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Ten Strangely Cruel Science Experiments
aalobode writes "The Times of London has a current story based on the review of a book by Alex Boase, Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Experiments. There they list the top science experiments — including the one from which the book gets its name — that were conducted by otherwise sane humans who tragically or otherwise ignored the effect of their research on the subjects themselves. Nowadays, most institutions have a review board for research on human subjects which would flag most proposals that could lead to harm for the subjects, but not so in the past. 'Another 1960s experiment, in which ten soldiers on a training flight were told by the pilot that the aircraft was disabled, and about to ditch in the ocean. They were then required to fill in insurance forms before the crash -- ostensibly so the Army was not financially liable for any deaths or injuries. They were actually unwitting participants in an experiment: the plane was not crippled at all. It revealed that fear of imminent death indeed causes soldiers to make more mistakes than usual when filling in forms.'"
1) I would assume I had already signed such a waiver when I first enlisted.
2) What was the Army going to do if they didn't? Suddenly save the plane to avoid any lawsuits?
Sugar Experiments Of Mental Patients.
In 1947-1949 a group of mental patients in Sweden were used as subjects in a full-scale experiment designed to bring about tooth decay. They were fed copious amounts of candy, and many of them had their teeth completely ruined. But, scientifically speaking, the experiment was a huge success.
You are not entitled to your opinion. You are entitled to your informed opinion. -- Harlan Ellison
Report here. Select a random group of ignorant African men, circumcise some of them. Give them vague advice on safe sex, then tell them to go out and have sex. See how many of them come back with HIV.
It was concluded that you're about 50% more likely to catch HIV if you're uncircumcised. I'd say, especially in a society where circumcision is not standard (i.e. not Israel, USA, Philippines, etc.), if you've just had part of your cock lobbed off, you're very likely to change your sexual habits and people are less likely to have sex with you. If you're just given advice and then told to go away, you're more likely to carry on as usual.
Experimentation on the negro is not exactly new, of course.
In 1960, a guy conducted a psychological experiment where he took identical twin girls from an orphanage and purposefully separated them to different families with the express intent of them having no communication with each other - not even to know they had a sister.
They both found out after 30 years that they were part of an experiment.
I can understand that some twins are separated by accident, but how would you feel to know that you missing 30 years of growing up with your sibling because of some experiment?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/news/2007/10/twins_separated_as_babies_beco_1.html
What about the Milgram Experiment of 1961, in which nearly 2/3rds of subjects were prepared to administer a lethal electrical shock to a partner hidden in another room, just because the scientist conducting the experiment said it was necessary? While no one was actually being shocked, many of the participants who inflicted the fake shocks were emotionally distressed by the ordeal. Derren Brown repeated the experiment in 2006, and obtained essentially the same results. Youtube videos of this are available.
What about the risks taken by the patients and surgeons who pioneered open heart surgery? A great recount of those gruesome days is provided by the book "King of Hearts", which details the career of Dr. C. Walton Lillehei?
My favourite along these lines is Jack Barnes who discovered the extremely poisonous box Irukandji jellyfish (Carukia barnesi): "The jellyfish itself was identified in 1964 by Dr. Jack Barnes; in order to prove it was the cause of Irukandji syndrome, he captured the tiny jelly and stung himself and his son." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carukia_barnesi They were both hospitalized, as was a life gaurd he also stung to make triply sure.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Perhaps more scientifically relevant than the rest, with better anesthesia, but freakish nonetheless:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdJGlYOL0r4
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_transplant
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/1263758.stm
http://www.freetimes.com/stories/14/46/whites-anatomy
In other news, Dr. White was my neurosurgeon once a long time ago. I suspect that's where my extra head came from, but you can never really know.
http://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
How about Dr. Jack Barnes who exposed himself and his son to the venom of the Irukandji jellyfish
Synergies are basically awesome, and they're even better when you leverage them. -PA
My guess is because they were going for a fairly light-hearted story, with a few light gasps and chills, and not trying to get people actually furious. The last thing I'd put the Tuskegee study in is with a bunch of experiements described as wacky. Would you?
Looking at the article, I think the summary is mistitled. The article doesn't talk about having the "cruelest" experiments, but simply the wackiest ones. For example, number seven about arousing male turkeys with a model of a female turkey is hardly cruel, and as the parent pointed out many really cruel ones are omitted.
I was also reminded of another famous experiment, the Milgram experiment where a group of test subjects were instructed to shock other test subjects. The entire setup was false - those said to be receiving shocks were only acting, but those told to administer the shocks did not know this. They still continued to administer (fake) shocks because they had been instructed to do so. This may not have been cruel to those pretending to be shocked, but I certainly would not want to have been one of those told to administer the shocks, as I would doubtless have had trouble sleeping at night after if I had done so. The Wikipedia article as usual has much more detail on this experiment.
How has the Standford Prison Experiment not been mentioned yet?
Take a few volunteers pay them $15 a day and split them up into Prisoners and Guards. These are just normal people off the street. The experiment had to be canceled early because of the psychological trauma that the Prisoners were experiencing. And we're not talking 30 days of 60 days in, the experiment was canceled in 6 days.
Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely
If free health care is provided, the amount of hypochondriacs will increase, the quality of doctors will decrease, the requirements to become a doctor will decrease and will become a technicians job relying on manuals and a 2 year schooling instead of engineering requirements.
It is unavoidable in a country that provides welfare for those who don't work and those who will justify an excuse to not work in order to get benefits.
The TSA is what happens when you let government come up with a solution to a potential problem.
What is disheartening is that in the USA, the slacker and entitle mentality is celebrated while someone that works hard, saves, raises a family, and is dependent on themselves is seen as the problem.
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Who says what the job of the government is? You? God? The constitution? I claim that the job of the government is to do what the people want it to do. In wellfare states that means that people willingly pay a bit more taxes to provide basic services for everyone. It means there's less poor, less homeless, less crime, less safelessness. In a wellfare state you don't NEED to own a gun to protect yourself, because the system isn't such that it makes people into criminals. (There will always be crime, but the system need not breed it.)
You say if government does anything beyond minimal regulation people suffer because of loss of "freedom". What kind of freedom is it to let your near ones go without food, shelter, health care? That's no freedom, that's cruelty.
I say, if the state does not some how guarantee a minimum of health care and social support a part of the populace suffer a real loss, a loss of dignity, a loss of life worth living. I am happy to pay taxes so that people around me can live a dignified life. I don't think it's okay for people to live on the streets, starve to death, be treated as criminals for simply existing at all. It's the task of the strong to take care of the weak, not to push them around.
What good is it being rich if people around you suffer?
The University of Iowa supported research, later dubbed "The Monster Study," that involved teaching young orphans how to stutter in an attempt to prove that stuttering is a learned behavior. While none of the children picked up stuttering, many began to exhibit the same mannerisms as stutterers (low self-esteem, hesitations, etc.)
The study's main researcher, Wendell Johnson, has a campus building named after him (the Wendell Johnson Speech & Hearing Center). Apparently the Univ. of Iowa still doesn't see anything wrong with conducting research on non-consenting children...
MKULTRA was the code name for a CIA mind-control research program that began in 1950.
Some excerpts from the wikipedia article:
LSD and other drugs were usually administered without the subject's knowledge and informed consent.
(About experiments in Canada by Donald Ewen Cameron)
His "driving" experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for weeks at a time (up to three months in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and postpartum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions.[18] His treatments resulted in victims' incontinence, amnesia, forgetting how to talk, forgetting their parents, and thinking their interrogators were their parents
[...]
The Canadian government was fully aware of this, and had later provided another $500,000 in funding to continue the experiments
Several of the womenfolk in my family worked as nurses to bring in a second salary. They gave up their positions in the health service after Mrs. Thatcher decided to partially privatize the health service (to create the "internal market").
One of the first things that she privatized was the ward cleaning services. In particular, Mrs. Thatcher was outraged that cleaners were using three different sets of disinfectants as well as spending what seemed to be half their time cleaning door handles. But there were sound scientific reasons for doing all of this. NHS scientists had determined that three levels of disinfectant were required. A high concentration disinfectant was used for cleaning floors where bandages, blood and outdoor shoes would bring in contamination. A middle concentration disinfectant for cleaning frequently contacted surface (door handles, panels etc.. ) and a low concentration disinfectant for clean walls and ceilings. As cleaners were part of the ward team, they got to know which areas needed the most attention
To stop this "waste", the government decided to privatize the cleaning services so that they would be specified only by a contract and not through team-work. Consequently we have all the problems we have now with infection.
For this reaon alone, many experienced nurses who have retired will not consider going back into the profession.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.
2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.
3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.
4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.
5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.
6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.
I don't know about everybody else, but I was certainly aware that the system was totally broken in an evil kind of way while I was struggling through the middle of it. I just barely managed to crawl across the graduation finish line, having made enemies with several of the staff. I was young, and I could have done much better had I another go at it, but the whole thing seemed monumentally evil at the time. When I came across Ingli'e work, it made a lot more sense.
But the absolutely most mind-blowing points are covered in this video.
-FL
Fancy semantics. If the founding fathers wanted to guarantee you health care it would have been written into the constitution. They had doctors then. They could have formed an anti-disease department. They didn't. Why? Because the governed people of the time would have never stood for it. They were independent and self sufficient.
They didn't yet have the entitlement mentality bred into them by the government. Why does the government want to provide more and more "services" to the people. To secure their votes, to secure their money, and to secure the power that comes with the wealth redistribution system of socialism.
How do they do it? They sell it to the public on one hand by creating a state of fear while on the other hand providing the easy remedy. Trade your freedom for "safety."
Do you feel safe yet?
In 1951, at McGill University, in Canada, a group of grad students were put in a dark chamber.
http://www.samadhitank.com/sensorydep.html
"Years later, 1961, Hebb published an introductory note in the book, "Sensory Deprivation" which shed light on the true original purpose..."the work we have done at McGill University began, actually, with the problem of "brainwashing".We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing. What we did say however was true-"
Wbat the found is for the unwitting subjects, the amount of time spent in sensory deprivation, the more personality changed. Most of those subjects who spent more then 3 days, deprived of only the minumum of senses, had experenced a complete change of personality. Almost all long term subjects dropeed out of school.
The subjects earned about $5/day as a stipend.
> That most of our scientific advances were made with experiments
> that would now be classified as cruel.
.
Most? How can you tell? In fact in WWII countless extremely cruel experiments were applied to a seemingly unlimited supply of human guinea pigs. Apperently the only thing good that came out of that was a book with beautiful color drawings of sliced heads. However, they could have created that book without the sacrifices and the horror, too. But after the war, when data was needed, many of the experiments had to be repeated with volunteers (i.e. hypothermia), because the German data was useless from a scientific point of view.
I should have mentioned that this video is a very slow-starter, but the opening info is important in order to grasp the whole enchilada. --It's well worth watching all six parts. One of the weird points which led the researcher to start investigating was a test her son told her about having written in school. She asked him what some of the questions on it were, and found them odd enough that she decided to ask the principal to see the test. She was denied, and in fact told that parents were not allowed to see the test, and that the children were not allowed to see their own test results. Okay. So she made a big stink and after weeks of work, finally got to see the test; one of the questions on it was the following. .
"If you and you friends are planning an act of vandalism, do you. .
A. Report this to an adult.
B. Report this to the Police.
C. Leave the group and go home.
D. Go along with the group.
The correct answer to the above question is, "D. Go along with the group."
Watch all six parts of this video. By the end, your hair will be standing on end.
-FL
And the use of foreskin is what, exactly? Other than being something you have to clean all the time so that it doesn't get infected, there is absolutely no use. The skin cut off is also used to help grow skin for burn victims, a worthy use of skin that has no practical purpose.