. Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at San Quentin, used prisoners as test subjects in a variety of bizarre medical experiments. Stanley’s experiments included sterilization and potential treatments for the Spanish Flu. In one particularly disturbing experiment, Stanley performed testicle transplants on living prisoners using testicles from executed prisoners and, in some cases, from goats and boars.

13. Sexual Reassignment

Image Source In 1965, Canadian David Peter Reimer was born biologically male. But at seven months old, his penis was accidentally destroyed during an unconventional circumcision by cauterization. John Money, a psychologist and proponent of the idea that gender is learned, convinced the Reimers that their son would be more likely to achieve a successful, functional sexual maturation as a girl. Though Money continued to report only success over the years, David’s own account insisted that he had never identified as female. He spent his childhood teased, ostracized, and seriously depressed. At age 38, David committed suicide by shooting himself in the head.

12. Effect of Radiation on Testicles

Image Source Between 1963 and 1973, dozens of Washington and Oregon prison inmates were used as test subjects in an experiment designed to test the effects of radiation on testicles. Bribed with cash and the suggestion of parole, 130 inmates willingly agreed to participate in the experiments conducted by the University of Washington on behalf of the U.S. government. In most cases, subjects were zapped with over 400 rads of radiation (the equivalent of 2,400 chest x-rays) in 10 minute intervals. However, it was much later that the inmates learned the experiments were far more dangerous than they had been told. In 2000, the former participants settled a $2.4 million class-action settlement from the University.

11. Stanford Prison Experiment

Image Source Conducted at Stanford University from August 14-20, 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment was an investigation into the causes of conflict between military guards and prisoners. Twenty-four male students were chosen and randomly assigned roles of prisoners and guards. They were then situated in a specially-designed mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Those subjects assigned to be guards enforced authoritarian measures and subjected the prisoners to psychological torture. Surprisingly, many of the prisoners accepted the abuses. Though the experiment exceeded the expectations of all of the researchers, it was abruptly ended after only six days.

10. Syphilis Experiments in Guatemala

Image Source From 1946 to 1948, the United States government, Guatemalan president Juan José Arévalo, and some Guatemalan health ministries, cooperated in a disturbing human experiment on unwitting Guatemalan citizens. Doctors deliberately infected soldiers, prostitutes, prisoners, and mental patients with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases in an attempt to track their untreated natural progression. Treated only with antibiotics, the experiment resulted in at least 30 documented deaths. In 2010, the United States made a formal apology to Guatemala for their involvement in these experiments.

9. Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Image Source In 1932, the U.S. Public Health Service began working with the Tuskegee Institute to track the natural progression of untreated syphilis. Six hundred poor, illiterate, male sharecroppers were found and hired in Macon County, Alabama. Of the 600 men, only 399 had previously contracted syphilis, and none were told they had a life threatening disease. Instead, they were told they were receiving free healthcare, meals, and burial insurance in exchange for participating. Even after Penicillin was proven an effective cure for syphilis in 1947, the study continued until 1972. In addition to the original subjects, victims of the study included wives who contracted the disease, and children born with congenital syphilis. In 1997, President Bill Clinton formally apologized to those affected by what is often called the “most infamous biomedical experiment in U.S. history.”

8. Milgram Experiment

In 1961, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale University, began a series of social psychology experiments that measured the willingness of test subjects to obey an authority figure. Conducted only three months after the start of the trial of German Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, Milgram’s experiment sought to answer the question, “Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders?” In the experiment, two participants (one secretly an actor and one an unwitting test subject) were separated into two rooms where they could hear, but not see, each other. The test subject would then read a series of questions to the actor, punishing each wrong answer with an electric shock. Though many people would indicate their desire to stop the experiment, almost all subjects continued when they were told they would not be held responsible, or that there would not be any permanent damage.

7. Infected Mosquitos in Towns

In 1956 and 1957, the United States Army conducted a number of biological warfare experiments on the cities of Savannah, Georgia and Avon Park, Florida. In one such experiment, millions of infected mosquitos were released into the two cities, in order to see if the insects could spread yellow fever and dengue fever. Not surprisingly, hundreds of researchers contracted illnesses that included fevers, respiratory problems, stillbirths, encephalitis, and typhoid. In order to photograph the results of their experiments, Army researchers pretended to be public health workers. Several people died as a result of the research.

6. Human Experimentation in the Soviet Union

Beginning in 1921 and continuing for most of the 21st century, the Soviet Union employed poison laboratories known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12, and Kamera as covert research facilities of the secret police agencies. Prisoners from the Gulags were exposed to a number of deadly poisons, the purpose of which was to find a tasteless, odorless chemical that could not be detected post mortem. Tested poisons included mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin, and curare, among others. Men and women of varying ages and physical conditions were brought to the laboratories and given the poisons as “medication,” or part of a meal or drink.

5. Human Experimentation in North Korea

Image Source Several North Korean defectors have described witnessing disturbing cases of human experimentation. In one alleged experiment, 50 healthy women prisoners were given poisoned cabbage leaves — all 50 women were dead within 20 minutes. Other described experiments include the practice of surgery on prisoners without anesthesia, purposeful starvation, beating prisoners over the head before using the zombie-like victims for target practice, and chambers in which whole families are murdered with suffocation gas. It is said that each month, a black van known as “the crow” collects 40-50 people from a camp and takes them to an known location for experiments.

4. Nazi Human Experimentation

Image Source Over the course of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Nazi Germany conducted a series of medical experiments on Jews, POWs, Romani, and other persecuted groups. The experiments were conducted in concentration camps, and in most cases resulted in death, disfigurement, or permanent disability. Especially disturbing experiments included attempts to genetically manipulate twins; bone, muscle, and nerve transplantation; exposure to diseases and chemical gasses; sterilization, and anything else the infamous Nazi doctors could think up. After the war, these crimes were tried as part of the Nuremberg Trial and ultimately led to the development of the Nuremberg Code of medical ethics.

3. Unit 731

Image Source From 1937 to 1945, the imperial Japanese Army developed a covert biological and chemical warfare research experiment called Unit 731. Based in the large city of Harbin, Unit 731 was responsible for some of the most atrocious war crimes in history. Chinese and Russian subjects — men, women, children, infants, the elderly, and pregnant women — were subjected to experiments which included the removal of organs from a live body, amputation for the study of blood loss, germ warfare attacks, and weapons testing. Some prisoners even had their stomachs surgically removed and their esophagus reattached to the intestines. Many of the scientists involved in Unit 731 rose to prominent careers in politics, academia, business, and medicine.

2. Radioactive Materials in Pregnant Women

Image Source Shortly after World War II, with the impending Cold War forefront on the minds of Americans, many medical researchers were preoccupied with the idea of radioactivity and chemical warfare. In an experiment at Vanderbilt University, 829 pregnant women were given “vitamin drinks” they were told would improve the health of their unborn babies. Instead, the drinks contained radioactive iron and the researchers were studying how quickly the radioisotope crossed into the placenta. At least seven of the babies later died from cancers and leukemia, and the women themselves experienced rashes, bruises, anemia, loss of hair and tooth, and cancer.

1. Mustard Gas Tested on American Military

Image Source In 1943, the U.S. Navy exposed its own sailors to mustard gas. Officially, the Navy was testing the effectiveness of new clothing and gas masks against the deadly gas that had proven so terrifying in the first World War. The worst of the experiments occurred at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. Seventeen and 18-year old boys were approached after eight weeks of boot camp and asked if they wanted to participate in an experiment that would help shorten the war. Only when the boys reached the Research Laboratory were they told the experiment involved mustard gas. The participants, almost all of whom suffered severe external and internal burns, were ignored by the Navy and, in some cases, threatened with the Espionage Act. In 1991, the reports were finally declassified and taken before Congress.

28. Prison Inmates as Test Subjects Henrietta Lacks 26. Project QKHILLTOP 25. Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study: Primaquine 24. Emma Eckstein 23. Dr. William Beaumont Dr. William Beaumont 21. Electroshock Therapy on Children 21. Project Artichoke 20. Operation Midnight Climax 19. Study of Humans Accidentally Exposed to Fallout Radiation 18. The Monster Experiment 17. Project MKUltra 16. Experiments on Newborns 15. The Aversion Project 14. Medical Experiments on Prison Inmates 13. Sexual Reassignment 12. Effect of Radiation on Testicles 11. Stanford Prison Experiment 10. Syphilis Experiment in Guatemala 9. Tuskegee Syphilis Study 8. Milgram Experiment 7. Infected Mosquitos in Towns 6. Human Experimentation in the Soviet Union 5. Human Experimentation in North Korea 4. Nazi Human Experimentation 3. Unit 731 2. Radioactive Materials in Pregnant Women 1. Mustard Gas Tested on American Military

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Tuskegee Experiment: The Infamous Syphilis Study

By: Elizabeth Nix

Updated: June 13, 2023 | Original: May 16, 2017

The Tuskegee experiment began in 1932, at a time when there was no known cure for syphilis, a contagious venereal disease. After being recruited by the promise of free medical care, 600 African American men in Macon County, Alabama were enrolled in the project, which aimed to study the full progression of the disease.

The participants were primarily sharecroppers, and many had never before visited a doctor. Doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), which was running the study, informed the participants—399 men with latent syphilis and a control group of 201 others who were free of the disease—they were being treated for bad blood, a term commonly used in the area at the time to refer to a variety of ailments.

The men were monitored by health workers but only given placebos such as aspirin and mineral supplements, despite the fact that penicillin became the recommended treatment for syphilis in 1947, some 15 years into the study. PHS researchers convinced local physicians in Macon County not to treat the participants, and instead, research was done at the Tuskegee Institute. (Now called Tuskegee University, the school was founded in 1881 with Booker T. Washington as its first teacher.)

In order to track the disease’s full progression, researchers provided no effective care as the men died, went blind or insane or experienced other severe health problems due to their untreated syphilis.

In the mid-1960s, a PHS venereal disease investigator in San Francisco named Peter Buxton found out about the Tuskegee study and expressed his concerns to his superiors that it was unethical. In response, PHS officials formed a committee to review the study but ultimately opted to continue it—with the goal of tracking the participants until all had died, autopsies were performed and the project data could be analyzed.

Buxton then leaked the story to a reporter friend, who passed it on to a fellow reporter, Jean Heller of the Associated Press. Heller broke the story in July 1972, prompting public outrage and forcing the study to finally shut down.

By that time, 28 participants had perished from syphilis, 100 more had passed away from related complications, at least 40 spouses had been diagnosed with it and the disease had been passed to 19 children at birth.

In 1973, Congress held hearings on the Tuskegee experiments, and the following year the study’s surviving participants, along with the heirs of those who died, received a $10 million out-of-court settlement. Additionally, new guidelines were issued to protect human subjects in U.S. government-funded research projects.

As a result of the Tuskegee experiment, many African Americans developed a lingering, deep mistrust of public health officials and vaccines. In part to foster racial healing, President Bill Clinton issued a 1997 apology, stating, “The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong… It is not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation, but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future.”

During his apology, Clinton announced plans for the establishment of Tuskegee University’s National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care .

The final study participant passed away in 2004.

Tuskegee wasn't the first unethical syphilis study. In 2010, then- President Barack Obama and other federal officials apologized for another U.S.-sponsored experiment, conducted decades earlier in Guatemala. In that study, from 1946 to 1948, nearly 700 men and women—prisoners, soldiers and mental patients—were intentionally infected with syphilis (hundreds more people were exposed to other sexually transmitted diseases as part of the study) without their knowledge or consent.

The purpose of the study was to determine whether penicillin could prevent, not just cure, syphilis infection. Some of those who became infected never received medical treatment. The results of the study, which took place with the cooperation of Guatemalan government officials, were never published. The American public health researcher in charge of the project, Dr. John Cutler, went on to become a lead researcher in the Tuskegee experiments.

Following Cutler’s death in 2003, historian Susan Reverby uncovered the records of the Guatemala experiments while doing research related to the Tuskegee study. She shared her findings with U.S. government officials in 2010. Soon afterward, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius issued an apology for the STD study and President Obama called the Guatemalan president to apologize for the experiments.

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What Are The Top 10 Unethical Psychology Experiments?

• By Cliff Stamp, BS Psychology, MS Rehabilitation Counseling
• Published September 9, 2019
• Last Updated November 13, 2023
• Read Time 8 mins

Posted September 2019 by Clifton Stamp, B.S. Psychology; M.A. Rehabilitation Counseling, M.A. English; 10 updates since. Reading time: 8 min. Reading level: Grade 9+. Questions on unethical psychology experiments? Email Toni at: [email protected] .

Like all sciences, psychology relies on experimentation to validate its hypotheses. This puts researchers in a bit of a bind, in that experimentation requires manipulation of one set of variables. Manipulating human beings can be unethical and has the potential to lead to outright harm. Nowadays experiments that involve human beings must meet a high standard for safety and security for all research participants. Although ethical and safety standards in the 21st century keep people safe from any potential ill effects of experiments and studies, conditions just a few decades ago were far from ideal and were in many cases out and out harmful. 

The Top 10 Unethical Psychology Experiments

10. The Stanford Prison Experiment (1971). This example of unethical research studies occurred in August of 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University began a Navy-funded experiment examining the effects of power dynamics between prison officers and prisoners. It only took six days before the experiment collapsed. Participants so completely absorbed their roles that the “officers” began psychologically torturing the prisoners and the prisoners became aggressive toward the officers. The prisoners, in turn, fought the guards and refused to comply with requests.  By the second day, prisoners refused to obey guards and the guards started threatening prisoners with violence, far over their instructions.  By the 6 th day, guards were harassing the prisoners physically and mentally and some guards had harmed prisoners. Zimbardo stopped the experiment at that point.

9. The Monster Study (1939). The Monster Study is a prime example of an unethical psychology experiment on humans that changed the world. Wendell Johnson, a psychologist at the University of Iowa, conducted an experiment about stuttering on 22 orphans. His graduate student, Mary Tudor, experimented while Johnson supervised her work. She divided a group of 22 children into two groups. Each group was a mixture of children with and without speech problems. One group received encouragement and positive feedback, but the other was ridiculed for any speech problems, including non-existent problems. Children who received ridicule naturally made no progress, and some of the orphans with no speech problems developed those very problems.

The study continued for six months and caused lasting, chronic psychological issues for some of the children. The study caused so much harm that some of the former subjects secured a monetary award from the University of Iowa in 2007 due to the harm they’d suffered.

8. The Milgram Conformity Experiment (1961 ). After the horrors of the Second World War, psychological researchers like Stanley Milgram wondered what made average citizens act like those in Germany who had committed atrocities. Milgram wanted to determine how far people would go carrying out actions that might be detrimental to others if they were ordered or encouraged to do so by an authority figure. The Milgram experiment showed the tension between that obedience to the orders of the authority figure and personal conscience. 

In each experiment, Milgram designated  three people as either a teacher, learner or experimenter. The “learner” was an actor planted by Milgram and stayed in a room separate from the experimenter and teacher. The teacher attempted to teach the learner how to perform small sets of word associations. When the learner got a pair wrong, the teacher delivered an electric shock to the learner. In reality, there was no shock given. The learner pretended to be in increasingly greater amounts of distress. When some teachers expressed hesitation about increasing the level of shocks, the experimenter encouraged them to do so.

Many of the subjects (the teachers) experienced severe and lasting psychological distress. The Milgram Conformity Experiment has become the byword for well-intentioned psychological experiments gone wrong.

8. David Reimer (1967–1977) . When David Reimer was eighth months old, his penis was seriously damaged during a failed circumcision. His parents contacted John Money, a professor of psychology and pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, who was a researcher in the development of gender. As David had an identical twin brother, Money viewed the situation as a rare opportunity to conduct his own experiment into the nature of gender, by advising Reimer’s parents to have the David sexually reassigned as a female. Money’s theory was that gender was a completely sociological construct and primarily influenced by nurture, as opposed to nature. Money was catastrophically wrong. 

Reimer never identified as female and developed strong psychological attachment to being a male. At age 14, Reimer’s parents told him the truth about his condition and he elected to switch to a male identity. Although he later had surgery to correct the initial sex re-assignment, he suffered from profound depression related to his sex and gender issues and committed suicide in 2004. Money’s desire to test his controversial psychology experiment on humans without their consent cost someone his life. 

7. Landis’ Facial Expressions Experiment (1924). In 1924, at the University of Minnesota, Carney Landis created an experiment on humans to investigate the similarity of different people’s’ facial expressions. He wanted to determine if people displayed similar or different facial expressions while experiencing common emotions.

Carney chose students as participants, who were exposed to different situations to prompt emotional reactions. However, to elicit revulsion, he ordered the participants to behead a live rat. One-third of participants refused to do it, while another two-thirds complied, with a great deal of trauma done to them–and the rats. This unethical experiment is one of many reasons review boards were created and have made drastic changes in policy over experiments done on humans.

6. The Aversion Project (1970s and 80s). During the apartheid years in South Africa,  doctors in the South African military tried to “cure” homosexuality in conscripts by forcing them to undergo electroshock therapy and chemical castration. The military also forced gay conscripts to undergo sex-change operations. This happened as one segment of a secret military program headed by Dr. Aubrey Levin that sought to study and eliminate homosexuality in the military as recently as 1989. Exception for several cases of lesbian soldiers who were abused, most of the 900 soldiers to be abused were very young, from 16 to 24-year-old male conscripts. Astoundingly, Dr. Levin relocated to Canada where he worked until he was sent to prison for assaulting a patient.

5. Monkey Drug Trials (1969).  The Monkey Drug Trials experiment was ostensibly meant to test the effects of  illicit drugs on monkeys. Given that monkeys and humans have similar reactions to drugs, and that animals have long been part of medical experiments, the face of this experiment might not look too bad. It’s actually horrific. Monkeys and rats learned to self-administer a range of drugs, from cocaine, amphetamines, codeine, morphine and alcohol. The animals suffered horribly, tearing their fingers off, clawing fur away, and in some cases breaking bones attempting to break out of their cages. This psychology experiment study had no purpose other than to re-validate studies that had been validated many times before. 

4. Little Albert (1920). John Watson, the founder of the psychological school of behaviorism, believed that behaviors were primarily learned. Anxious to test his hypothesis, he used an orphan, “Little Albert,” as an experimental subject. He exposed the child to a laboratory rat, which caused no fear response from the boy, for several months. Next, at the same time, the child was exposed to the rat, he struck a steel bar with a hammer, scaring the little boy and causing a fear response. By associating the appearance of the rat with the loud noise, Little Albert became afraid of the rat. Naturally, the fear was a condition that needed to be fixed, but the boy left the facility before Watson could remedy things.

3. Harlow’s Pit of Despair (1970s). Harry Harlow, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, was a researcher in the field of maternal bonding. To investigate the effects of attachment on development, he took young monkeys and isolated them after they’d bonded with their mothers. He kept them completely isolated, in a vertical chamber that prevented all contact with other monkeys.  They developed no social skills and became completely unable to function as normal rhesus monkeys. These controversial psychology experiments, were not only staggeringly cruel but revealed no data that wasn’t already known.

2. Learned Helplessness (1965). In 1965, Doctors Martin Seligman and Steve Maier investigated the concept of learned helplessness. Three sets of dogs were placed in harnesses. One group of dogs were control subjects. Nothing happened to them. Dogs from group two received electric shocks; however, they were able to stop the shocks when they pressed a lever. In group three, the subjects were shocked, but the levers didn’t abort the shocks. Next, the psychologists placed the dogs in an open box the dogs could easily jump out of, but even though they received shocks, they didn’t leap out of the box. The dogs developed a sense of helplessness, or an inability to take successful action to change a bad situation.

1. The Robbers Cave Experiment (1954). Although the Robbers Cave Experiment is much less disturbing than some of the others in the list, it’s still a good example of the need for informed consent. In 1954, Muzafer Sherif, a psychologist interested in group dynamics and conflict, brought a group of preteen boys to a summer camp. He divided them into groups and engaged the boys in competitions. However, Sherif manipulated the outcomes of the contests, keeping the results close for each group. Then he gave the boys tasks to complete as a unified group, with everyone working together. The conflicts that had arisen when the boys were competing vanished when they worked as one large group.

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Unethical human research in the field of neuroscience: a historical review

Affiliations.

• 1 King Abdulaziz Medical City, King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, P.O. Box: 12723, Jeddah, 21483, Saudi Arabia. [email protected].
• 2 King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
• 3 King Abdullah International Medical Research Center, King Saud bin Abdulaziz University for Health Sciences, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
• PMID: 29460160
• DOI: 10.1007/s10072-018-3245-1

Understanding the historical foundations of ethics in human research are key to illuminating future human research and clinical trials. This paper gives an overview of the most remarkable unethical human research and how past misconducts helped develop ethical guidelines on human experimentation such as The Nuremberg Code 1947 following WWII. Unethical research in the field of neuroscience also proved to be incredibly distressing. Participants were often left with life-long cognitive disabilities. This emphasizes the importance of implicating strict rules and ethical guidelines in neuroscience research that protect participants and respects their dignity. The experiments conducted by German Nazi in the concentration camps during WWII are probably the most inhumane and brutal ever conducted. The Nuremberg Code of 1947, one of the few positive outcomes of the Nazi experiments, is often considered the first document to set out ethical regulations of human research. It consists of numerous necessary criteria, to highlight a few, the subject must give informed consent, there must be a concrete scientific basis for the experiment, and the experiment should yield positive results that cannot be obtained in any other way. In the end, we must remember, the interest of the patient must always prevail over the interest of science or society.

Keywords: Ethics; History; Neuroscience; Unethical research.

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A Brief History of Human Challenge Trials

For more than two centuries, scientists have been intentionally infecting patients with dangerous diseases in order to learn more

Theresa Machemer

Correspondent

Physicians promise in the Hippocratic oath to keep their patients from harm, so intentionally exposing people to a deadly disease would seem to run counter to that contract. But with human challenge studies, they do exactly that. In challenge studies, medical professionals purposefully expose patients to illnesses so that they can study the patient’s symptoms and immune system response. Such studies can also help physicians discover what vaccines will work to prevent the affliction. Historically in such experiments, the health of individual patients, usually voluntary but at times, horrifically, not, has been sacrificed for medical knowledge and future treatments.

Researchers are planning new human challenge trials as the race to develop vaccines against Covid-19 is in a full sprint, with Pfizer’s vaccine receiving authorization in several countries and Moderna’s not far behind. But the end of the pandemic won’t just come from these two pharmaceutical breakthroughs. In order to fully contain the spread of Covid-19, many treatments and vaccines may be necessary in order to vaccinate billions of people. And some experts say that the fastest way to test those second-generation vaccines is through human challenge trials.

Imperial College London intends to begin a human challenge study related to Covid-19 as soon as January. During the study, scientists would purposely infect up to 100 young, healthy volunteers with the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 in the hopes of accelerating the search for new vaccines.

Supporters of the controversial Covid-19 human challenge trial argue that if it can be done safely then it provides a uniquely controlled environment to study factors that are difficult to unravel in longer, large-scale Phase III trials of thousands of people. Critics say that challenge studies are either unnecessary because of vaccine successes so far, or should be put on pause until a later date when they can be run safely. Critics also point out that safety is a concern even for young volunteers because scientists do not know how to treat Covid-19 or what its long-term effects are, and evidence presented by the World Health Organization in September showed that at least a fifth of people between 18 and 34 who catch Covid-19 experience prolonged symptoms.

The debate over such a contentious experiment is nothing new. Human challenge trials are as old as inoculation itself. In 1796, English surgeon Edward Jenner tested the world’s first vaccine by exposing his gardener’s 8-year-old son to cowpox and then smallpox. Human challenge trials have since been used to study dozens of diseases from cholera to cancer, but early studies often put participants directly in harm’s way, not always with their knowledge.

Today, challenge studies undergo careful review by boards of experts before they can begin. A key requirement of an ethical study is that volunteers provide informed consent , proving that they understand the risks of joining a study. The first informed consent process was introduced more than a century after Jenner’s human challenge study.

In 1898, as the U.S. warred with Spain in Cuba, yellow fever —which can cause liver damage, nausea, high fever and bleeding—killed 13 times more soldiers than war wounds. So in 1900, the U.S. Army established a commission led by pathologist Walter Reed to figure out how yellow fever spread and how to stop it. Because only humans seemed to fall ill with the disease, Reed and three colleagues on the commission designed a human challenge study to test a leading theory of yellow fever transmission: mosquito bites.

Reed recognized that if he was correct, then the study itself would be incredibly risky. The need to expose volunteers to deadly disease would have to be weighed with the responsibility to keep the volunteers safe.

“The general that created the commission told Walter Reed… that he had to be absolutely sure that no harm would be caused to the volunteers,” says Enrique Chaves-Carballo , a historian of medicine at the University of Kansas. “He was pretty specific about that.”

To balance his superior’s order with the study’s inherent risk, the commission came up with a novel solution: the first informed consent contract. The commission created a document for volunteers to sign, stating that they understood the study’s risks. However, the form suggested that abstaining from the study was risky, too. The contract stated :

“The undersigned understands perfectly well that in the case of the development of yellow fever in him, that he endangers his life to a certain extent but it being entirely impossible for him to avoid the infection during his stay in the island, he prefers to take the chance of contracting it intentionally in the belief that he will receive from the said Commission the greatest care and the most skillful medical service.”

During the experiment, the scientists first allowed mosquitoes to bite yellow fever patients so the insects would pick up the disease. Then, they brought the mosquitoes to healthy volunteers, and allowed the mosquitoes to bite them. When volunteers fell ill, Reed scoured blood samples for the microbe causing their illness.

Those with yellow fever were prescribed complete bed rest and fasting except for “a few sips of champagne” and some pain medication, says Chaves-Carballo. Volunteers received a hefty payment of $100 in gold per mosquito bite, and another $100 if they fell ill.

In the first round of experiments, 11 volunteers got mosquito bites. Two fell ill, and survived. The third man to fall ill, Jesse W. Lazear, was one of the scientists running the study. He was bitten by accident and died of yellow fever 12 days later.

Though Reed considered ending the study after the death of his colleague, the commission instead named a sanitary station Camp Lazear in his honor. And by 1901 , Reed and the commission had shown through their mosquito bite experiments that the insects transmit yellow fever. Inoculation of more volunteers with yellow fever patients’ filtered blood samples showed that a virus causes the disease—making yellow fever the first human virus scientists discovered.

With the disease-causing culprit identified, Reed returned to George Washington University (then Columbian University) to teach, and other scientists picked up the search for a yellow fever vaccine. U.S. army physician William Gorgas and Cuban-born physician Juan Guiteras established an inoculation station for a new round of human challenge studies in Havana. They hoped to learn how to induce light cases of yellow fever with mosquito bites in order to give people immunity. More than 20 volunteers signed up for the first experimental inoculations in 1901, including the only woman to participate in the study, a military nurse named Clara Maass.

Maass was bitten five times without developing yellow fever, and received $100 to send home to her mother and nine siblings in New Jersey—a huge sum compared to her monthly pay of $30 .

Her sixth mosquito bite proved fatal. She and two other volunteers were infected with a particularly violent strain of the virus—the doctors didn’t know how to induce just light cases—and all three died in August of 1901.

“Some of the headlines of the newspapers are like, ‘Nurse Dies for a Hundred Dollars,’” says Chaves-Carballo. “People responded to the fact that she was a young nurse who was trying her best to help her family.”

Public outcry in the U.S. brought the Havana experiments to an end. Maass’ death brought the study’s exorbitant pay under fire, as such a large incentive may have interfered with the participants’ ability to accurately weigh the risk of joining the study. The fact that the study was run by the U.S. Army, and Reed’s participants were members of the military, also brought into question the participants’ ability to freely opt out of the study, says Monica McArthur , pediatrician and infectious disease specialist at the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Center for Vaccine Development and Global Health.

“In a lot of the studies early on, the Walter Reed experiment and other studies, used what we would now consider vulnerable populations,” people who couldn’t freely agree to participate or make a fully informed decision, says McArthur. “Prisoners, for example, could be enrolled in studies.”

A classic example of a challenge study that relied on a vulnerable population is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Beginning in 1932 , the U.S. Public Health Service recruited about 600 poor African American men from around Tuskegee, Alabama, for a study of how syphilis worsens over time. About two-thirds of the men had syphilis, but the study doctors informed them they had “bad blood.”

After receiving this phony diagnosis, the men were persuaded to join the study in exchange for free meals, hospital access and treatment for “bad blood” and other unrelated conditions. The scientists also provided participants a burial stipend that would be paid to their survivors after their deaths.

Only about half of the men with syphilis received a treatment that was usually prescribed in the 1930s: doses of toxic arsenic and mercury. The doctors subjected the participants to blood draws and spinal taps, and after they died of syphilis, autopsies, all in pursuit of more information about the natural course of the disease. The study lasted for decades, and even after the medical community established that penicillin could cure the disease in the 1940s the men did not receive the medication.

In 1972, journalist Jean Heller of the Associated Press brought the Tuskegee Syphilis Study to light and shared how the doctors involved in the study had deceived the men participating. By then, only 74 of the men with syphilis still survived. Public outrage shut the study down three months after the report.

While the Tuskegee Syphilis Study relied on participants who were already ill, other studies exposed otherwise healthy people to deadly diseases. For example, from 1955 to 1970, a pediatrician exposed more than 50 children with mental disabilities to hepatitis in order to identify different strains of the disease and eventually develop vaccines. The trial took place at Willowbrook State School, a home for children and adults with developmental disabilities in Staten Island, New York.

The school was overcrowded and had a lengthy waitlist for new patients. But the study’s principal investigator, Saul Krugman, offered several parents the opportunity to cut the line if they agreed to enroll their children in the study. Krugman told them that their children were likely to catch the disease at the facility anyway, but by joining the study, they would have access to cleaner facilities and a chance at an eventual vaccine.

“I did feel coerced,” said Diana McCourt, who enrolled her daughter in the Willowbrook study, to Forbes ’ Leah Rosenbaum. “I felt like I was denied help unless I took this [opportunity].”

The Willowbrook studies, which ended in 1970, revealed the existence of the A and B strains of hepatitis and sped up the development of a hepatitis B vaccine. But the studies progressed even as some in the medical community criticized Krugman’s methods. In 1966, anesthesiologist Henry K. Beecher published a landmark essay detailing 22 examples of ongoing unethical research on human subjects, including the Willowbrook hepatitis studies, in order to raise awareness and end unethical practices that continued despite the creation of international human experimentation guidelines—the Nuremberg Code in 1947 and the Declaration of Helsinki in 1964.

In addition to the Willowbrook study, Beecher highlighted one study in which melanoma, a serious form of skin cancer, was transferred from a woman to her mother “in the hope of gaining a little better understanding of cancer immunity.” The woman died on the same day that her mother was to receive the melanoma injection, so the doctors knew the cancer was deadly. Her mother died 451 days after receiving the injection.

Beecher concluded that an ethical approach to experimentation requires, first and foremost, the informed consent of study volunteers. “The difficulty of obtaining this is discussed in detail,” he writes, “But it is absolutely essential to strive for it for moral, sociologic and legal reasons. The statement that consent has been obtained has little meaning unless the subject or his guardian is capable of understanding what is to be undertaken and unless all hazards are made clear.”

Human challenge studies became less common after the 1970s with the conclusion of unethical studies that shocked the public. Since then, the Declaration of Helsinki has been amended seven times to clarify ethical standards for human experiments, most recently in October of 2013. The current declaration states that “While the primary purpose of medical research is to generate new knowledge, this goal can never take precedence over the rights and interests of individual research subjects.”

When run well, challenge studies are still uniquely able to provide clear data about infectious diseases. “They are now coming back in favor with very rigorous ethical principles in place,” adds McArthur.

The University of Maryland used human challenge studies in 2012 and 2013 to develop a vaccine for cholera , which was approved by the FDA in 2016. Cholera was an ideal candidate for a safe human challenge study because it is well understood by scientists, is reliably treatable with fluids and antibiotics, and has no long-term effects after the infection is gone.

Informed consent procedures have come a long way since Reed’s contract. Volunteers can ask questions and seek outside guidance, and must pass an assessment designed by the researchers to prove that they understand the risks of a study. And the volunteers have the power to quit. “Every time there’s an encounter with the volunteer, it’s reaffirming that the volunteer is still willing and able to participate,” says McArthur.

According to a statement by Imperial College London, which still needs to have its experimental plan approved by government regulators before researchers can begin recruiting participants, volunteers’ safety is the number one priority. “It would be nice to see exactly how [Imperial College London] explains the risks and benefits to those participating in this study,” says Chaves-Carballo.

Covid-19 is different from other challenge study diseases: Scientists have been studying it for less than a year, physicians have no approved treatments to intervene if a volunteer’s illness becomes severe, and early evidence suggests Covid-19 can cause long-term effects even in young, previously healthy people. The Imperial College London study aims to first identify the minimum dose of coronavirus necessary to cause disease. The study would use that dose of virus to study how vaccines work in the body to prevent Covid-19, to look at potential treatments and study the immune response. The biomedical community remains split on whether such a study should be run, given all of the unknowns around Covid-19.

When scientists develop second- and third-generation vaccines, a challenge study allows researchers to work with just 100 people instead of tens of thousands. That means fewer people are asked to go without the vaccine for the sake of research. And by waiting to conduct a challenge study on Covid-19 until a later date, researchers might get access to new information about risk factors for severe disease, which could help make the study safer.

“I am not a fan of SARS-CoV-2 challenge studies,” says McArthur. “But if I’m playing devil’s advocate against myself, some of the very reasons [not to do a challenge study] that I listed might be reasons that someone else might say that a challenge study is beneficial. Because we don’t know that much about a disease, so we could learn more about it.”

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Theresa Machemer is a freelance writer based in Washington DC. Her work has also appeared in National Geographic and SciShow. Website: tkmach.com

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Understanding the Milgram Experiment in Psychology

A closer look at Milgram's controversial studies of obedience

Isabelle Adam (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) via Flickr

Factors That Influence Obedience

• Ethical Concerns
• Replications

How far do you think people would go to obey an authority figure? Would they refuse to obey if the order went against their values or social expectations? Those questions were at the heart of an infamous and controversial study known as the Milgram obedience experiments.

Yale University  psychologist   Stanley Milgram  conducted these experiments during the 1960s. They explored the effects of authority on obedience. In the experiments, an authority figure ordered participants to deliver what they believed were dangerous electrical shocks to another person. These results suggested that people are highly influenced by authority and highly obedient . More recent investigations cast doubt on some of the implications of Milgram's findings and even the results and procedures themselves. Despite its problems, the study has, without question, made a significant impact on psychology .

At a Glance

Milgram's experiments posed the question: Would people obey orders, even if they believed doing so would harm another person? Milgram's findings suggested the answer was yes, they would. The experiments have long been controversial, both because of the startling findings and the ethical problems with the research. More recently, experts have re-examined the studies, suggesting that participants were often coerced into obeying and that at least some participants recognized that the other person was just pretending to be shocked. Such findings call into question the study's validity and authenticity, but some replications suggest that people are surprisingly prone to obeying authority.

History of the Milgram Experiments

Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolf Eichmann had begun. Eichmann’s defense that he was merely following instructions when he ordered the deaths of millions of Jews roused Milgram’s interest.

In his 1974 book "Obedience to Authority," Milgram posed the question, "Could it be that Eichmann and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all accomplices?"

Procedure in the Milgram Experiment

The participants in the most famous variation of the Milgram experiment were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. In exchange for their participation, each person was paid $4.50.

Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 15 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with terms including "slight shock," "moderate shock," and "danger: severe shock." The final three switches were labeled simply with an ominous "XXX."

Each participant took the role of a "teacher" who would then deliver a shock to the "student" in a neighboring room whenever an incorrect answer was given. While participants believed that they were delivering real shocks to the student, the “student” was a confederate in the experiment who was only pretending to be shocked.

As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even complain about a heart condition. Once they reached the 300-volt level, the learner would bang on the wall and demand to be released.

Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock.

Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter then responded with a series of commands to prod the participant along:

• "Please continue."
• "The experiment requires that you continue."
• "It is absolutely essential that you continue."
• "You have no other choice; you must go on."

Results of the Milgram Experiment

In the Milgram experiment, obedience was measured by the level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver. While many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught, and angry at the experimenter, they nevertheless continued to follow orders all the way to the end.

Milgram's results showed that 65% of the participants in the study delivered the maximum shocks. Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks, while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels.

Why did so many of the participants in this experiment perform a seemingly brutal act when instructed by an authority figure? According to Milgram, there are some situational factors that can explain such high levels of obedience:

• The physical presence of an authority figure dramatically increased compliance .
• The fact that Yale (a trusted and authoritative academic institution) sponsored the study led many participants to believe that the experiment must be safe.
• The selection of teacher and learner status seemed random.
• Participants assumed that the experimenter was a competent expert.
• The shocks were said to be painful, not dangerous.

Later experiments conducted by Milgram indicated that the presence of rebellious peers dramatically reduced obedience levels. When other people refused to go along with the experimenter's orders, 36 out of 40 participants refused to deliver the maximum shocks.

More recent work by researchers suggests that while people do tend to obey authority figures, the process is not necessarily as cut-and-dried as Milgram depicted it.

In a 2012 essay published in PLoS Biology , researchers suggested that the degree to which people are willing to obey the questionable orders of an authority figure depends largely on two key factors:

• How much the individual agrees with the orders
• How much they identify with the person giving the orders

While it is clear that people are often far more susceptible to influence, persuasion , and obedience than they would often like to be, they are far from mindless machines just taking orders. 

Another study that analyzed Milgram's results concluded that eight factors influenced the likelihood that people would progress up to the 450-volt shock:

• The experimenter's directiveness
• Legitimacy and consistency
• Group pressure to disobey
• Indirectness of proximity
• Intimacy of the relation between the teacher and learner
• Distance between the teacher and learner

Ethical Concerns in the Milgram Experiment

Milgram's experiments have long been the source of considerable criticism and controversy. From the get-go, the ethics of his experiments were highly dubious. Participants were subjected to significant psychological and emotional distress.

Some of the major ethical issues in the experiment were related to:

• The use of deception
• The lack of protection for the participants who were involved
• Pressure from the experimenter to continue even after asking to stop, interfering with participants' right to withdraw

Due to concerns about the amount of anxiety experienced by many of the participants, everyone was supposedly debriefed at the end of the experiment. The researchers reported that they explained the procedures and the use of deception.

Critics of the study have argued that many of the participants were still confused about the exact nature of the experiment, and recent findings suggest that many participants were not debriefed at all.

Replications of the Milgram Experiment

While Milgram’s research raised serious ethical questions about the use of human subjects in psychology experiments , his results have also been consistently replicated in further experiments. One review further research on obedience and found that Milgram’s findings hold true in other experiments. In one study, researchers conducted a study designed to replicate Milgram's classic obedience experiment. The researchers made several alterations to Milgram's experiment.

• The maximum shock level was 150 volts as opposed to the original 450 volts.
• Participants were also carefully screened to eliminate those who might experience adverse reactions to the experiment.

The results of the new experiment revealed that participants obeyed at roughly the same rate that they did when Milgram conducted his original study more than 40 years ago.

Some psychologists suggested that in spite of the changes made in the replication, the study still had merit and could be used to further explore some of the situational factors that also influenced the results of Milgram's study. But other psychologists suggested that the replication was too dissimilar to Milgram's original study to draw any meaningful comparisons.

One study examined people's beliefs about how they would do compared to the participants in Milgram's experiments. They found that most people believed they would stop sooner than the average participants. These findings applied to both those who had never heard of Milgram's experiments and those who were familiar with them. In fact, those who knew about Milgram's experiments actually believed that they would stop even sooner than other people.

Another novel replication involved recruiting participants in pairs and having them take turns acting as either an 'agent' or 'victim.' Agents then received orders to shock the victim. The results suggest that only around 3.3% disobeyed the experimenter's orders.

Recent Criticisms and New Findings

Psychologist Gina Perry suggests that much of what we think we know about Milgram's famous experiments is only part of the story. While researching an article on the topic, she stumbled across hundreds of audiotapes found in Yale archives that documented numerous variations of Milgram's shock experiments.

Participants Were Often Coerced

While Milgram's reports of his process report methodical and uniform procedures, the audiotapes reveal something different. During the experimental sessions, the experimenters often went off-script and coerced the subjects into continuing the shocks.

"The slavish obedience to authority we have come to associate with Milgram’s experiments comes to sound much more like bullying and coercion when you listen to these recordings," Perry suggested in an article for Discover Magazine .

Few Participants Were Really Debriefed

Milgram suggested that the subjects were "de-hoaxed" after the experiments. He claimed he later surveyed the participants and found that 84% were glad to have participated, while only 1% regretted their involvement.

However, Perry's findings revealed that of the 700 or so people who took part in different variations of his studies between 1961 and 1962, very few were truly debriefed.

A true debriefing would have involved explaining that the shocks weren't real and that the other person was not injured. Instead, Milgram's sessions were mainly focused on calming the subjects down before sending them on their way.

Many participants left the experiment in a state of considerable distress. While the truth was revealed to some months or even years later, many were simply never told a thing.

Variations Led to Differing Results

Another problem is that the version of the study presented by Milgram and the one that's most often retold does not tell the whole story. The statistic that 65% of people obeyed orders applied only to one variation of the experiment, in which 26 out of 40 subjects obeyed.

In other variations, far fewer people were willing to follow the experimenters' orders, and in some versions of the study, not a single participant obeyed.

Participants Guessed the Learner Was Faking

Perry even tracked down some of the people who took part in the experiments, as well as Milgram's research assistants. What she discovered is that many of his subjects had deduced what Milgram's intent was and knew that the "learner" was merely pretending.

Such findings cast Milgram's results in a new light. It suggests that not only did Milgram intentionally engage in some hefty misdirection to obtain the results he wanted but that many of his participants were simply playing along.

An analysis of an unpublished study by Milgram's assistant, Taketo Murata, found that participants who believed they were really delivering a shock were less likely to obey, while those who did not believe they were actually inflicting pain were more willing to obey. In other words, the perception of pain increased defiance, while skepticism of pain increased obedience.

A review of Milgram's research materials suggests that the experiments exerted more pressure to obey than the original results suggested. Other variations of the experiment revealed much lower rates of obedience, and many of the participants actually altered their behavior when they guessed the true nature of the experiment.

Impact of the Milgram Experiment

Since there is no way to truly replicate the experiment due to its serious ethical and moral problems, determining whether Milgram's experiment really tells us anything about the power of obedience is impossible to determine.

So why does Milgram's experiment maintain such a powerful hold on our imaginations, even decades after the fact? Perry believes that despite all its ethical issues and the problem of never truly being able to replicate Milgram's procedures, the study has taken on the role of what she calls a "powerful parable."

Milgram's work might not hold the answers to what makes people obey or even the degree to which they truly obey. It has, however, inspired other researchers to explore what makes people follow orders and, perhaps more importantly, what leads them to question authority.

Recent findings undermine the scientific validity of the study. Milgram's work is also not truly replicable due to its ethical problems. However, the study has led to additional research on how situational factors can affect obedience to authority.

Milgram’s experiment has become a classic in psychology , demonstrating the dangers of obedience. The research suggests that situational variables have a stronger sway than personality factors in determining whether people will obey an authority figure. However, other psychologists argue that both external and internal factors heavily influence obedience, such as personal beliefs and overall temperament.

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By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

Review Highlights Unethical Moments in Medical Research History

Tuskegee syphilis study is most famous

Doctors experimented on people who did not have full rights, obama bioethics panel will set new rules for medical studies, recent posts.

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Unethical human research in the field of neuroscience: a historical review

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• Published: 19 February 2018
• Volume 39 , pages 829–834, ( 2018 )

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• Hussein Algahtani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9484-9838 1 ,
• Mohammed Bajunaid 2 &
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Understanding the historical foundations of ethics in human research are key to illuminating future human research and clinical trials. This paper gives an overview of the most remarkable unethical human research and how past misconducts helped develop ethical guidelines on human experimentation such as The Nuremberg Code 1947 following WWII. Unethical research in the field of neuroscience also proved to be incredibly distressing. Participants were often left with life-long cognitive disabilities. This emphasizes the importance of implicating strict rules and ethical guidelines in neuroscience research that protect participants and respects their dignity. The experiments conducted by German Nazi in the concentration camps during WWII are probably the most inhumane and brutal ever conducted. The Nuremberg Code of 1947, one of the few positive outcomes of the Nazi experiments, is often considered the first document to set out ethical regulations of human research. It consists of numerous necessary criteria, to highlight a few, the subject must give informed consent, there must be a concrete scientific basis for the experiment, and the experiment should yield positive results that cannot be obtained in any other way. In the end, we must remember, the interest of the patient must always prevail over the interest of science or society.

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Algahtani, H., Bajunaid, M. & Shirah, B. Unethical human research in the field of neuroscience: a historical review. Neurol Sci 39 , 829–834 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10072-018-3245-1

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How the Classics Changed Research Ethics

Some of history’s most controversial psychology studies helped drive extensive protections for human research participants. some say those reforms went too far..

• Behavioral Research
• Institutional Review Board (IRB)

Photo above: In 1971, APS Fellow Philip Zimbardo halted his classic prison simulation at Stanford after volunteer “guards” became abusive to the “prisoners,” famously leading one prisoner into a fit of sobbing. Photo credit:   PrisonExp.org

Nearly 60 years have passed since Stanley Milgram’s infamous “shock box” study sparked an international focus on ethics in psychological research. Countless historians and psychology instructors assert that Milgram’s experiments—along with studies like the Robbers Cave and Stanford prison experiments—could never occur today; ethics gatekeepers would swiftly bar such studies from proceeding, recognizing the potential harms to the participants. 

But the reforms that followed some of the 20th century’s most alarming biomedical and behavioral studies have overreached, many social and behavioral scientists complain. Studies that pose no peril to participants confront the same standards as experimental drug treatments or surgeries, they contend. The institutional review boards (IRBs) charged with protecting research participants fail to understand minimal risk, they say. Researchers complain they waste time addressing IRB concerns that have nothing to do with participant safety. 

Several factors contribute to this conflict, ethicists say. Researchers and IRBs operate in a climate of misunderstanding, confusing regulations, and a systemic lack of ethics training, said APS Fellow Celia Fisher, a Fordham University professor and research ethicist, in an interview with the Observer . 

“In my view, IRBs are trying to do their best and investigators are trying to do their best,” Fisher said. “It’s more that we really have to enhance communication and training on both sides.” 

‘Sins’ from the past  

Modern human-subjects protections date back to the 1947 Nuremberg Code, the response to Nazi medical experiments on concentration-camp internees. Those ethical principles, which no nation or organization has officially accepted as law or official ethics guidelines, emphasized that a study’s benefits should outweigh the risks and that human subjects should be fully informed about the research and participate voluntarily.  

See the 2014 Observer cover story by APS Fellow Carol A. Tavris, “ Teaching Contentious Classics ,” for more about these controversial studies and how to discuss them with students.

But the discovery of U.S.-government-sponsored research abuses, including the Tuskegee syphilis experiment on African American men and radiation experiments on humans, accelerated regulatory initiatives. The abuses investigators uncovered in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s—decades after the experiments had occurred—heightened policymakers’ concerns “about what else might still be going on,” George Mason University historian Zachary M. Schrag explained in an interview. These concerns generated restrictions not only on biomedical research but on social and behavioral studies that pose a minute risk of harm.  

“The sins of researchers from the 1940s led to new regulations in the 1990s, even though it was not at all clear that those kinds of activities were still going on in any way,” said Schrag, who chronicled the rise of IRBs in his book  Ethical Imperialism: Institutional Review Boards and the Social Sciences, 1965–2009.  

Accompanying the medical research scandals were controversial psychological studies that provided fodder for textbooks, historical tomes, and movies.  

• In the early 1950s, social psychologist Muzafer Sherif and his colleagues used a Boy Scout camp called Robbers Cave to study intergroup hostility. They randomly assigned preadolescent boys to one of two groups and concocted a series of competitive activities that quickly sparked conflict. They later set up a situation that compelled the boys to overcome their differences and work together. The study provided insights into prejudice and conflict resolution but generated criticism because the children weren’t told they were part of an experiment. 
• In 1961, Milgram began his studies on obedience to authority by directing participants to administer increasing levels of electric shock to another person (a confederate). To Milgram’s surprise, more than 65% of the participants delivered the full voltage of shock (which unbeknownst to them was fake), even though many were distressed about doing so. Milgram was widely criticized for the manipulation and deception he employed to carry out his experiments. 
• In 1971, APS Fellow Philip Zimbardo halted his classic prison simulation at Stanford after volunteer “guards” became abusive to the “prisoners,” famously leading one prisoner into a fit of sobbing. 

Western policymakers created a variety of safeguards in the wake of these psychological studies and other medical research. Among them was the Declaration of Helsinki, an ethical guide for human-subjects research developed by the Europe-based World Medical Association. The U.S. Congress passed the National Research Act of 1974, which created a commission to oversee participant protections in biomedical and behavioral research. And in the 90s, federal agencies adopted the Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects (better known as the Common Rule), a code of ethics applied to any government-funded research. IRBs review studies through the lens of the Common Rule. After that, social science research, including studies in social psychology, anthropology, sociology, and political science, began facing widespread institutional review (Schrag, 2010).  

Sailing Through Review

Psychological scientists and other researchers who have served on institutional review boards provide these tips to help researchers get their studies reviewed swiftly.  

• Determine whether your study qualifies for minimal-risk exemption from review. Online tools are even in development to help researchers self-determine exempt status (Ben-Shahar, 2019; Schneider & McClutcheon, 2018). 
• If you’re not clear about your exemption, research the regulations to understand how they apply to your planned study. Show you’ve done your homework and have developed a protocol that is safe for your participants.  
• Consult with stakeholders. Look for advocacy groups and representatives from the population you plan to study. Ask them what they regard as fair compensation for participation. Get their feedback about your questionnaires and consent forms to make sure they’re understandable. These steps help you better show your IRB that the population you’re studying will find the protections adequate (Fisher, 2022). 
• Speak to IRB members or staff before submitting the protocol. Ask them their specific concerns about your study, and get guidance on writing up the protocol to address those concerns. Also ask them about expected turnaround times so you can plan your submission in time to meet any deadlines associated with your study (e.g., grant application deadlines).  

Ben-Shahar, O. (2019, December 2). Reforming the IRB in experimental fashion. The Regulatory Review . University of Pennsylvania. https://www.theregreview.org/2019/12/02/ben-shahar-reforming-irb-experimental-fashion/  

Fisher, C. B. (2022). Decoding the ethics code: A practical guide for psychologists (5 th ed.). Sage Publications. 

Schneider, S. L. & McCutcheon, J. A. (2018).  Proof of concept: Use of a wizard for self-determination of IRB exempt status . Federal Demonstration Partnership.   http://thefdp.org/default/assets/File/Documents/wizard_pilot_final_rpt.pdf  

Social scientists have long contended that the Common Rule was largely designed to protect participants in biomedical experiments—where scientists face the risk of inducing physical harm on subjects—but fits poorly with the other disciplines that fall within its reach.

“It’s not like the IRBs are trying to hinder research. It’s just that regulations continue to be written in the medical model without any specificity for social science research,” she explained. 

The Common Rule was updated in 2018 to ease the level of institutional review for low-risk research techniques (e.g., surveys, educational tests, interviews) that are frequent tools in social and behavioral studies. A special committee of the National Research Council (NRC), chaired by APS Past President Susan Fiske, recommended many of those modifications. Fisher was involved in the NRC committee, along with APS Fellows Richard Nisbett (University of Michigan) and Felice J. Levine (American Educational Research Association), and clinical psychologist Melissa Abraham of Harvard University. But the Common Rule reforms have yet to fully expedite much of the research, partly because the review boards remain confused about exempt categories, Fisher said.  

Interference or support?  

That regulatory confusion has generated sour sentiments toward IRBs. For decades, many social and behavioral scientists have complained that IRBs effectively impede scientific progress through arbitrary questions and objections. 

In a Perspectives on Psychological Science  paper they co-authored, APS Fellows Stephen Ceci of Cornell University and Maggie Bruck of Johns Hopkins University discussed an IRB rejection of their plans for a study with 6- to 10-year-old participants. Ceci and Bruck planned to show the children videos depicting a fictional police officer engaging in suggestive questioning of a child.  

“The IRB refused to approve the proposal because it was deemed unethical to show children public servants in a negative light,” they wrote, adding that the IRB held firm on its rejection despite government funders already having approved the study protocol (Ceci & Bruck, 2009).   

Other scientists have complained the IRBs exceed their Common Rule authority by requiring review of studies that are not government funded. In 2011, psychological scientist Jin Li sued Brown University in federal court for barring her from using data she collected in a privately funded study on educational testing. Brown’s IRB objected to the fact that she paid her participants different amounts of compensation based on need. (A year later, the university settled the case with Li.) 

In addition, IRBs often hover over minor aspects of a study that have no genuine relation to participant welfare, Ceci said in an email interview.  

“You can have IRB approval and later decide to make a nominal change to the protocol (a frequent one is to add a new assistant to the project or to increase the sample size),” he wrote. “It can take over a month to get approval. In the meantime, nothing can move forward and the students sit around waiting.” 

Not all researchers view institutional review as a roadblock. Psychological scientist Nathaniel Herr, who runs American University’s Interpersonal Emotion Lab and has served on the school’s IRB, says the board effectively collaborated with researchers to ensure the study designs were safe and that participant privacy was appropriately protected 

“If the IRB that I operated on saw an issue, they shared suggestions we could make to overcome that issue,” Herr said. “It was about making the research go forward. I never saw a project get shut down. It might have required a significant change, but it was often about confidentiality and it’s something that helps everybody feel better about the fact we weren’t abusing our privilege as researchers. I really believe it [the review process] makes the projects better.” 

Some universities—including Fordham University, Yale University, and The University of Chicago—even have social and behavioral research IRBs whose members include experts optimally equipped to judge the safety of a psychological study, Fisher noted. 

Training gaps  

Institutional review is beset by a lack of ethics training in research programs, Fisher believes. While students in professional psychology programs take accreditation-required ethics courses in their doctoral programs, psychologists in other fields have no such requirement. In these programs, ethics training is often limited to an online program that provides, at best, a perfunctory overview of federal regulations. 

“It gives you the fundamental information, but it has nothing to do with our real-world deliberations about protecting participants,” she said. 

Additionally, harm to a participant is difficult to predict. As sociologist Martin Tolich of University of Otago in New Zealand wrote, the Stanford prison study had been IRB-approved. 

“Prediction of harm with any certainty is not necessarily possible, and should not be the aim of ethics review,” he argued. “A more measured goal is the minimization of risk, not its eradication” (Tolich, 2014). 

Fisher notes that scientists aren’t trained to recognize and respond to adverse events when they occur during a study. 

“To be trained in research ethics requires not just knowing you have to obtain informed consent,” she said. “It’s being able to apply ethical reasoning to each unique situation. If you don’t have the training to do that, then of course you’re just following the IRB rules, which are very impersonal and really out of sync with the true nature of what we’re doing.” 

Researchers also raise concerns that, in many cases, the regulatory process harms vulnerable populations rather than safeguards them. Fisher and psychological scientist Brian Mustanski of University of Illinois at Chicago wrote in 2016, for example, that the review panels may be hindering HIV prevention strategies by requiring researchers to get parental consent before including gay and bisexual adolescents in their studies. Under that requirement, youth who are not out to their families get excluded. Boards apply those restrictions even in states permitting minors to get HIV testing and preventive medication without parental permission—and even though federal rules allow IRBs to waive parental consent in research settings (Mustanski & Fisher, 2016) 

IRBs also place counterproductive safety limits on suicide and self-harm research, watching for any sign that a participant might need to be removed from a clinical study and hospitalized. 

“The problem is we know that hospitalization is not the panacea,” Fisher said. “It stops suicidality for the moment, but actually the highest-risk period is 3 months after the first hospitalization for a suicide attempt. Some of the IRBs fail to consider that a non-hospitalization intervention that’s being tested is just as safe as hospitalization. It’s a difficult problem, and I don’t blame them. But if we have to take people out of a study as soon as they reach a certain level of suicidality, then we’ll never find effective treatment.” 

Communication gaps  

Supporters of the institutional review process say researchers tend to approach the IRB process too defensively, overlooking the board’s good intentions.  

“Obtaining clarification or requesting further materials serve to verify that protections are in place,” a team of institutional reviewers wrote in an editorial for  Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research . “If researchers assume that IRBs are collaborators in the research process, then these requests can be seen as prompts rather than as admonitions” (Domenech Rodriguez et al., 2017). 

Fisher agrees that researchers’ attitudes play a considerable role in the conflicts that arise over ethics review. She recommends researchers develop each protocol with review-board questions in mind (see sidebar). 

“For many researchers, there’s a disdain for IRBs,” she said. “IRBs are trying their hardest. They don’t want to reject research. It’s just that they’re not informed. And sometimes if behavioral scientists or social scientists are disdainful of their IRBs, they’re not communicating with them.” 

Some researchers are building evidence to help IRBs understand the level of risk associated with certain types of psychological studies.  

• In a study involving more than 500 undergraduate students, for example, psychological scientists at the University of New Mexico found that the participants were less upset than expected by questionnaires about sex, trauma , and other sensitive topics. This finding, the researchers reported in  Psychological Science , challenges the usual IRB assumption about the stress that surveys on sex and trauma might inflict on participants (Yeater et al., 2012). 
• A study involving undergraduate women indicated that participants who had experienced child abuse , although more likely than their peers to report distress from recalling the past as part of a study, were also more likely to say that their involvement in the research helped them gain insight into themselves and hoped it would help others (Decker et al., 2011). 
• A multidisciplinary team, including APS Fellow R. Michael Furr of Wake Forest University, found that adolescent psychiatric patients showed a drop in suicide ideation after being questioned regularly about their suicidal thoughts over the course of 2 years. This countered concerns that asking about suicidal ideation would trigger an increase in such thinking (Mathias et al., 2012). 
• A meta-analysis of more than 70 participant samples—totaling nearly 74,000 individuals—indicated that people may experience only moderate distress when discussing past traumas in research studies. They also generally might find their participation to be a positive experience, according to the findings (Jaffe et al., 2015). 

The takeaways  

So, are the historians correct? Would any of these classic experiments survive IRB scrutiny today? 

Reexaminations of those studies make the question arguably moot. Recent revelations about some of these studies suggest that scientific integrity concerns may taint the legacy of those findings as much as their impact on participants did (Le Texier, 2019, Resnick, 2018; Perry, 2018).  

Also, not every aspect of the controversial classics is taboo in today’s regulatory environment. Scientists have won IRB approval to conceptually replicate both the Milgram and Stanford prison experiments (Burger, 2009; Reicher & Haslam, 2006). They simply modified the protocols to avert any potential harm to the participants. (Scholars, including Zimbardo himself, have questioned the robustness of those replication findings [Elms, 2009; Miller, 2009; Zimbardo, 2006].) 

Many scholars believe there are clear and valuable lessons from the classic experiments. Milgram’s work, for instance, can inject clarity into pressing societal issues such as political polarization and police brutality . Ethics training and monitoring simply need to include those lessons learned, they say. 

“We should absolutely be talking about what Milgram did right, what he did wrong,” Schrag said. “We can talk about what we can learn from that experience and how we might answer important questions while respecting the rights of volunteers who participate in psychological experiments.”  

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References   

Burger, J. M. (2009). Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today? American Psychologist , 64 (1), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0010932  

Ceci, S. J. & Bruck, M. (2009). Do IRBs pass the minimal harm test? Perspectives on Psychological Science , 4 (1), 28–29. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-6924.2009.01084.x   

Decker, S. E., Naugle, A. E., Carter-Visscher, R., Bell, K., & Seifer, A. (2011). Ethical issues in research on sensitive topics: Participants’ experiences of stress and benefit . Journal of Empirical Research on Human Research Ethics: An International Journal , 6 (3), 55–64. https://doi.org/10.1525/jer.2011.6.3.55  

Domenech Rodriguez, M. M., Corralejo, S. M., Vouvalis, N., & Mirly, A. K. (2017). Institutional review board: Ally not adversary. Psi Chi Journal of Psychological Research , 22 (2), 76–84.  https://doi.org/10.24839/2325-7342.JN22.2.76  

Elms, A. C. (2009). Obedience lite. American Psychologist , 64 (1), 32–36.  https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014473

Fisher, C. B., True, G., Alexander, L., & Fried, A. L. (2009). Measures of mentoring, department climate, and graduate student preparedness in the responsible conduct of psychological research. Ethics & Behavior , 19 (3), 227–252. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508420902886726  

Jaffe, A. E., DiLillo, D., Hoffman, L., Haikalis, M., & Dykstra, R. E. (2015). Does it hurt to ask? A meta-analysis of participant reactions to trauma research. Clinical Psychology Review , 40 , 40–56. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cpr.2015.05.004  

Le Texier, T. (2019). Debunking the Stanford Prison experiment. American Psychologist , 74 (7), 823–839. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/amp0000401  

Mathias, C. W., Furr, R. M., Sheftall, A. H., Hill-Kapturczak, N., Crum, P., & Dougherty, D. M. (2012). What’s the harm in asking about suicide ideation? Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior , 42 (3), 341–351. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1943-278X.2012.0095.x  

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Mustanski, B., & Fisher, C. B. (2016). HIV rates are increasing in gay/bisexual teens: IRB barriers to research must be resolved to bend the curve.  American Journal of Preventive Medicine ,  51 (2), 249–252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2016.02.026  

Perry, G. (2018). The lost boys: Inside Muzafer Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment. Scribe Publications.  

Reicher, S. & Haslam, S. A. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study. British Journal of Social Psychology , 45 , 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1348/014466605X48998  

Resnick, B. (2018, June 13). The Stanford prison experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud. Vox. https://www.vox.com/2018/6/13/17449118/stanford-prison-experiment-fraud-psychology-replication  

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11+ most controversial psychological experiments in history

Here is a glimpse at some of the most controversial, unethical psychological experiments in history..

Kashyap Vyas

Scientific experimentation is a staple of human progress. Academic researchers are usually required to abide by rules and regulations governing the ethics of conducting studies. However, there has always been a very small number of researchers that have moved far beyond what many consider ethical. 

Today, there are strict rules that must be followed when conducting such psychological experiments. For example, the American Psychological Association (APA) has a binding Code of Conduct that must be followed when conducting any kind of experiment. Experimenters are bound to adhere to everything from consent to confidentiality of the experiments.

Moreover, there are review boards and panels that are in charge of reinforcing these strict ethics. Having said that, the norms were not always this stern. That is precisely how some of the following controversial psychological experiments came to be conducted. 

 1.  The Facebook experiment

hocus- focus/iStock

The Facebook Experiment of 2012 created quite an uproar amongst indignant users. Nearly 700,000 Facebook users were subjected to secret psychological tests to gauge the effects of different types of posts.

The details of the experiment came out in a scientific paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . The paper revealed that, unbeknownst to users, Facebook had tampered with the news feeds of nearly 700,000 people, showing them an abnormally low number of either positive or negative posts. The experiment aimed to determine whether the company could alter the emotional state of its users.

The experiment was designed to determine whether the number of positive or negative comments in a Facebook newsfeed would have any effect on how the user updated their own page. 

News of the research led to outrage from people who felt they had been secretly manipulated by the company.

The researchers revealed that social media users were prone to “emotional contagion” in which they mimicked the type of content of others who posted on their feed. For example, those shown more negative comments posted more negative comments themselves.

Although the results were interesting, Facebook suffered a storm of criticism , with many referring to the social media platform as “terrifying” and “creepy.” The ethics of the experiment have since been debated heavily. 

 2. The O peration Midnight Climax

The US Military and CIA have an extensive history of conducting unusual psychological experiments.

One research project, dubbed Operation Midnight Climax, was conducted in the 1950s under the direction of Allen Dulles, the CIA Director at the time. It was a part of Project MKULTRA, the controversial series of experiments aimed at developing mind control techniques.

This operation was conducted with the motive of exploring the use of “mind-control” drugs and testing the effects of psychoactive drugs like LSD on individuals.

Unknowingly, clients were lured to CIA-run brothels by CIA-paid prostitutes, and psychoactive substances such as LSD were slipped into their drinks. These individuals were then monitored from behind a two-way mirror while they engaged in sexual activities.

The project’s activities expanded over the years to test other agents, such as stink bombs and heroin, on many unsuspecting people. The brothels were also popular with agents, who used them for “quickies.”

The agency shut down MKULTRA in the late 1960s after the CIA’s inspector general’s office  discovered the experiments . However, two related programs, MKSEARCH and Project OFTEN, continued until 1972 and 1973, respectively.

3.  The Aversion Project

The South African Aversion Project was yet another unethical psychology experiment that was conducted on people. Apartheid South Africa was an extremely dangerous place for homosexuals — both black and white. During that time, the government had strict anti-homosexual laws. Being gay was defined as abnormal and homosexuality was considered a mental illness. As a result, aversion therapies and techniques were applied to many South Africans to “cure” them of this illness.

Homosexuals were also often forced to join the military against their will. The Aversion Project mainly consisted of drugging lesbians and gay men, after which they were shown photos of same-sex erotica as they were subjected to electroconvulsive behavior therapy.

Thereafter, they were electrically shocked, and they were shown pictures of the opposite sex erotica. The technique obviously did not work, and the victims were then subjected to hormone therapy.

In some cases, this therapy also included chemical castration. Moreover, more than 900 men and women were forced to undergo a gender reassignment surgery to reorient them, without their consent, of course.

4.  Unnecessary sexual reassignment experiments

One tragic case came about as the result of poor decisions made after a surgical accident, when a seven-month-old Canadian boy was “accidentally castrated” while undergoing a routine circumcision.

After the penis of David Peter Reimer was accidentally maimed, a psychologist convinced his parents that the boy was more likely to successfully reach sexual maturation if he underwent sexual reassignment surgery as a female.

The psychologist, John Money, reported the reassignment was successful and used it as evidence that gender identity is primarily learned. However, as Reimer grew older, he came to realize that he was not a girl and at the age of 15, he transitioned to living as a male. Reimer eventually went public with his story to help discourage similar medical practices and the resulting furor changed medical practices in similar cases. Reimer killed himself at the age of 38, after suffering severe depression.

5.  The Milgram Experiments

A psychologist from Yale University named Stanley Milgram conducted one of the most notorious studies on obedience.

His psychological experiment consisted of analyzing the conflict between personal conscience and obedience to authority. In 1963, Milgram examined justifications that were offered by people accused of performing acts of genocide during World War II .

More often than not, they offered a defense based on the notion of “obedience” and argued that they were merely following their superior’s orders. Therefore, Milgram wanted to examine whether the Germans were somehow naturally obedient, or if there was another reason behind the cruelty.

Based on this experiment, Milgram chose participants through newspaper advertising, urging them to participate in a study at Yale University.

Each participant was then paired with another participant. One was the “learner”, and the other was the “teacher”. In each case, the learner was actually a confederate of Milgram who was pretending to be an actual participant.

The learner was taken to one room and the teacher was taken to the other. The teacher’s room consisted of an electric shock device, along with a row of switches labeled from 15 volts to 450 volts.

The aim of the experiment was to research exactly how far people were willing to go in order to obey an instruction, even if that entailed harming another person. The teacher was instructed to “shock” the student with increasingly high voltages. However, unbeknownst to the teacher, the switches were not real and the learner was faking their reaction. The fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real.

The experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of subjects would fully obey the instructions, albeit reluctantly.

6. The Stanford Prison Experiment

Eric. E Castro/Wikimedia

The SPE experiment was conducted in 1971 at Stanford University. It was one of the most compelling psychological studies and has become particularly notorious.

In the study, participants were assigned as either guards or inmates in a mock prison at the university. 

The premise of the experiment was that when people are given a certain amount of power over others, they will eventually start to abuse that power. On the flip side, people who are put in a powerless situation will often be driven to submission or even madness.

The experiment found that people who were assigned the role of guards became progressively more cruel and even became willing to inflict psychological torture, while many of the “inmates” passively accepted psychological abuse and actively harassed other prisoners who tried to stop it.

The experiment was abandoned early and has been criticized for using an unscientific methodology, such as instructing the participants on how to behave. Its findings have been called into question, too.

7.  The Monster Study

The Monster Study experiment of 1939 was an admirable experiment on the part of Dr. Wendell Johnson, who was a speech pathologist. He wanted to understand the cause of stuttering. Therefore, he conducted an experiment on a group of children at an orphanage in Davenport Iowa. Johnson did not agree with the prevalent belief that stuttering was an inborn trait that therefore could not be corrected.

As a part of the study, Johnson experimented on 22 orphans and put them into two groups of stutterers and non-stutterers.

Only half of the kids in the stuttering group were actually stutterers. Throughout the experiment, the non-stutterers enjoyed heavy praise, thanks to their conventional speech patterns.

On the other hand, the stuttering group continually received negative reinforcement, and they were always put on edge as a reminder not to stutter. Johnson concluded afterward that the kids who did have stutters in the stuttering group were actually worse off than before and the ones in the stuttering group who hadn’t stuttered before the experiment started stuttering by the end of the experiment.

Johnson established that the problem of stuttering was developmental instead of an innate trait, but he left many children with a lifelong struggle.

 8. The 1969 Monkey Drug Trials

13160449/iStock

The Monkey Drug Trial in 1969 is another one of those psychological experiments that entirely crossed the line.

Despite this trial helping psychologists understand drug addiction better, the three researchers who conducted this experiment at the University of Michigan Medical School completely overstepped their mark, making it another psychological experiment gone wrong.

The researchers hooked Macaque monkeys on illegal substances by injecting the unwitting primates with drugs such as cocaine, morphine, amphetamines, and alcohol.

They did this to see if the monkeys would later actively administer doses of these substances to themselves.

Many monkeys did, and the researchers were able to establish a link between psychological dependence and drug abuse . However, the experiment had questionable scientific value, as the same results might not be reproducible in humans.

In addition to that, despite the establishment of a link, the method was definitely unethical as well as cruel because some of the monkeys died during the experiment.

9. The Robbers Cave Experiment

Cummings Center for the History of Psychology/YouTube

The Robbers Cave Experiment was organized by psychologist Muzafer Sherif in the Robbers Cave State Park, Oklahoma.

Sherif recruited boys of the age group of 11 and 12 for the experiment and split them into two groups. The boys developed an attachment to their groups throughout the first week of the camp by doing various activities together, such as hiking, swimming, etc.

The two groups then spent four days competing with each other in many games. During the competitions, Sherif manipulated the results of the game to bring the game scores exceptionally close. Prejudice between the groups began to become apparent.

Then followed a two-day cooling-off period, where the boys tended to characterize their own group in very favorable terms, and the other group in very unfavorable terms.

Sherif then attempted to reduce the prejudice or inter-group conflict. However, simply increasing the contact of the two groups only made the situation worse, whereas forcing the groups to work together to reach common goals, eased prejudice and tension among the groups.

The experiment confirmed Sherif’s realistic conflict theory (also called realistic group conflict theory) — the idea that group conflict can result from competition over resources.

This experiment is clearly controversial as it uses children as test subjects without their consent or even awareness.

 10. The  Brown-Eyed vs. Blue-Eyed Student Experiments

Jane Elliott was a third-grade teacher who became known for her brown eyes/blue eyes exercise. This experiment went on to demonstrate the impact of racism on education .

The morning after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Elliott told her class that the way in which things were done was going to change. She placed the blue-eyed children at the front of the classroom.

They were given  additional recess time , the pride of place in the front of the classroom, a second helping of food during lunch, and active participation in class discussions.

At the same time, the brown-eyed children had to sit at the back of the class; moreover, they were severely reprimanded for all those things that the blue-eyed kids usually got away with. Elliott even went through all the trouble of making up a scientific fact that supposedly stated blue-eyed people are more intelligent than brown-eyed ones, thanks to the presence of melanin.

The results of the study were stunning. The blue-eyed students performed much better in the assignments whereas those brown-eyed students who usually showed a much better performance in the class were found struggling.

The blue-eyed students also became vicious toward the brown-eyed ones. The next day, Elliott reversed the exercise, and the same results were found. However, the brown-eyed students were not as vicious with their taunts. At the end of the exercise, both groups of children hugged each other and cried. They had learned an essential lesson in racism, even though the process was completely unethical.

 11.  The Little Albert Experiment

John B Watson/Wikimedia

John Watson is a popular psychologist, and people know him as the “Father of Behaviorism.” He was known to use orphans in many of his experiments.

In one of these especially unethical and well-known experiments, Watson employed  Little Albert, a nine-month-old orphan.

In this experiment, Watson exposed Little Albert to many sights and sounds. This included monkeys, rabbits, different masks, and a burning newspaper. In the second part of the experiment, Little Albert was introduced to a white rat.

Much like the earlier things, Little Albert was not scared of the rat. But then, every time Albert touched the rat, Watson made loud noises with a bar made of steel.

This distressed Little Albert as he thought that the noise was coming from the rat. Over time, he showed fear of anything white and/or fluffy. This demonstrated Watson’s hypothesis that it was possible to condition the element of fear in people.

12. Project QKHILLTOP

Mike Mcclaughry

Project QKHILLTOP  was a CIA-developed experiment to study Chinese brainwashing techniques. This shocking psychological experiment was born out of the CIA’s desire to create more effective methods of interrogation. Led by Dr. Harold Wolff of Cornell University Medical School, the controversial experiments explored drugs, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, brainwashing, and hypnoses on various subjects. 

13. University of Pennsylvania testing prison inmates 

In 1951, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania began experimenting on inmates at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg Prison. For 20 years, Dr. Albert M. Kligman tested toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, skin creams, detergents, liquid diets, eye drops, foot powders, and hair dyes on inmates’ skin, to determine if they were safe to use. The tests required constant skin biopsies and painful procedures. 

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History has shown the cruelty of humans towards other human beings and species in their quest to find answers to some questions. In this quest, they forgot about ethics and morals which led to severe repercussions and in some cases, scarred adulthood where children are involved.

However, it is good that people have learned from history and now, researchers need to seek prior permission before conducting experiments with human subjects.

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Kashyap Vyas <p>Kashyap Vyas is an entrepreneur, marketer and writer. He holds a Master&rsquo;s degree in Thermal Engineering with several research papers to his credit. Kashyap primarily authors in-depth content in the science &amp; technology space. You can find more about him on LinkedIn.</p>

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Ugly past of U.S. human experiments uncovered

Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States — studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect — they violated the concept of "first do no harm," a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

"When you give somebody a disease — even by the standards of their time — you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Attitude similar to Nazi experiments Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the '60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society — people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

"There was definitely a sense — that we don't have today — that sacrifice for the nation was important," said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.

The AP review of past research found:

• A federally funded study begun in 1942 injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later. It was co-authored by Dr. Jonas Salk, who a decade later would become famous as inventor of the polio vaccine.

Some of the men weren't able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were "senile and debilitated." Then it quickly moved on to the promising results.

• In federally funded studies in the 1940s, noted researcher Dr. W. Paul Havens Jr. exposed men to hepatitis in a series of experiments, including one using patients from mental institutions in Middletown and Norwich, Conn. Havens, a World Health Organization expert on viral diseases, was one of the first scientists to differentiate types of hepatitis and their causes.

A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.

• Researchers in the mid-1940s studied the transmission of a deadly stomach bug by having young men swallow unfiltered stool suspension. The study was conducted at the New York State Vocational Institution, a reformatory prison in West Coxsackie. The point was to see how well the disease spread that way as compared to spraying the germs and having test subjects breathe it. Swallowing it was a more effective way to spread the disease, the researchers concluded. The study doesn't explain if the men were rewarded for this awful task.
• A University of Minnesota study in the late 1940s injected 11 public service employee volunteers with malaria, then starved them for five days. Some were also subjected to hard labor, and those men lost an average of 14 pounds. They were treated for malarial fevers with quinine sulfate. One of the authors was Ancel Keys, a noted dietary scientist who developed K-rations for the military and the Mediterranean diet for the public. But a search of various news archives found no mention of the study.
• For a study in 1957, when the Asian flu pandemic was spreading, federal researchers sprayed the virus in the noses of 23 inmates at Patuxent prison in Jessup, Md., to compare their reactions to those of 32 virus-exposed inmates who had been given a new vaccine.
• Government researchers in the 1950s tried to infect about two dozen volunteering prison inmates with gonorrhea using two different methods in an experiment at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The bacteria was pumped directly into the urinary tract through the penis, according to their paper.

The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn't comparable to how men normally got infected — by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives.

Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.

Victims for science Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. In 1915, the U.S. government's Dr. Joseph Goldberger — today remembered as a public health hero — recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)

But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, "devitalized men" by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.

Newspapers wrote about Stanley's experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.

"Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth — an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. All this has been done, is being done ... by a surgeon with a scalpel," began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.

Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. For example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.

It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the "Nuremberg Code," a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities — not to American medicine.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.

But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public's attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.

The first came to light in 1963. Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them.

The hospital director said the patients were not told they were being injected with cancer cells because there was no need — the cells were deemed harmless. But the experiment upset a lawyer named William Hyman who sat on the hospital's board of directors. The state investigated, and the hospital ultimately said any such experiments would require the patient's written consent.

At nearby Staten Island, from 1963 to 1966, a controversial medical study was conducted at the Willowbrook State School for children with mental retardation. The children were intentionally given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured with gamma globulin.

Those two studies — along with the Tuskegee experiment revealed in 1972 — proved to be a "holy trinity" that sparked extensive and critical media coverage and public disgust, said Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College historian who first discovered records of the syphilis study in Guatemala.

'My back is on fire!' By the early 1970s, even experiments involving prisoners were considered scandalous. In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward "Yusef" Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison.

"I said 'Oh my God, my back is on fire! Take this ... off me!'" Anthony said in an interview with The Associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain.

The government responded with reforms. Among them: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the mid-1970s effectively excluded all research by drug companies and other outside agencies within federal prisons.

As the supply of prisoners and mental patients dried up, researchers looked to other countries.

It made sense. Clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules. And it was easy to find patients who were taking no medication, a factor that can complicate tests of other drugs.

Additional sets of ethical guidelines have been enacted, and few believe that another Guatemala study could happen today. "It's not that we're out infecting anybody with things," Caplan said.

Still, in the last 15 years, two international studies sparked outrage.

One was likened to Tuskegee. U.S.-funded doctors failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns. U.S. health officials argued the study would answer questions about AZT's use in the developing world.

The other study, by Pfizer Inc., gave an antibiotic named Trovan to children with meningitis in Nigeria, although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease. Critics blamed the experiment for the deaths of 11 children and the disabling of scores of others. Pfizer settled a lawsuit with Nigerian officials for $75 million but admitted no wrongdoing.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general reported that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown. The report also noted that U.S. regulators inspected fewer than 1 percent of foreign clinical trial sites.

Monitoring research is complicated, and rules that are too rigid could slow new drug development. But it's often hard to get information on international trials, sometimes because of missing records and a paucity of audits, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine who has written on the ethics of international studies.

Syphilis study These issues were still being debated when, last October, the Guatemala study came to light.

In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.

Story: U.S. apologizes for Guatemala syphilis experiments

The Guatemala study nauseated ethicists on multiple levels. Beyond infecting patients with a terrible illness, it was clear that people in the study did not understand what was being done to them or were not able to give their consent. Indeed, though it happened at a time when scientists were quick to publish research that showed frank disinterest in the rights of study participants, this study was buried in file drawers.

"It was unusually unethical, even at the time," said Stark, the Wesleyan researcher.

"When the president was briefed on the details of the Guatemalan episode, one of his first questions was whether this sort of thing could still happen today," said Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

That it occurred overseas was an opening for the Obama administration to have the bioethics panel seek a new evaluation of international medical studies. The president also asked the Institute of Medicine to further probe the Guatemala study, but the IOM relinquished the assignment in November, after reporting its own conflict of interest: In the 1940s, five members of one of the IOM's sister organizations played prominent roles in federal syphilis research and had links to the Guatemala study.

So the bioethics commission gets both tasks. To focus on federally funded international studies, the commission has formed an international panel of about a dozen experts in ethics, science and clinical research. Regarding the look at the Guatemala study, the commission has hired 15 staff investigators and is working with additional historians and other consulting experts.

The panel is to send a report to Obama by September. Any further steps would be up to the administration.

Some experts say that given such a tight deadline, it would be a surprise if the commission produced substantive new information about past studies. "They face a really tough challenge," Caplan said.

Inside 7 Of The Most Horrific Psychological Experiments Ever Performed

From the little albert experiment that terrorized a helpless infant to the monster study that tried to turn non-stuttering children into stutterers, these are some of the most disturbing psychology experiments ever performed on humans..

Psychology is a relatively new scientific field. While inquiries into the workings of the human mind technically trace back to the ancient Greeks, psychology did not officially become a field of academic and scientific study until the 1800s, with many citing Wilhelm Wundt’s 1873 book, Principles of Physiological Psychology and his subsequent founding of the first psychology lab in 1879 as the modern origin of the field.

Wundt primarily focused on the study of human consciousness, and he applied several experimental methods to move his research forward. The German professor’s work was very much “of the time” and can be viewed as unscientific by today’s standards, but his influence on the field is undeniable.

Over a century after Wundt opened his psychology lab, the field of psychology has grown exponentially, and researchers have gained a far deeper understanding of the human mind and human behavior. However, there have been some serious missteps along the way.

The American Psychological Association (APA) didn’t establish its first Code of Ethics until 1953. Before that, human psychology experiments had far more potential risk. The original guidelines have, of course, been adapted and added to over the past 70 years as well — and for good reason.

Below, you’ll find seven examples of disturbing and highly unethical psychology experiments conducted on human subjects.

Disturbing Psychology Experiments: The Little Albert Experiment (1920)

YouTube Psychologist John Watson wearing a Santa Claus mask and scaring “Little Albert.”

Ivan Pavlov’s experiments into classical conditioning are perhaps the most famous psychology experiments of all time. The Russian psychologist found that he could condition dogs to drool when they heard a dinner bell ring — even if there was no dinner in front of them — by creating an association in their minds between the bell being rung and dinner being served.

About 20 years later, in 1920, Johns Hopkins University researchers John Watson and Rosalie Rayner sought to prove that classical conditioning could work on humans just as effectively as it had on Pavlov’s dogs.

Their tests are now known as the Little Albert Experiment .

Throughout the course of the study, Watson and Rayner presented a nine-month-old baby, whom they called “Little Albert,” with several fluffy animals like a rabbit and a white rat. At first, the infant showed no negative reaction to any of the animals and even tried to pet them.

But then, when he was presented with one of the animals again, the researchers would strike a hammer against a steel pipe. The sudden and loud noise scared the baby, and he would start to cry.

Eventually, Albert came to fear anything that resembled the fluffy animals, including his family’s dogs and a bearded Santa Claus mask. His mother, who realized how traumatized he was, pulled him from the study before Watson and Rayner could attempt to reverse the conditioning.

The study is controversial for several reasons. First, creating a fear response is a form of psychological harm that is prohibited in modern experiments — and it was heavily critiqued at the time, as well. Second, the study only had one subject, which effectively rendered it pointless as studies of this nature need a much larger sample size in order for conclusions to be drawn.

Worst of all, however, is that Albert’s ultimate fate remains unknown to this day, and since his conditioning was never reversed, he quite possibly spent the rest of his life afraid of harmless objects and animals.

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• Neuroscience

Some of psychology's most influential studies were also completely unethical

by Susannah Locke

Some of the most important studies in the history of psychology couldn’t be done today — because they were incredibly unethical.

That includes the “Little Albert” study from 1920, in which researchers purposefully terrified a small child to study how fear works. It also includes the famous Stanford prison experiment of 1971, in which subjects acted as prison guards and mistreated fake inmates — a powerful look at how cultural roles can influence behavior. These studies and their findings were hugely influential. They would also — for good reason — be barred from happening today.

Many of these important studies can no longer be replicated

Nowadays, all research being conducted with federal funding has to be reviewed for several ethical criteria. For example, the benefits to society have to outweigh the risks to the participants. And volunteers have to fully consent, understand the risks, and know that they can quit at any time.

These rules also mean that many of those important earlier studies — like the Stanford prison experiment — can’t be replicated exactly. So it’s hard to truly test the methods and conclusions of some of the most foundational studies in psychology. And that means that we’re always going to be debating what, exactly, these studies really mean.

So here’s a look at three of the most important psychology studies that you could never get away with today:

1) The “Little Albert” study

( John Watson, via Wikimedia )

For a study published in 1920, researchers John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner, of Johns Hopkins University, trained a baby boy they called Albert to irrationally fear a white rat and other objects. They did so by repeatedly putting the rat near the baby while striking a steel bar with a hammer to make a terrible, scary noise.

By the end of the experiment, the baby was also terrified of lots of other objects with similar qualities, including a fur coat and a Santa Claus mask with a white beard. The researchers were planning to re-train Albert to not fear these things, but Albert and his family disappeared.

There are many hypotheses for who Albert was. A thorough investigation published in 2009 in the journal of the American Psychological Association concluded that Albert was most likely a boy named Douglas Merritte, the son of a Johns Hopkins wet nurse who left the job at about the same time Albert left the study. Whether or not Albert suffered any long-term effects from this research is still unclear.

Today, scientists could never get away with repeatedly terrifying a small child like this. But t he Little Albert study is widely regarded as the first significant example of learned reflexive responses — or "conditioning" — in a human. ( Ivan Pavlov had already showed conditioning in dogs, which he had trained to salivate when they heard a sound.) That turned out to be important. Conditioning is at the heart of many types of psychological therapy today, including treatments for some addictions and phobias .

2) The Milgram Shock Experiment 5

Ontario Science Centre Milgram electric box ( Isabelle/Flickr )

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Stanley Milgram produced a series of experiments investigating the nature of obedience. In the most famous one, researchers told participants to administer progressively stronger electric shocks to a person in an adjacent room for each wrong answer he gave on a test. (The participants were told that this was a study about learning methods.)

The “learner” was actually in on the study. At one point, after every shock, he started yelling in pain and demanding that it stop. Still, a researcher encouraged the participant to continue giving shocks.

And they did. 65 percent of participants continued shocking until the voltage simply couldn’t go any higher — so high that the learner had stopped making noise and was presumably incapacitated or dead. In other words, these people were willing to injure or possibly even kill someone else just because a researcher had told them to. And the participants had to learn this about themselves.

This experiment has been exceptionally influential in the field of social psychology. It appeared to show how everyday people could act inhumanely in obedience to an authority figure — such as was demonstrated in the atrocities of World War II.

But this study couldn’t get carried out in its entirety today. Although some degree of deception is common in many studies, the anguish of thinking that you’ve severely hurt or killed someone is just too great to justify. And that means the study will always remain subject to much debate.

In 2009, a study went as far as the learner’s first protest and found similar obedience rates at that point. But we’ll never really know if people today would still go all the way.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

( Shutterstock )

In 1971, psychologists recruited male college students to play prisoners or guards 24 hours a day for two weeks at a mock prison in the basement of a Stanford building. This later became known as The Stanford Prison Experiment .

Even though the roles were randomly assigned, some of the guards became so cruel (including sometimes banning clothing and the right to use the toilet, and using increasingly strenuous exercise as punishment) that the researchers stopped the experiment after just six days. And within those six days, several prisoners freaked out so badly that they had to be let go, and one even went on a hunger strike.

Even more remarkable, many of the "prisoners" stayed even though they were clearly in a lot of distress — possibly because they didn't realize they could leave. Today, psychology researchers are expected to tell participants that they have the right to withdraw at any time. But that didn't happen in this study.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, run by psychologist Philip Zimbardo, is one of the most famous pieces of evidence that cultural roles can have an exceptionally strong influence on people’s behavior. It’s become one of the most talked about studies in all of social psychology. But it’s also been contentious. Other researchers have raised questions about the study’s methodology and conclusions. For example, recent news reports about prison brutality may have led participants to simply give psychologists the drama they thought they wanted. And the exact wording of Zimbardo’s instructions may have egged them on.

To really get a sense of how valid the study was, researchers would ideally want to replicate it in full. But good luck trying to do that. “No behavioral research that puts people in that kind of setting can ever be done again in America,” Zimbardo told Stanford’s alumni magazine in 2011.

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The victims of unethical human experiments and coerced research under National Socialism

Paul weindling.

1 Oxford Brookes University, History, Philosophy and Religion, Headington Campus, Oxford OX3 0BP, United Kingdom

Anna von Villiez

2 Independent Data Analyst

Aleksandra Loewenau

3 Oxford Brookes University, Centre for Medical Humanities, Department of History, Philosophy and Religion, Gypsy Lane, Oxford OX3 0BP, United Kingdom

4 University of Calgary, Cumming School of Medicine, 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary T2N 1N4, Canada

Nichola Farron

5 Independent Holocaust Historian

• • Human experiments were more extensive than often assumed with a minimum of 15,750 documented victims.
• • Experiments rapidly increased from 1942, reaching a high point in 1943 and sustained until the end of the war.
• • There were more victims who survived than were killed as part of or as a result of the experiments. Many survived with severe injuries.
• • Victims came from diverse nationalities with Poles (Jews and Roman Catholics) as the largest national cohort.
• • Body parts, especially from euthanasia killings, were often retained for research and teaching after 1945.

There has been no full evaluation of the numbers of victims of Nazi research, who the victims were, and of the frequency and types of experiments and research. This paper gives the first results of a comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of the different categories of victims. Human experiments were more extensive than often assumed with a minimum of 15,754 documented victims. Experiments rapidly increased from 1942, reaching a high point in 1943. The experiments remained at a high level of intensity despite imminent German defeat in 1945. There were more victims who survived than were killed as part of or as a result of the experiments, and the survivors often had severe injuries.

The coerced human experiments and research under National Socialism constitute a reference point in modern bioethics. 7 Yet discussions of consent and the need for safeguards for research subjects to date lack a firm basis in historical evidence. There has been no full evaluation of the numbers of victims of Nazi research, who the victims were, and of the frequency and types of experiments and research. The one partial estimate is restricted to experiments cited at the Nuremberg Medical Trial. This paper gives the first results of a comprehensive evidence-based evaluation of the different categories of victims. In 1945 liberated prisoners from German concentration camps began to collect evidence of the experiments.

The scientific intelligence officer John Thompson then pointed out not only that 90% of all medical research under National Socialism was criminal, but also the need to evaluate all criminal experiments under National Socialism, and not just those whose perpetrators were available for arrest and prosecution. 8 The Nuremberg Medical Trial of 1946–47 was necessarily selective as to who was available for prosecution, and since then only clusters of victims have been identified. 9 In the early 1980s Günther Schwarberg named a set of child victims: his reconstruction the life histories of the ‘twenty children’ killed after transport from Auschwitz for a tuberculosis immunisation experiment at Neuengamme concentration camp was exemplary. 10 The question arises whether what Schwarberg achieved in microcosm can be achieved for the totality of victims. Our aim is to identify not just clusters of victims but all victims of unethical medical research under National Socialism. The methodology is that of record linkage to reconstruct life histories of the total population of all such research victims. This allows one to place individual survivors and groups of victims within a wider context.

This project on the victims of Nazi medical research represents the fulfilment of Thompson's original scheme of a complete record of all coerced experiments and their victims. 11 Our project identifies for the first time the victims of Nazi coercive research, and reconstructs their life histories as far as possible. Biographical data found in many different archives and collections is linked to compile a full life history, and subjective narratives and administrative data are compared. Results are aggregated here as cohorts because of undertakings as regards anonymisation, given in order to gain access to key sources. All data is verifiable through the project database.

The criterion for unethical research is whether coercion by researchers was involved, or whether the location was coercive. The project has covered involuntary research in clinical contexts as psychiatric hospitals, incarceration in concentration camps and prisoner of war camps, the ‘euthanasia’ killings of psychiatric patients with subsequent retention of body parts for research, and executions of political victims, when body parts were sent to university anatomical institutes, and persons subjected to anthropological research in coercive and life threatening situations as ghettoes and concentration camps.

Without a reliable, evidence-based historical analysis, compensation for surviving victims has involved many problems. Victim numbers have been consistently underestimated from the first compensation scheme in 1951 when the assumption was of only few hundred survivors. 12 The assumption was that most experiments were fatal. This project's use of several thousand compensation records in countries where victims lived (as Poland) or migrated to (as Israel), or were collected by the United Nations or the German government has corrected this impression. The availability of person-related evidence from the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen further helps to determine whether a victim survived. Major repositories of documents like the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Yad Vashem archives, court records in war crimes proceedings, and oral history collections notably the Shoah Foundation have been consulted. Record linkage of named records is essential for the project, and shows how a single person could be the victim of research on multiple occasions. Father Leon Michałowski, born 22 March 1909 in Wąbrzeźno, was subjected to malaria in August 1942 and then to freezing experiments in October 1942 ( Figure 1 ).

Malaria card of Father Bruno Stachowski from Claus Schilling's research at Dachau. Approximately 1000 cards were kept back from destruction by the prisoner assistant Eugène Ost. International Tracing Service, source number 1079406301.

A further issue relates to the methods and organisation of the research. From the 1950s the experiments were viewed as ‘pseudo-science’, in effect marginalising them from mainstream science under National Socialism. For the purpose of this study, the experiments have been viewed as part of mainstream German medical research, as this renders rationales and supportive networks historically intelligible. It is clear that prestigious research institutions such as the Kaiser Wilhelm Society and funding agencies such as the German Research Fund were involved. 13 It has been argued more recently that some experiments were cutting edge science. 14 Another view is that the approach and methods were scientific albeit of varying quality. For the purpose of this study, the experiments have been viewed as part of mainstream German medical research, as this renders rationales and supportive networks intelligible.

Defining what constitutes research is problematic. For example, a listing of operations in a concentration camp may be nothing more than a clinical record, may have been undertaken by young surgeons seeking to improve their skills, or may indeed have involved research. As stated above, only confirmed data of research has been utilised in the project's category of a verified instance of unethical research. The only exception is the corpses sent to anatomical institutes for research purposes. 15 Separating these out often does not appear possible, but the project includes anatomical research on body parts and brains as separate categories.

The project has graded victim evidence into two categories, so that there should be a set of verifiable and proven victims established as incontestable evidence of having been a victim. The unexpectedly high numbers of identified experiment victims makes this necessary. The two categories are:

• 1. those who were identified as confirmed victims through a reliable source such as experimental records kept at the time.
• 2. those who have claimed to have been experimented on, but confirmation could not so far be obtained.

The project did not set out to adjudicate on the authenticity of victims’ claims. In Warsaw ca. 3600 compensation files of victims of human experiments were viewed, while there are a further 10,000 files representing claims deemed unsuccessful. It is sometimes unclear whether extensive injuries were retrospectively defined to have resulted from an experiment to meet the criteria of the compensation scheme offered by the Federal Republic of Germany in various forms since 1951, or whether experimentation had taken place in a hitherto unknown location. The project discounted claims of abuse when no experiment or research was involved, or when victims having misunderstood compensation schemes for experiments being about ‘experiences’. It is hoped that further research will provide confirmation of experiments in disputed locations like the concentration camps of Stutthof and Theresienstadt. 16 While Yugoslav victims were abused for experiments in German concentration camps, claims for experiments in the former Yugoslavia and Northern Norway have not so far been confirmed. The grading of victims’ claims into the verified and as yet unverified enable the project to establish verifiable minimum numbers, while indicating the possibility of higher numbers being confirmed by further research.

Project findings

The project is able to present results on: how many victims were killed in the course of the experiment, how many died from the consequences of the experiment or were killed as potential evidence of Nazi criminality, and how many survived? The project has covered experiments, as the most notorious experiments taken to the point of death and supported by the SS in concentration camps, as well as dispersed experiments in a variety of clinical contexts, particularly on psychiatric patients. Some sets of experiments and locations, not least those sponsored by German pharmaceutical companies remain shadowy, and require more detailed research possibly on the basis of further disclosure of documents held in company archives. The extent of involvement of German pharmaceutical companies like that of IG-Farben (using the branded product names of ‘Bayer’, ‘Hoechst’ and ‘Behringwerke’) remains contentious. The company supplied Helmuth Vetter with samples for experiments at Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Similarly problematic is the extent that Schering-Kahlbaum supported Clauberg's uses of X-ray contrast fluids and a substance to seal the fallopian tubes at Auschwitz. Initially, Clauberg asked for deliveries to his clinic at Königshütte (so making the experiments appear as taking place in a consensual clinical context), but later on to Auschwitz. The extent that the company's senior staff knew that their employee and Clauberg's pharmaceutical assistant Johannes Goebel worked at Auschwitz is contentious ( Figure 2 ). 17

Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann at Block 10 in Auschwitz. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum W/S #67417.

The occurrence of unethical research provides insight into the structure of Nazi medical research. The project traced how Nazi coercive research began in the context of eugenic research in the mid-1930s. After numbers of experiments dipped in 1940 due to military call-up of medical researchers, the research rapidly intensified both in terms of numbers of experiments and victims, and in terms of severity for victims. This can be seen from 1942 with the notorious and often fatal experiments on low pressure, exposure to freezing temperatures, and infectious diseases when research could be taken to the point of death. Pharmacological experiments on therapies for tetanus, typhus and typhoid were spurred by the realisation that Allied military medical research on infectious diseases was outstripping German military medical expertise. From November 1942 racial priorities came increasingly to the fore, as exemplified by Schumann's X-ray sterilisation experiments on Jews in Auschwitz.

Victims were a highly international group. The above table ( Table 1 ) shows numbers of nationalities, using nationality as in 1938. The table indicates the distribution of nationalities. The largest national group, that of Polish victims, includes both Roman Catholics and Jews. There were high numbers of German and Austrian victims, in part as a result of the experiments and dissections that accompanied the killing of psychiatric patients. While there were other large groups, there are also smaller national groups, as Swiss, British and Irish, all highly remarkable in how their citizens became caught up in the experimentation. We find victims include a Swiss conscientious objector used for malaria experiments at Dachau, and British commandos captured in Norway used for amphetamine and high performance experiments on the shoe track at Sachsenhausen, and subsequently executed.

Nationality (as at March 1938).

Statistics on gender indicate a proportion of male to female of approximately 2:1 ( Table 2 ). One possible reason is the high number of military experiments as related to infectious diseases. Another is that more men than women were held in concentration camps, so that there was a higher male availability in the predominately male camps. In Ravensbrück the situation was reversed with the large female camp and a small male compound ( Figure 3 ).

Clandestine photograph of a mutilated leg of the Polish political prisoner Bogumiła Babińska-Dobrowska at Ravensbrück concentration camp. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Anna Hassa Jarosky and Peter Hassa W/S #69340.

While for most nationalities male victims were the majority, in the case of certain national groups, female victims were in the majority. This is the case for victim groups from the Netherlands (in the case of sterilisation at Auschwitz), and Greece (for the Jewish skeleton collection). Children were often victims of experiments in psychiatric clinics. Later in the war, Roma and Jewish children were targeted for research by Mengele in Auschwitz.

The statistics show the age distribution was the same for men and women. While there was a very wide age spectrum, the peak is of victims born in 1921, so in their early twenties at the time of the experiment ( Figure 4 ). Several hundred Jewish children were held by Mengele for twin research, and batches of Jewish children were dispatched for hepatitis and tuberculosis research, and body parts of small children were retained by psychiatric researchers.

Age of victims at the start of experiment.

Ethnicity and religion have been recorded, as for the definitively confirmed experiment victims ( Table 3 ). Here, one is thrown back on the categories imposed by the Nazis. Thus a victim of the Jewish skeleton collection for the anatomy department at Strasbourg was baptised Protestant. 18 Generally, the Nazis used the generic and stigmatising term of ‘Zigeuner’ or gypsy rather than the self-identifying terms of ‘Sinti’ and ‘Roma’.

In addition to the experiment victims are Roma and Sinti victims of large scale anthropological investigations of Ritter, Justin, and Ehrhardt, amounting to at least a further 21,498 persons ( Figure 5 ).

A gypsy used for seawater experiments in Dachau to test methods of making seawater drinkable, ca. July–September 1944. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of National Archives and Records Administration, College Park W/S #78688.

If however one takes the year 1943 we find a higher proportion of Jewish victims, in part because of the intensification of experiments on Jews (particularly on women and children) at Auschwitz and Auschwitz-Birkenau. This would again indicate that there was an intensification of racial research ( Table 4 ).

Victim number indicates how from 1942 onwards there was an overall intensification of research ( Figure 6 ).

Start year of experiments.

The life history approach allows appraisal of both experiments and victim numbers over time. The period 1933–39 shows sporadic experimentation in the context of racial hygiene. Mixed race adolescents were sterilised and evaluated by anthropologists. The concerns of racial hygiene with mental illness explain why psychiatrists and neurologists conducted experiments in psychiatric institutions. The psychiatrist Georg Schaltenbrand pointed out that his neurological research subjects were transferred to other institutions, many as we now know to be killed. This interrupted his research on the transmissibility of multiple sclerosis. The numbers of brains and body parts increased. From 1942 onwards there was an overall intensification of research.

The chart ( Figure 7 ) shows when experiments started, but not the distribution of victims over time.

Victims by start year of each experiment.

The largest series of experiments were for infectious diseases. Malaria research at Dachau between 1942 and 1945 had 1091 confirmed victims, and after infection different combinations of drugs were tested. These experiments by Schilling began in 1942 and remarkably Schilling tried to continue the research after the liberation of the camp. 19

He pleaded at his trial to be allowed to continue the research, albeit on volunteers. The highest numbers were in 1943. The momentum continued even though the war was clearly lost. Other large groups included the twins researched on by Mengele, and to date 618 individuals are known ( Figure 8 ).

Twins Frank (lt) and Otto (rt) Klein attend a world gathering of survivors of Dr. Joseph Mengele's medical experiments at Auschwitz. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum W/S #05586.

The overall findings provide an accurate basis for analysis of experiments to date. First, nearly a quarter of confirmed victims were either killed to obtain their organs for research, or died as a result of experiments taking the research subject to the point of death (notoriously, the experiments on freezing and low pressure at Dachau). The euthanasia killings and executions were sources of bodies for research, and the extent that this happened and research conducted before and after the end of the war is still being documented. Of the fully documented victims died 781 died before the end of the war as a result of the experiments: research subjects were weakened by the strain of the experiment such as a deliberate infection or severe cold, or they were deliberately killed because it was feared that they would testify against the perpetrators ( Table 5 ).

Fatalities.

While, most subjects survived, amounting to 24,010 persons, many had severe physical disabilities with life-long consequences. 20

The analysis presented here shows that several types of unethical medical research occurred under National Socialism. Not only were large numbers of victims affected, but also overall, numbers of surviving victims were far higher than anticipated. The survivors were often seriously disabled and handicapped for the remainder of their lives. The experiments gained in numbers with the war and the implementation of the Holocaust, and were sustained at a high level of intensity despite imminent defeat.

One issue arising is that body parts of deceased victims were retained by medical research and teaching institutes, notably for anatomy and brain research. While there was meant to be full disclosure of specimens deriving from euthanasia victims and executed persons by 1990, specimens continue to be identified. 21 The complex data is to be further augmented and refined, the history of specimens retained for research during and after WW2 is being documented, and the narratives of survivors analysed in order to understand more fully the consequences of coerced research. This research provides a basis in historical evidence for discussions of the ethics of coerced medical research.

Acknowledgments

Wellcome Trust Grant No 096580/Z/11/A on research subject narratives.

AHRC GRANT AH/E509398/1 Human Experiments under National Socialism.

Conference for Jewish Material Claims Against Germany Application 8229/Fund SO 29.

7 Annas G, Grodin M. The Nazi Doctors and the Nuremberg Code . New York: Oxford University Press; 1992; Weindling P. Nazi Medicine and the Nuremberg Trials: From Medical War Crimes to Informed Consent . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2000.

8 Weindling P. John Thompson (1906–1965): Psychiatrist in the Shadow of the Holocaust . Rochester: Rochester University Press; 2010.

9 Klee E. Auschwitz, die NS-Medizin und ihre Opfer . Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag; 1997; Mitscherlich A, Mielke F. Wissenschaft ohne Menschlichkeit . Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider; 1949. See also Schwarberg G. The Murders at Bullenhuser Damm: The SS Doctor and the Children . Bloomington: Indiana University Press; 1984.

10 Lang H-J. Die Namen der Nummern: Wie es gelang, die 86 Opfer eines NS-Verbrechens zu identifizieren. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe; 2004.

11 Brody H, Leonard S, Nie J-B, Weindling P. United States Responses to Japanese Wartime Inhuman Experimentation after World War II: National Security and Wartime Exigency. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2014; 23: 220–230.

12 Baumann S. Menschenversuche und Wiedergutmachung . München: Oldenbourg; 2009.

13 Schwerin A von. Experimentalisierung des Menschen: Der Genetiker Hans Nachtsheim und die vergleichende Erbpathologie 1920–1945 . Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag; 2004; Schmuhl H-W. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, 1927–1945: Crossing Boundaries . Dordrecht: Springer; 2008.

14 Roelcke V. Fortschritt ohne Rücksicht, In: Eschebach I, Ley A. eds . Geschlecht und “Rasse” in der NS-Medizin . Berlin: Metropol Verlag; 2012: 101–114.

15 Hildebrandt S. Anatomy in the Third Reich: An outline, Part 1. National Socialist politics, anatomical institutions, and anatomists. Clinical Anatomy 2009; 22: 883–893.

16 Hunt N. The Soviet Experience of Nazi Medicine: Statistics, Stories and Stereotypes . MPhil thesis, Oxfrod Brookes University; 2011; and Loewenau A. The impact of Nazi medical experiments on Polish inmates at Dachau, Auschwitz and Ravensbück . PhD thesis, Oxford Brookes University; 2012.

17 Weindling, P. Victims and Survivors of Nazi Human Experiments: Science and suffering in the Holocaust. London: Bloomsbury; 2014.

18 www.die-namen-der-nummern.de/html/the_names.html (accessed 8 October 2014).

19 Eckart WU, Vondra H. Malaria and World War II: German malaria experiments 1939–45 . Parassitologia 2000; 42:53–58.

20 Loewenau A. Die “Kaninchen” von Ravensbrück: Eine Fotogeschichte. In: Eschebach I, Ley A eds. Geschlecht und “Rasse” in der NS-Medizin . Berlin: Metropol Verlag; 2012:115–140.

21 Weindling P. “Cleansing” Anatomical Collections: The Politics of Removing Specimens from German Anatomical and Medical Collections 1988–92. Annals of Anatomy 2012; 194:237–242.

Topic: Human Experimentation

Addressing social justice through the lens of henrietta lacks.

Among the many disruptions of the pandemic, one particular disappointment was the cancellation of the in-person annual meeting of the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities (ASBH), scheduled for Baltimore and set to coincide with the Berman Institute’s 25th Anniversary Celebration and the centennial of Henrietta Lacks’s birth. Yet despite the switch to a virtual format, the Berman Institute was able to host a plenary session that was the talk of the meeting and continues to reverberate.

“Social Justice and Bioethics Through the Lens of the Story of Henrietta Lacks,” was moderated by Jeffrey Kahn and featured Ruth Faden as a panelist. She was joined by Henrietta Lacks’s granddaughter, Jeri Lacks, architect Victor Vines, and Georgetown University Law Center bioethicist Patricia King.

Faden began the session by providing an overview of the Henrietta Lacks story, famed in the context of structural injustice.

“The structural injustice of racism defined in pretty much every way how this story unfolded,” she said. “What is wrong about what happened to the Lacks family engages every core element of human well-being. There were assaults on the social basis of respect, and of self-determination, on attachments, on personal security and on health. Mrs. Lacks and her children were poor Black people in a segregated world in which the most profound injustices of racial oppression were daily features of their lives.”

Faden was followed by Jeri Lacks who expressed the importance of continuing to let the world know about her grandmother’s story.

“Her cells were used to develop the polio vaccine and to treat HIV, and in creating in vitro fertilization. She is a person who continues to give life, and to preserve life,” said Lacks. “No matter what your race, your age, your social circumstances, she continues to improve your life.”

Victor Vines, an architect who was part of the architect team leading programming and planning for the National Museum of African American History and Culture and led the feasibility study for what will be Johns Hopkins University’s Henrietta Lacks Hall, spoke next about addressing racial injustice through architecture and design.

“When we started work on Lacks Hall, we didn’t talk a lot about architecture or design. We talked about what that story is that we want to tell through the building. Meeting with the Lacks family was critically important to that,” Vines said. “We had to understand what they went through and what they care about. The building still has to function and house the Berman Institute, so we had to meet their needs. And we discovered a third client, the East Baltimore community. At the end of the day, this building and university reside within that community, and they will be called to embrace this project – or not.”

King concluded the panel with a riveting and wide-ranging discussion that touched upon intersectionality, segregation, the Tuskegee experiments and participation in clinical trials, COVID, race as a social construct, and the role of consent, all within the framework of Henrietta Lacks’s story.

“Our narratives are important and should be thought of as lessons or homework for institutions,” she said. “They not only document the deep distrust we bring to health encounters but also convey relevant aspects of our lives that should be appreciated.”

As the session ended Kahn noted that perhaps it was fortunate the session had been virtual, so the recording “could be shared with others for posterity. I’m not quite speechless, but maybe close,” he said.

Honoring an Immortal Contribution

Johns Hopkins University President Ronald J. Daniels and Paul B. Rothman, CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine and dean of the medical faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, along with Berman institute Executive Director Jeffrey Kahn and descendants of Henrietta Lacks, recently announced plans to name a new multidisciplinary building on the Johns Hopkins East Baltimore campus in honor of Henrietta Lacks, who was the source of the HeLa cell line that has been critical to numerous advances in medicine.

Surrounded by descendants of Lacks, Daniels made the announcement at the 9th annual Henrietta Lacks Memorial Lecture in the Turner Auditorium in East Baltimore.

“Through her life and her immortal cells, Henrietta Lacks made an immeasurable impact on science and medicine that has touched countless lives around the world,” Daniels said. “This building will stand as a testament to her transformative impact on scientific discovery and the ethics that must undergird its pursuit. We at Johns Hopkins are profoundly grateful to the Lacks family for their partnership as we continue to learn from Mrs. Lacks’ life and to honor her enduring legacy.”

Henrietta Lacks’ contributions to science were not widely known until the 2010 release of the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot, which explored Lacks’ life story, her impact on medical science and important bioethical issues. In 2017, HBO and Harpo Studios released a movie based on the book, with Oprah Winfrey starring as Deborah Lacks, Henrietta Lacks’ daughter.

Several Lacks family members attended today’s event. “It is a proud day for the Lacks family. We have been working with Hopkins for many years now on events and projects that honor our grandmother,” said Jeri Lacks, granddaughter of Henrietta Lacks. “They are all meaningful, but this is the ultimate honor, one befitting of her role in advancing modern medicine.”

The building, which will adjoin the Berman Institute of Bioethics’ current home in Deering Hall will support programs that enhance participation and partnership with members of the community in research that can benefit the community, as well as extend the opportunities to further study and promote research ethics and community engagement in research through an expansion of the Berman Institute and its work.

The story portrayed in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks points to several important bioethical issues, including informed consent, medical records privacy, and communication with tissue donors and research participants.

“The story of Henrietta Lacks has encouraged us all to examine, discuss and wrestle with difficult issues that are at the foundation of the ethics of research, and must inform our relationships with the individuals and communities that are part of that research,” said Jeffrey Kahn, director of the Johns Hopkins University Berman Institute of Bioethics. “As a result, students, faculty and the entire research community at Johns Hopkins and around the world do their work with a greater sensitivity to these critical issues.”

In 2013, Johns Hopkins worked with members of the Lacks family and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to help broker an agreement that requires scientists to receive permission to use Henrietta Lacks’ genetic blueprint in NIH-funded research.

The NIH committee tasked with overseeing the use of HeLa cells now includes two members of the Lacks family. The medical research community has also made significant strides in improving research practices, in part thanks to the lessons learned from Henrietta Lacks’ story.

“It has been an honor for me to work with the Lacks family on how we can recognize the contribution of Henrietta Lacks to medical research and the community. Their willingness to focus on the positive impact of the HeLa cells has been inspiring to me. The Henrietta Lacks story has led many researchers to rededicate themselves to working more closely with patients,” said Daniel E. Ford, vice dean for clinical investigation in the school of medicine. “The new building will be a hub for the community engagement and collaboration program of the NIH-supported Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.”

Groundbreaking on the building that will be named for Henrietta Lacks is scheduled for 2020 with an anticipated completion in 2022.

To learn more about Henrietta Lacks and the wide-ranging impact of HeLa cells on medical research,

please visit: www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henriettalacks .

Alan Regenberg, MBE

Alan is also engaged in a broad range of research projects and programs, including the Berman Institute’s science programs: the Stem Cell Policy and Ethics (SCOPE) Program ; the Program in Ethics and Brain Sciences (PEBS-Neuroethics) ; and the Hinxton Group , an international consortium on stem cells, ethics and law; and the eSchool+ Initiative . Recent research has focused on using deliberative democracy tools to engage with communities about their values for allocating scarce medical resources like ventilators in disasters like pandemics. Additional recent work has focused on ethical challenges related to gene editing, stem cell research, social media, public engagement, vaccines, and neuroethics. ( Publications )

Joseph Ali, JD

Vaccinating pregnant women against ebola.

In a STAT News opinion piece, Johns Hopkins University experts, including our Ruth Faden, argued it is unfair  to deny pregnant and lactating women the experimental Ebola vaccine if they wish to take it, given the great risk the virus poses to those who are exposed to it.

“From a public health perspective and an ethical perspective, the decision to exclude pregnant and lactating women is utterly indefensible,” they wrote.

The authors are members of Pregnancy Research Ethics for Vaccines, Epidemics, and New Technologies (PREVENT) Working Group, which has brought together an international team of experts in bioethics, maternal immunization, maternal-fetal medicine, obstetrics, pediatrics, philosophy, public health, and vaccine research to provide specific recommendations developed to address this critical gap in vaccine research and development and epidemic response. This group recognizes that excluding pregnant women from efforts to develop and deploy vaccines against emerging threats is not acceptable.

Nancy E. Kass, ScD

Dr. Kass is coeditor (with Ruth Faden) of HIV, AIDS and Childbearing: Public Policy, Private Lives (Oxford University Press, 1996).

She has served as consultant to the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, to the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Kass currently serves as the Chair of the NIH Precision Medicine Initiative Central IRB; she previously co-chaired the National Cancer Institute (NCI) Committee to develop Recommendations for Informed Consent Documents for Cancer Clinical Trials and served on the NCI’s central IRB. Current research projects examine improving informed consent in human research, ethical guidance development for Ebola and other infectious outbreaks, and ethics and learning health care. Dr. Kass teaches the Bloomberg School of Public Health’s course on U.S. and International Research Ethics and Integrity, she served as the director of the School’s PhD program in bioethics and health policy from its inception until 2016, and she has directed (with Adnan Hyder) the Johns Hopkins Fogarty African Bioethics Training Program since its inception in 2000. Dr. Kass is an elected member of the Institute of Medicine (now National Academy of Medicine) and an elected Fellow of the Hastings Center.

Jeremy Sugarman, MD, MPH, MA

He was the founding director of the Trent Center for Bioethics, Humanities and History of Medicine at Duke University where he was also a professor of medicine and philosophy. He was appointed as an Academic Icon at the University of Malaya and is a faculty affiliate of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University.

Dr. Sugarman was the longstanding chair of the Ethics Working Group of the HIV Prevention Trials Network. He is currently a member of the Scientific and Research Advisory Board for the Canadian Blood Service and the Ethics and Public Policy Committees of the International Society for Stem Cell Research. He co-leads the Ethics and Regulatory Core of the NIH Health Care Systems Research Collaboratory and is co-chair of the Johns Hopkins’ Institutional Stem Cell Research Oversight Committee.

Dr. Sugarman has been elected as a member of the American Society of Clinical Investigation, Association of American Physicians, and the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine). He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American College of Physicians and the Hastings Center. He also received a Doctor of Science, honoris causa, from New York Medical College.