Creepy Real Life Experiments

Unit 731 — Japan’s Biological Warfare Laboratory

If you’re searching for the single darkest chapter in the history of scientific experimentation, this is probably it. Unit 731 was a covert research program of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Kwantung Army, established in 1932 under the command of Lieutenant General Shirō Ishii, a physician and medical officer who had developed an almost fanatical interest in biological weapons.

The facility at Pingfang, near Harbin in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, covered more than six square kilometers. It had its own rail line, its own airstrip, its own power plant, and its own prison. The prisoners — Chinese civilians, Russian POWs, Korean and Mongolian captives — were referred to by staff as maruta: “logs of wood.” That dehumanization was not incidental. It was policy.

Source: Dr. Sheldon Harris, Factories of Death, 1994; Atomic Heritage Foundation; Pacific Atrocities Education

The experiments conducted there defy easy categorization because they were so varied in their cruelty. Subjects were deliberately infected with plague, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, and anthrax — then denied treatment so researchers could document the disease’s progression. Physiologist Yoshimura Hisato ran frostbite experiments by submerging prisoners’ limbs in ice water until they froze solid, then testing different rewarming methods. Surviving witnesses later testified that frozen limbs made a sound like wood when struck.

Vivisections — surgical procedures performed on living, conscious subjects with no anesthesia — were carried out to study the effect of various pathogens on internal organs in real time. Surgeons trained in this facility reported that the “specimens” were sometimes still alive and screaming when their organs were removed.

“It’s all right to kill me, but please spare my child’s life.” — Testimony of a pregnant subject, vivisected while conscious, as reported by a Pingfang physician in post-war testimony

None of the mothers’ last requests were honored. The researchers wanted their data.

Perhaps the most legally extraordinary aftermath: the United States government, upon learning of the scale and sophistication of Unit 731’s research, struck a secret deal with Ishii and his key scientists. In exchange for sharing the biological weapons data, the researchers were granted immunity from prosecution at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal. The deal was confirmed in declassified US documents. Shirō Ishii died peacefully in Tokyo in 1959.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The Tuskegee study is probably the most frequently cited example of research ethics failure in American medicine — and it deserves every citation it gets, because what the US Public Health Service did over four decades is almost incomprehensible in its sustained, deliberate cruelty.

In 1932, USPHS researchers enrolled 600 Black men from Macon County, Alabama: 399 who had been diagnosed with syphilis, and 201 as a control group. The men were told they were being treated for “bad blood” — a local term that covered a range of conditions. They were told treatment would be provided. Neither of those things was true.

The researchers’ actual aim was to observe the “natural progression of untreated syphilis in the Negro male” — a question with deeply racist embedded assumptions about whether the disease manifested differently across racial lines. The subjects received placebos. The syphilis was never treated. When penicillin was confirmed as a highly effective treatment in 1947 — more than a decade into the study — it was deliberately withheld from the participants.

Source: CDC Tuskegee Records; Reverby, S. (2009). Examining Tuskegee: The Infamous Syphilis Study and Its Legacy. University of North Carolina Press.

The study ran until 1972, when a USPHS venereal disease investigator named Peter Buxtun leaked the details to journalist Jean Heller at the Associated Press. The subsequent public outcry led to the study’s immediate termination and, eventually, a formal apology from President Bill Clinton in 1997 — a quarter-century after the program ended.

The study’s impact on Black Americans’ trust in the medical establishment persists to this day. Multiple studies have linked the Tuskegee disclosure to measurable declines in healthcare engagement among Black men in subsequent decades. A 2016 paper in the Journal of Political Economy found that after the 1972 revelations, Black men’s interactions with physicians declined significantly, with estimated life expectancy losses of roughly 1.4 years in heavily impacted counties.

Source: Alsan, M. & Wanamaker, M. (2016). “Tuskegee and the Health of Black Men.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 133(1), 407–455. doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx029

Project MKUltra — The CIA’s War on Human Cognition

MKUltra is the experiment that most people think they know about — and that almost everyone significantly underestimates. The pop culture version involves LSD and hippies. The actual documented record involves electroshock therapy on psychiatric patients, hypnosis on prisoners who didn’t consent, sensory deprivation chambers, psychological torture lasting months, and at least one confirmed death from unwitting drug administration.

The program was launched in April 1953 under CIA Director Allen Dulles, driven by Cold War fears that the Soviet Union and China had developed effective “brainwashing” techniques. Its operational chief was Sidney Gottlieb, a chemist and CIA officer who spent two decades running experiments that, in his own later admission, “made little scientific sense.”

Source: National Security Archive, December 2024; Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearings, 1977

The program operated across more than 80 institutions — universities, hospitals, prisons, and CIA “safehouses” — in the United States, Canada, and beyond. Many subjects had no idea they were in an experiment. Federal narcotics agent George White, working as a CIA contractor, ran “Operation Midnight Climax” in San Francisco safehouses where unsuspecting men were given LSD in their drinks and observed through one-way mirrors. The agency funded a wing of Georgetown University Hospital, with the agreement that one-sixth of the space could be used for “experimental use” of patients who hadn’t been told.

The most publicly documented victim was Frank Olson, a civilian Army biochemist. In November 1953, Olson was secretly given LSD in his drink during a CIA work retreat. Nine days later, he fell from a tenth-floor window of the Statler Hotel in New York City. It was ruled a suicide at the time. When MKUltra was disclosed in the late 1970s, Olson’s family received a settlement and a personal apology from President Ford. In 1994, Olson’s family had his body exhumed; forensic pathologist James Starrs found evidence of blunt-force trauma to the skull before the fall, suggesting possible homicide. The case was never formally resolved.

“We don’t know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed.” — Stephen Kinzer, journalist and author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control (2019), speaking to NPR

In December 2024, the National Security Archive and ProQuest published a new scholarly collection of over 1,200 declassified documents on CIA behavior control programs — the most comprehensive release to date. The documents confirm the program’s scope extended well beyond LSD tests and included experiments in “erasing and reprogramming the human mind” at institutions including Georgetown University Hospital.

Ewen Cameron and the Montreal Experiments (MKUltra Subproject 68)

Donald Ewen Cameron was not a fringe figure. He was president of both the American Psychiatric Association and the World Psychiatric Association. He was chairman of the scientific committee of the American Mental Health Foundation. He was, by every conventional measure, at the absolute top of his profession.

He was also conducting some of the most disturbing experiments on psychiatric patients in recorded history, funded in part — without their knowledge — by the CIA under MKUltra Subproject 68.

Cameron’s theory was that mental illness could be treated by first “depatterning” a patient — effectively destroying their existing personality through intensive electroconvulsive therapy, drug-induced sleep lasting months, and sensory deprivation — and then “psychically driving” new, healthier behaviors through endlessly repeated taped messages. The theory had essentially no scientific basis. The results were catastrophic.

Patients admitted for relatively mild conditions — depression, anxiety, mild schizophrenia — emerged with profound amnesia. Many forgot their names, their families, their entire histories. Some lost the ability to perform basic functions like feeding themselves. Several became permanently institutionalized as a direct result of the “treatment” they received.

Source: Montreal Experiments (Wikipedia, sourced from Senate hearings); Anne Collins, In the Sleep Room, 1988

In 1992, the Canadian government acknowledged its role (through domestic funding that ran parallel to CIA funding) and paid compensation to 77 survivors. Ewen Cameron died in 1967, before any of this came to light. He was never held accountable.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiment has been cited in introductory psychology textbooks for over fifty years as proof that ordinary people will behave monstrously when placed in positions of authority. That conclusion turns out to be significantly more complicated than the textbooks suggest — but the ethical catastrophe of the experiment itself is not in dispute.

In August 1971, Zimbardo recruited 24 male college students, divided them randomly into “guards” and “prisoners,” and set them up in a mock prison in the basement of Stanford’s psychology department. The experiment was supposed to run for two weeks. It was halted after six days.

Within that time, guards had begun psychological abuse: sleep deprivation, humiliation, stripping prisoners of their names (replacing them with numbers), forcing them into stress positions, and using fire extinguishers on them. Three “prisoners” suffered acute emotional breakdowns and had to be removed from the study. One went on a hunger strike. Zimbardo himself became so absorbed in his role as “prison superintendent” that he initially failed to halt the abuses — it took his girlfriend (and later wife), psychologist Christina Maslach, visiting the basement and confronting him directly, to shut it down.

The science has since been substantially disputed. Investigative journalist Ben Blum obtained audio recordings in 2018 showing that the “guards” had been actively coached by Zimbardo and research assistants to behave more aggressively. The participants weren’t simply succumbing to situational pressure — some were actively encouraged to escalate. The BBC Prison Study (2006), conducted by psychologists Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam, found that when researchers were not pushing for escalation, participants organized resistance rather than automatically deferring to authority.

Nevertheless, the experiment produced lasting harm to participants without adequate informed consent about what it might involve psychologically, and was never reviewed by an independent ethics board before it began.

The Milgram Obedience Studies

Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments are, in a sense, the most important psychological studies of the twentieth century. They’re also ethically troubling — though considerably less so than most other entries on this list, which is worth acknowledging clearly.

Milgram, a Yale social psychologist working in the aftermath of the Nuremberg trials, wanted to understand how ordinary Germans had followed orders to participate in atrocities. His experimental design was ingenious and disturbing in equal measure: a subject was instructed by an authority figure in a lab coat to administer what they believed to be electric shocks to a “learner” (actually an actor) whenever the learner gave a wrong answer. The shocks appeared to escalate to 450 volts — labeled “XXX” on the control panel — accompanied by increasingly anguished cries from the learner behind a partition.

In Milgram’s original series, approximately 65% of subjects administered what they believed to be the maximum, potentially lethal shock. They did so not because they were sadistic, but because an authority figure told them it was necessary for the research, and because the social context made stopping feel difficult.

The ethical problem: participants showed clear signs of extreme distress — trembling, stuttering, sweating, laughing nervously. They were being pushed through a genuinely traumatic experience under false pretenses, with no adequate prior informed consent. Post-experiment debriefs reduced but couldn’t eliminate the psychological harm. Milgram was criticized by the American Psychological Association for years afterward, and the study helped precipitate the modern IRB review system.

Source: British Psychological Society, Research Digest; Milgram, S. (1963). “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(4), 371–378.

The Guatemala Syphilis Experiments

This one is less famous than Tuskegee, in part because it wasn’t publicly disclosed until 2010 — when medical historian Susan Reverby, while researching the Tuskegee study, found detailed records in the archived papers of John Cutler, one of the study’s lead researchers. The records showed what Cutler had concealed for six decades.

Between 1946 and 1948, US government-funded physicians deliberately infected more than 1,300 people in Guatemala — psychiatric patients, prisoners, soldiers, and commercial sex workers — with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. The purpose was to test whether penicillin could prevent infection after exposure. None of the subjects gave informed consent. Many were already vulnerable due to institutionalization or incarceration.

Source: PBS NewsHour Classroom, January 2025; Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues Report, 2011.

President Obama formally apologized to Guatemalan President Álvaro Colom in 2010. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the experiments “clearly unethical.” The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues concluded in 2011 that the experiments were “clearly unethical even by the standards of the time.”

The same John Cutler had previously worked on the Tuskegee syphilis study. The same basic logic — that poor, institutionalized, or racialized populations were acceptable experimental subjects with no meaningful right to consent — ran through both programs, separated by geography and paperwork, nothing more.

The Aversion Project — South Africa’s Conversion Program

Apartheid South Africa’s Aversion Project is less well-known outside southern Africa, and that relative obscurity is itself a form of injustice. What happened at Ward 22 of the 1 Military Hospital in Voortrekkerhoogte was medical torture, documented and acknowledged as such in the records of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The program was established in 1969 under psychiatrist Aubrey Levin, who claimed to have a “cure” for homosexuality. Gay and lesbian conscripts identified during military service — often through informants or chaplaincy interviews — were referred to Ward 22, where they underwent forced “aversion therapy”: electric shocks administered while viewing same-sex imagery, combined with rewards when shown opposite-sex imagery. When these methods failed, the program escalated to chemical castration through hormonal drugs and, in some documented cases, involuntary gender reassignment surgery.

Source: Kaplan R., South African Medical Journal, 2001; PMC Archives; TRC submissions, 1999

Victims were discharged from the military with no support, in many cases with incomplete or botched surgical procedures. The South African Medical Association issued a public apology in 1995. Aubrey Levin emigrated to Canada, where he worked as a forensic psychiatrist — treating sex offenders, with a certain grim irony — until he was arrested in 2010 for sexually assaulting a patient. He was convicted in 2013 and sentenced to five years in prison. His crimes in South Africa were never prosecuted.

The Monster Study

The name was coined by the research team themselves, which tells you something. In 1939, University of Iowa graduate student Mary Tudor conducted a study under the supervision of well-known speech pathologist Wendell Johnson to test the theory that stuttering was caused by environmental labeling rather than innate neurological factors.

Tudor took 22 orphaned children from the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home and divided them into two groups. The control group received positive, encouraging feedback about their speech. The experimental group — including 10 children who had normal speech — were told repeatedly that they had “very bad” speech, that they were stuttering, and that they should stop speaking until they could do so correctly. The intent was to artificially induce stuttering in normal-speaking children by making them self-conscious and afraid of speaking.

Several of the children who received negative feedback developed lasting speech problems. Some withdrew socially. The study was never published in Johnson’s lifetime — reportedly because of embarrassment about the methods — but internal records were discovered by journalist Jim Dyer in 2001, who broke the story in the San Jose Mercury News.

In 2007, the University of Iowa reached a settlement with six surviving subjects, paying each between $60,000 and $150,000 in damages. The university publicly apologized, acknowledging that the study “caused significant psychological harm to some of the participants.”

Source: Dyer, J. (2001). “Ethics and Orphans: The ‘Monster Study.'” San Jose Mercury News, June 10, 2001; Reynolds, G. (2003). “The Stuttering Doctor’s ‘Monster Study.'” New York Times Magazine, March 16, 2003.

US Cold War Radiation Experiments

Between the end of World War II and the early 1970s, the United States government conducted or funded hundreds of radiation experiments on human subjects — many of whom had no idea what was being done to them. The scale was revealed only in 1993, when Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary declassified tens of thousands of related documents in response to investigative journalism by Eileen Welsome of the Albuquerque Tribune, who later won a Pulitzer Prize for the reporting.

The experiments ranged across a disturbing spectrum. Plutonium was injected into 18 patients, many of them terminal cancer cases — though in at least some cases, the patients’ prognoses were apparently overstated to make them suitable subjects. Prisoners in Oregon and Washington state had their testes irradiated to test radiation’s effect on human fertility. Children at the Fernald School for the mentally retarded in Massachusetts were fed radioactive iron and calcium in their breakfast cereal, with parental consent obtained through a letter that described the study only as “special diet research.” People were exposed to whole-body radiation at high doses. Patients with brain tumors were injected with uranium salts.

Source: Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE) Final Report, 1995. US DOE Office of Human Radiation Experiments

The Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments (ACHRE), convened by President Clinton in 1994, spent 18 months reviewing the documents and published its final report in 1995. The committee found that while some experiments met ethical standards, a significant number did not — including cases where subjects were used without informed consent, and cases where vulnerable populations were deliberately targeted because they were less able to refuse.