5 OF THE SCARIEST REAL-LIFE EXPERIMENTS

28.3.13

Zombie dogs, mind control and deadly nurses are just some of the actual science experiments that have been conducted.

Since Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the popular imagination has been alive with stories of mad scientists and the chilling experiments they conduct. But sometimes, real life is even more frightening than fiction.

From zombie dogs to mind control, here are some of the scariest experiments ever done.

1. Earth-swallowing black holes

When physicists first flipped the switch on the Large Hadron Collider(LHC), at least a few people held their breath. For years, rumors had circulated that the particle accelerator could create mini black holes that would destroy Earth. In 2008, a group even filed suit to stop the particle collider from turning on, arguing that the atomic collisions could cause the end of the world. [Top 10 Ways to Destroy Earth]

Though it sounded slightly plausible, there’s basically no chance that the LHC will destroy the Earth. A comprehensive study calculated that cosmic rays bombarding Earth routinely create higher energy collisions than the particle accelerator. According to that study, “nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth already — and the planet still exists.”

Of course, even if the world is destroyed, at least we have a consolation prize: Earlier this year, physicists at the Swiss site announced they had found a particle that may be the Higgs boson, the elusive particle thought to give all other particles their mass.

2. Zombie dogs

In 1940, Russian scientists released a video of severed dog heads that were kept alive for several hours, wiggling their ears in response to sounds and even licking their mouths. The scientists claimed they could keep the animals alive by an artificial blood circulation system.

But that was just the first time scientists had created zombie dogs. In 2005, American scientists created another pack of zombie dogs. The team rapidly killed the dogs by flushing all the blood from their bodies and replacing it with oxygen- and sugar-filled saline, according to the researchers from the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh.

Three hours later, the team gave the dogs a blood transfusion, and an electric shock. The dogs were resurrected, and while some had permanent damage, most were no worse for wear. The research, published in the Yearbook of Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, suggested that the treatment could one day revive people who are hemorrhaging blood too quickly for doctors to repair their injuries.

3. Mind control

Talk about a bad trip. In the 1950s, the CIA launched a top-secret program called MKULTRA to look for drugs and other techniques to use in mind control. Over the next two decades, the agency used hallucinogens, sleep deprivation and electrical shock techniques in an effort to perfect brainwashing.

CIA scientists conducted more than 149 research projects as part of MKULTRA. In one, they tested the effects of LSD in social situations by slipping the drug to unwitting bar patrons in New York and San Francisco. In others, they enticed heroin addicts to take the hallucinogen by offering them heroin. [Trippy Tales: The History of 8 Hallucinogens]

Spooked by the Watergate scandal, in 1973 CIA Director Richard Helms ordered documents related to the project destroyed. However, some documents escaped destruction, and by 1977 a Freedom of Information Act request released more than 20,000 pages on the sordid program to author John Marks.

4. Deadly nurses

While the CIA was working so hard to control people’s minds, it turns out it’s pretty easy to get people to do what you say: All you have to do is ask like you mean it.

In 1963, social psychologist Stanley Milgram had shown that Yale University students were willing to administer a deadly shock to strangers if an authority figure requested it.

But psychiatrist Charles Hofling wanted to see how obedience influenced decisions when people didn’t know they were part of an experiment. In his innocuously titled 1966 paper “An Experimental Study of Nurse-Physician Relationships,” Hofling described a chilling experimental protocol: An unknown doctor called real nurses on the hospital’s night shift and asked them to administer twice the maximum dose of an unapproved drug to a patient. Unbeknown to the nurses, the “medicine” was actually a harmless sugar pill and the doctor was a fake.

While it’s frightening that the experiment was given the green light at all, it’s perhaps even scarier that 21 out of 22 nurses complied. The researchers clearly labeled the drug, so nurses knew they were overdosing their patients. The nurses also violated hospital rules by taking instructions over the phone and giving an unapproved medicine. The study showed just how much the aura of authority could cloud people’s ethical judgments.

5. Bat bombs

In World War II, the U.S. Marine Corps worked on a project to train bats as kamikaze bombers against the Japanese. A Pennsylvania dentist, Lytle Adams, first proposed the idea to the White House in 1942, after visiting the bat-filled caves at Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. Adams proposed strapping tiny incendiary explosives to the animals and exploiting their use of echolocation to find roosts in barns and attics. According to Lytle’s plan, the bomb-strapped bats would fly to Japan, nestle in the nooks of the mostly wooden buildings in Japanese cities, and set them ablaze.

The Marine Corps captured thousands of Mexican free-tailed bats and developed explosive devices to strap to their backs. The project was scrapped in 1943, probably because the U.S. government had made progress on the atomic bomb.

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/5-of-the-scariest-real-life-experiments

EVIL EXPERIMENTS

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28.3.13

Medical progress saves lives, but sometimes scientists let the hope of a breakthrough get in the way of ethics. Recently, the United States government issued a formal apology to Guatemala for experiments done there in the 1940s that involved infecting prisoners and mental patients with syphilis.

The Guatemala project is just one of many terrible experiments done in the name of medicine. Some ethical lapses are mistakes by people sure they’re doing the right thing. Other times, they’re pure evil. Here are seven of the worst experiments on human subjects in history.

NAZI MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS

Perhaps the most infamous evil experiments of all time were those carried out by Josef Mengele, an SS physician at Auschwitz. Mengele combed the incoming trains for twins upon which to experiment, hoping to prove his theories of the racial supremacy of Aryans. Many died in the process. He also collected the eyes of his dead “patients,” according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The Nazis used prisoners to test treatments for infectious diseases and chemical warfare. Others were forced into freezing temperatures and low-pressure chambers for aviation experiments. Countless prisoners were subjected to experimental sterilization procedures. One woman had her breasts tied off with string so SS doctors could see how long it took her baby to starve, according to an oral history collected by the Holocaust Museum. She eventually injected the child with a lethal dose of morphine to keep it from suffering longer.

Some of the doctors responsible for these atrocities were later tried as war criminals, but Mengele escaped to South America. He died in Brazil in 1979 of a stroke.

JAPAN’S UNIT 731

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese Imperial Army conducted biological warfare and medical testing on civilians, mostly in China. The death toll of these brutal experiments is unknown, but as many as 200,000 may have died, according to a 1995 New York Times report.

Among the atrocities were wells infected with cholera and typhoid and plague-ridden fleas spread across Chinese cities. Prisoners were marched in freezing weather and then experimented on to determine the best treatment for frostbite. Former members of the unit have told media outlets that prisoners were dosed with poison gas, put in pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, and even dissected while alive and conscious. After the war, the U.S. government helped keep the experiments secret as part of a plan to make Japan a cold-war ally, according to the Times report.

THE “MONSTER STUDY”

In 1939, speech pathologists at the University of Iowa set out to prove their theory that stuttering was a learned behavior caused by a child’s anxiety about speaking. Unfortunately, the way they chose to go about this was to try to induce stuttering in orphans by telling them they were doomed to start stuttering in the future.

Yes, orphans. The researchers sat down with children at the Ohio Soldiers and Sailors Orphans’ Home and told them they were showing signs of stuttering and shouldn’t speak unless they could be sure that they would speak right. The experiment didn’t induce stuttering, but it did make formerly normal children anxious, withdrawn and silent.

Future Iowa pathology students dubbed the study, “the Monster Study,” according to a 2003 New York Times article on the research. Three surviving children and the estates of three others eventually sued Iowa and the university. In 2007, Iowa settled for a total of $925,000.

THE BURKE AND HALE MURDERS

Until the 1830s, the only legally available bodies for dissection by anatomists were those of executed murderers. Executed murderers being a relative rarity, many anatomists took to buying bodies from grave robbers ¾ or doing the robbing themselves.

Edinburgh boardinghouse owner William Hare and his friend William Burke took this entrepreneurial activity one step further. From 1827 to 1828, the two men smothered more than a dozen lodgers at the boardinghouse and sold their bodies to anatomist Robert Knox, according to Mary Roach’s “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003). Knox apparently didn’t notice (or didn’t care) that the bodies his newest suppliers were bringing him were suspiciously fresh, Roach wrote.

Burke was later hanged for his crimes, and the case spurred the British government to loosen the restrictions on dissection.

SURGICAL EXPERIMENTS ON SLAVES

The father of modern gynecology, J. Marion Sims, gained much of his fame by doing experimental surgeries (sometimes several per person) on slave women. Sims remains a controversial figure to this day, because the condition he was treating in the women, vesico-vaginal fistula, caused terrible suffering. Women with fistulas, a tear between the vagina and bladder, were incontinent and were often rejected by society.

Sims performed the surgeries without anesthesia, in part because anesthesia had only recently been discovered, and in part because Sims believed the operations were “not painful enough to justify the trouble,” as he said in an 1857 lecture.

Arguments still rage as to whether Sims’ patients would have consented to the surgeries had they been entirely free to choose. Nonetheless, wrote University of Alabama social work professor Durrenda Ojanuga in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 1993, Sims “manipulated the social institution of slavery to perform human experimentations, which by any standard is unacceptable.”

GUATEMALA SYPHILIS STUDY

Many people erroneously believe that the government deliberately infected the Tuskegee participants with syphilis, which was not the case. But the work of Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby recently exposed a time when U.S. Public Health Service researchers did just that. Between 1946 and 1948, Reverby found, the U.S. and Guatemalan governments co-sponsored a study involving the deliberate infection of Guatemalan prisoners and mental asylum patients with syphilis.

The study was intended to test chemicals to prevent the spread of the disease. The researchers attempted to infect their subjects both by paying for them to have sex with infected prostitutes and by abrading the skin on their penises and pouring cultured syphilis bacteria on the wounds.

Those who got syphilis were given penicillin as a treatment, Reverby found, but the records she uncovered indicate no follow-up or informed consent by the participants. On Oct. 1, 2010, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a joint statement apologizing for the experiments.

http://www.livescience.com/13002-7-absolutely-evil-medical-experiments-tuskegee-syphilis.html