Experiments involving the use of people will always remain a controversial topic. On one hand, they allow us to obtain more information about the human body that we can put to good use in the future. On the other hand, we have a whole slew of ethical issues to consider. The best that we can do as civilized human beings is to balance the two. Ideally, we should conduct experiments while bringing the least possible harm to the individual. This list shows the exact opposite of that concept. We can only imagine the pain these people went through as they were treated like nothing more than guinea pigs by those who liked to play God.

10 Surgery To Treat Insanity

Dr. Henry Cotton believed that localized infections were the root causes of insanity. After he became the head of an insane asylum in Trenton in 1907, he began implementing a procedure he dubbed “surgical bacteriology.” During that time, Cotton and his team performed thousands of surgical operations on patients, often without their consent. First, they extracted teeth and tonsils; if that wasn’t enough, they would go deeper and remove the internal organs which they believed were causing the problems. He believed in his methods so much that he even performed them on himself and his family. He extracted teeth from himself, his wife, and his two sons (one of whom also had part of his colon removed).

Cotton claimed that his treatments had a high rate of curing patients, and that claim soon became a lightning rod for critics who found his work appalling. In one instance, he justified the deaths of 49 patients from the colectomies and stated that they were already suffering from “end-stage psychosis” prior to the operations. An independent investigation later revealed that Cotton greatly exaggerated the results. After his death in 1933, the surgeries at the asylum ceased and Cotton’s viewpoints faded into obscurity. To his credit, critics ruled that he really was sincere in his efforts to cure his patients, albeit in an insane, deluded way.

9 Vaginal Surgery Without Anesthesia

J. Marion Sims, revered by many as a pioneer in the field of American gynecology, conducted an extensive surgical study on several female African-American slaves during the 1840s. The study, which spanned three years, focused on a surgical cure for vesicovaginal fistula, a condition that abnormally connects the bladder to the vagina. But here’s the kicker—he performed the surgeries without anesthesia. One subject, a woman named Anarcha, endured a whopping 30 operations before Sims finally got it right.

This wasn’t the only horrifying study that Sims performed. Among other insanities that we’ve discussed before, he also tried to cure the infants of slaves suffering from trismus (a condition similar to lockjaw in tetanus) using a shoemaker’s awl to pry their cranial bones into alignment.

8 Accidental Bubonic Plague

Richard Strong, a doctor and head of the Biological Laboratory of the Philippines Bureau of Science, performed several inoculations on inmates at a Manila prison in an attempt to find the perfect cholera vaccine. In one such experiment in 1906, he mistakenly gave the bubonic plague to the inmates instead of the cholera vaccine, which resulted in the deaths of 13 subjects. A government investigation into the incident later corroborated the findings and stated that “a plague serum was probably substituted for a bottle of cholera serum.”

Depressed by the debacle, Strong laid low for awhile, only to resurface six years later for another series of inoculations on the inmates—this time with the disease Beriberi. Some of the participants died, while those who survived were compensated with nothing more than a few packs of cigarettes. Strong’s notorious experiments were such a catastrophe that they were later cited by Nazi defendants at the Nuremberg trials to justify their own horrific research.

7 Slaves Doused With Boiling Water

In what could more accurately be described as torture than treatment, Dr. Walter Jones recommended boiling water as a cure for typhoid pneumonia during the 1840s. He tested his treatment on numerous slaves afflicted with the disease over the course of several months. Jones described in great detail how one patient, a sickly 25-year-old man, was stripped naked and made to lie down on the ground on his stomach. At this point, Jones poured five gallons of boiling water over the patient’s back.

However, that wasn’t the end of the poor man’s suffering—White stated that the treatment should be repeated every four hours, which he rationalized would be sufficient for “re-establishing the capillary circulation.” Jones later claimed that his treatment cured many patients, an assertion that was never independently verified. No surprise there.

6 Electric Current Applied Directly To The Brain

While the idea of shocking someone sounds painful by itself, one man—a Cincinnati physician named Dr. Roberts Bartholow—took it to the next level when he sent an electric current straight into the brain of one of his patients. In 1847, Bartholow was treating a patient named Mary Rafferty who was suffering from an ulcer in the skull. The ulcer had eaten its way so far through the bone that her brain had became visible.

With her permission, Bartholow inserted electrodes directly into her brain and applied varying currents to observe her reactions. He repeated his experiment eight times over a four-day period. Initially, Rafferty seemed fine; however, she became greatly agitated during the later stages of the tests and soon went into a coma. Shortly afterward, she died.

The resulting backlash was so great that Bartholow had to leave his job and continue his work elsewhere. He later settled in Philadelphia and attained a very high teaching position at Jefferson Medical College, proving that even mad scientists can catch the occasional break.

5 Testicle Transplants

Leo Stanley, the chief physician at San Quentin prison from 1913 to 1951, had a crazy theory: He believed that males who committed crimes had low levels of testosterone and, according to him, raising testosterone levels in inmates would reduce criminal behavior.

To test this notion, Stanley conducted a series of bizarre operations in which he surgically transplanted the testicles of newly executed criminals into still-living prisoners. Due to a lack of available human testicles (on average, only three executions took place inside the prison annually), Quentin soon turned to using various animal testicles that he would process into a liquid and inject into the prisoners’ skin.

By 1922, Stanley claimed that he had performed the operations on more than 600 inmates. He also claimed that his operations were successful; in one particular case he described how a senile Caucasian inmate became sprightly and energetic after being given the testicles of an executed African-American man.

4 Shock Therapy And LSD For Kids

Lauretta Bender is perhaps best known for devising the Bender-Gestalt test—a psychological test that assesses a child’s motor and cognitive abilities. However, Bender also engaged in several slightly more controversial studies. As psychiatrist of the Bellevue Hospital during the 1940s, Bender administered daily shocks to 98 pediatric patients in an effort to cure them of a condition she coined “childhood schizophrenia.”

She reported that the shocks were hugely successful, and that only a small number of the children went into relapse. As if the shock treatment wasn’t enough, Bender also gave the children adult-sized doses of mind-bending drugs such as LSD and psilocybin (the chemical in hallucinogenic mushrooms), often for weeks at a time. And while it was never officially proven, there have been allegations that she got her funds from the notorious CIA program MK-ULTRA.

3 The Guatemala Syphilis Experiment

In 2010, a highly unethical syphilis experiment came to light when a professor who was studying the infamous Tuskegee Study discovered that the same health organization also performed a similar experiment in Guatemala. This revelation spurred the White House to form an investigation committee, which later found that government-sponsored researchers intentionally infected 1,300 Guatemalans with syphilis in 1946.

The study, which lasted two years, aimed to find out if penicillin could be an effective treatment once a patient was already infected. To do that, the researchers paid prostitutes to spread the disease to other people—mostly soldiers, inmates, and psychiatric patients—who did not know they were being infected with syphilis. A total of 83 people died from the experiment. These ghastly findings prompted President Obama to personally apologize to the Guatemalan president and people.

2 Skin-Hardening Experiments

Dermatologist Albert Kligman ran a very comprehensive experimental program on inmates of Holmesburg Prison during the 1960s. In one such experiment, the US Army sponsored a study that focused on finding ways to harden the skin. Theoretically, the hardened skin could protect the soldiers from chemical irritants while in combat zones. Kligman applied various chemical-filled creams and agents to the inmates, but the only noticeable outcome was permanent scarring and a good deal of pain.

Pharmaceutical companies also paid Kligman to use his prisoners as guinea pigs to test their products. While the subjects were paid to participate, they were not fully informed of the experiments’ objectives and the potentially adverse effects that could result from them. Many of the chemical concoctions ended up causing the skin to blister and burn. Needless to say, Kligman displayed ruthless, mechanical efficiency in dealing with the inmates during his tenure at the prison. In fact, after he arrived at the prison for the first time, he remarked that “all I saw before me were acres of skin.”

Eventually, public uproar and a subsequent investigation forced Kligman to shut down his operations and destroy all the information from the experiments. Sadly, the former test subjects were never compensated, while Kligman later became rich by inventing Retin-A, the “drug of choice” against acne. Sometimes life just doesn’t play fair.

1 Experimental Spinal Taps On Children

While lumbar punctures—sometimes referred to as spinal taps—are often a necessary procedure, especially for neurological and spinal disorders, we can all agree that sticking a giant needle into someone’s spine is a recipe for excruciating pain. Yet, in 1896, a pediatrician named Arthur Wentworth decided to test the obvious. During an experimental spinal tap on a young girl, Wentworth noted how the patient cringed in pain during the procedure. Wentworth suspected that the operation was painful (it was believed to be painless at the time) but was not totally convinced. So he performed it again—on 29 infants and toddlers.

He eventually reached the conclusion that although temporarily painful, the procedure was very useful in helping diagnose illnesses. Wentworth’s findings received mixed reviews from his colleagues—some praised them while one critic denounced them as nothing more than “human vivisection.” Growing public indignation over the experiments later forced Wentworth to leave his teaching job at Harvard Medical School.

Marc V. is always open for a conversation, so do drop him a line sometime.

Cutting-edge technology allows researchers to get creative with their goals. Quirkiness in the name of science is bound to produce something unusual. From octopuses that are plied with Ecstasy and people reading each other’s thoughts to a reality that exists only when looked at, scientists are breaking new ground.

However, as with all experiments, not everything was wholesome. Some results showed disturbing human-robot relationships and worse—the tendency to torture a helpless victim existed even in those who thought they were incapable.

10 Goats Like Happy People

Goats are known for their smarts. In 2018, an experiment with 20 animals revealed another cognitive ability. They can tell people’s facial expressions apart. The plucky creatures were trained to walk over to the far side of the pen, where they received snacks.

During the second phase, two images were tacked to the back. The photos included men and women, none of whom the goats had ever met in real life. One picture always contained a smiling person and the other, a grumpy frown. The animals were shown only male or female faces, and the pictures were moved around to the left and right sides of the enclosure.

Gender appeared to make no difference to the goats, which preferred to sniff at the happy faces. Curiously, they only picked the positive images posted on the right side of the pen.^[1]

This suggested that the left hemisphere of a goat’s brain deals with friendly cues. It remains unclear how goats understand the facial communication of another species, but this test provided the first evidence that they are capable of doing so.

9 The Four-Day Week

Many employees dread their work environment, especially when companies put profits ahead of workers’ needs. In 2018, one New Zealand company made a radical change. For two months, the trusts firm Perpetual Guardian gave its workforce full pay for four-day weeks.

The unique experiment aimed to determine whether reduced office hours had a positive or negative impact on business. Most business owners would view it as risky, but the results were incredible.

The staff’s stress levels dropped from 45 to 38 percent. Even healthier, their work-life balance increased from 54 to 78 percent. The most remarkable finding was that productivity showed a small improvement despite the shorter weeks. Additionally, there was an increase in the commitment and positive relationships among staff. Leadership improved, and people actually enjoyed what they were doing.

The experiment created something that is rarely seen today—a team fiercely loyal to a company that cares for them. Perpetual Guardian now wants to make the four-day week permanent.^[2]

8 Octopuses On Ecstasy

A bizarre-sounding experiment happened in 2018. Researchers gathered two octopuses, two Star Wars action figures, and some Ecstasy (aka MDMA). This drug is known to flood human brains with serotonin and turn them into social cuddle bears.

Octopuses are grouchy loners. When sober, they avoided their own kind and the toys in their tank. When high on Ecstasy, they behaved just like people and got chummy with their fellow octopuses as well as Chewbacca and a stormtrooper.

The lovestruck tentacles revealed something unexpected. The brain of an octopus and that of a human do not even have the same regions. The two groups, vertebrates and invertebrates, separated over 500 million years ago. But surprisingly, a single gene in the genomes of humans and the eight-tentacled wonders matched perfectly.^[3]

SLC6A4 is the genetic binding site of Ecstasy, which is likely why both species develop a rosy, loving outlook on life once drugged with MDMA. Nobody really expected the socially linked genetic and neurological pathways of people to exist in other creatures.

7 Rogue Kidneys

These days, scientists grow organoids—miniature versions of real human organs. In 2018, a laboratory sprouted some mini kidneys from stem cells. After four weeks of nourishing the growths in a chemical soup, they were ready.

This soup was designed to encourage the stem cells to grow only specialized kidney cells. Once the organoids were fully grown, researchers took a peek at what was happening inside them. Then the surprise hit.

For some reason, the tiny kidneys had gone rogue and also produced brain and muscle cells. These cellular oddballs accounted for up to 20 percent of the organoids’ makeup.

As interesting as Frankenstein organs are, it was a setback. Organoids are valuable as tools to study diseases, but if they do not model a real human kidney, any information gleaned would most likely be skewed.

Another unexpected discovery was that the lab-grown kidneys refused to mature, no matter how they were farmed. This was also problematic for disease studies as longer exposure to the soup caused more rogue cells.^[4]

6 Children Believe Misleading Robots

The Asch experiment is a social conformity test disguised as a vision exam. In 2018, researchers put their own spin on it. Around 43 kids, aged seven to nine, were required to find two equally long lines on a screen. The answer was obvious. When alone, the children proved correct 87 percent of the time.^[5]

Then the robots came. Whenever the child was asked to pick lines, a robot would helpfully provide the incorrect answer. Even though the right answer was easy, the kids doubted themselves and looked to the machines for answers. They did this so often that the success rate fell to 75 percent. They just followed the robots’ leads, sometimes word for word.

When 60 adults were tested in the same way, they ignored the robots. The children probably experienced “automation bias,” a powerful belief that machines have greater abilities than they really do. Researchers suspect that the adults, unaffected by the toylike robots, might have folded if they were bigger and more imposing.

5 The Tokyo Explosion

Scientists have been trying to make bigger magnetic fields for decades. Huge ones have been created, but their strength was too much for an indoor setting. However, measuring fields that are created outside fails in the accuracy department.

In 2018, Tokyo physicists built an armored room to contain what they hoped would be the strongest controlled magnetic field created under laboratory conditions. Such fields are graded in teslas. The strongest MRI machine creates three teslas, and the Tokyo team aimed for 700.^[6]

Instead, their electromagnetic device erupted with 1,200 teslas. This unexpected development made it the strongest controlled field, although “controlled” only meant being able to measure its power. The actual event blew apart the laboratory’s armored doors, right after it crumpled the iron box in which it was kept.

Despite the fright and damaged property the team got, the 1,200 teslas was a step toward limitless, clean energy. Nuclear fusion reactors need only a 1,000-tesla magnetic field to change the world’s energy crisis. Scientists now have a strong-enough field. They just need to determine how to stop the explosions.

4 Measurement Creates Reality

In 1978, physicists proposed that reality did not exist until measured. It sounded weird back then, but in 2015, the technology arrived to prove it. Australian scientists tweaked a famous theoretical experiment from the 1970s and showed that the quantum world honored this strange law.

The experiment took a single helium atom and sent it through laser barriers (the points of measurement) to see if it acted like a wave or a particle. Logic dictates that its very nature would be preexisting and that measurement could not make it behave in any other way.^[7]

However, as bizarre as it sounds, the tests showed that the atom could not decide whether it wanted to be a wave or a particle until it encountered the lasers. To start its journey, the helium atom was sent through a pair of beams meant to scatter its path.

At a later point during its travels, random lasers were added to merge the paths again. This second measurement somehow brought into existence the atom’s preference for wave- or particle-like behavior.

3 The Murdered Robot

Once upon a time (2015), there was a robot called hitchBOT. He had one ambition: to travel as far as he could by hitching rides with strangers. For two weeks, the friendly machine enjoyed the charity of drivers and clocked the longest journey ever made by its kind.

After he had traveled over 10,000 kilometers (6,200 mi) in Canada and enjoyed the views of several cities in Germany, hitchBOT wanted to see the whole of the United States of America. Had the electronic wanderer had parents, they would have warned him about the dangers of hitchhiking.

Instead, hitchBOT’s designers created him as an experiment to see how far human kindness would take him and how people interacted with a robot without supervision. Around the beginning of his great American adventure, he set off for San Francisco—and disappeared.^[8]

His decapitated body was found in Philadelphia. It had been thrown into a ditch. Worse, his killer had had fun. The person had also removed hitchBOT’s arms and rearranged them around the robot’s body.

2 BrainNet

In 2018, neuroscientists managed to connect the brains of three people. They could play a Tetris-type game just by sharing thoughts. This “network” was dubbed BrainNet.

The participants did not actually read one another’s thoughts. However, thanks to electroencephalograms (EEGs) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), they could communicate. Two participants were the “senders” and wore EEG electrodes. A third person had a TMS cap and was the “receiver.”

The senders played each other, but only the third person could move the blocks. When a player wished to rotate a block, he stared at one of two LEDs on the screen. The flashing lights triggered signals in the brain, which got picked up by the EEG and relayed to the TMS cap. The latter’s magnetic field created phantom flashes in the receiver’s mind—a sign to rotate the block.

With a success rate of just over 80 percent, scientists hope to one day create a social network of interfaced brains, possibly over the web.^[9]

1 The Milgram Experiment

Stanley Milgram discovered a disturbing corner of the human mind. During the 1960s, this social psychologist tested how far people would go when ordered by an authority figure to electrocute another person. Most participants obeyed. The Milgram experiment was a turning point in the study of obedience and social psychology.

In 2017, researchers wanted to see if individuals today would shelve empathy for authoritative approval. Most would think themselves incapable of responding to such influence.

A recent Polish study recruited 80 people for a “memory experiment.” Their job was to shock learners who failed to memorize associations. The shocks were never real. The participants did not know this or that the “learners” were actors.

About 10 levers delivered increasingly higher voltage shocks. The participants were told to zap learners who failed to memorize something, and an authority figure encouraged those who became hesitant when the shocks grew more powerful (and they had to listen to screams). Although participants were three times less likely to use stronger shocks on female learners, a disturbing 90 percent went all the way.^[10]

Some of the following experiments are horrifying because of how doctors use fellow human beings as guinea pigs. Some of them are horrifying because of what they say about us as a species. In fact, a few of these experiments were even used as a justification by the Nazi doctors during their trials at Nuremburg.

10Measuring A Dying Man’s Fear

John Deering was a convicted criminal, having killed someone during a robbery, and he was sentenced to face the firing squad in 1932. Approached by doctors just before his death, he agreed to take part in a novel experiment. Electrodes would be hooked up to him, and researchers would determine exactly when his heart stopped.

The heart stopped 15.6 seconds after he was shot. He wasn’t pronounced dead until 150 seconds later.

However, the experiment also investigated something else. In addition to detecting when the heart stopped, the electrocardiogram measured the rate at which it beat, and the researchers used this data to extrapolate how scared Deering felt as he died. Immediately before the execution, the heart pounded at a very high 120 beats per minute. When the sheriff called “fire,” the pulse shot up to 180 beats per minute.

Deering had kept a calm exterior during the execution, but newspapers gleefully reported on the experiment by declaring: “You can’t be brave facing death!”

9Vanderbilt University’s Radioactive Iron

In 1945, researchers at Vanderbilt University set up a study to find out the rate of iron absorption in pregnant woman. Their preferred method of measurement was radioactive iron.

Researchers gave pills to 829 anemic women without telling them they were consuming something radioactive. Thanks to the pills, the women received radiation levels 30 times higher than normal exposure.

The study had a secondary objective: to observe the long-term effects of radiation on children. The experiment likely caused the deaths of three children: an 11-year-old girl and two boys, ages 11 and 5.

Vanderbilt ended up the subject of a lawsuit at the behest of the mothers of the dead children, a lawsuit that they settled for over $10 million.

8The Boston Project

In 1953, Dr. William Sweet, in conjunction with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, conducted several radioactive injection experiments on terminally ill cancer patients. As with the Vanderbilt experiment, the purpose of the uranium injections was twofold: to study the effects of ingested uranium on the human body and to see if the radioactive material would have any effect on the patients’ tumors. As part of a deal with the government, Sweet agreed to turn over the patients’ corpses to the government for further research on radioactivity.

None of the patients showed any signs of recovery. Many died quickly. In addition, it appears that no patients consented to the experiment.

7Bacteria Testing In San Francisco

In 1950, fears of biological warfare with the Soviets inspired American officials to test the viability of an offshore attack. The experiment consisted of a single vessel located a few miles away from San Francisco, loaded up with a bacteria known as Serratia marcescens. The bacteria produced bright red colonies on soil or water samples, making it ideal for tracking purposes.

The researchers believed that the bacteria was completely safe for humans. In reality, it caused various respiratory and urinary tract infections. Doctors in the area observed such an increase in pneumonia and UTI cases that Stanford wrote an article about it for a medical journal. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were exposed to potentially deadly bacteria.

The worst part is that the experiment was completely unnecessary. Similar tests could have been done in a deserted area and in smaller quantities. The only thing the experiment proved was that San Francisco was indeed vulnerable to biological attack.

6 Puppy Obedience Experiments

In Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiments, participants were told to deliver electric shocks to victims, and actors pretended that they really were receiving shocks. Charles Sheridan and Richard King’s variation added a twist: The victim was not faking the cries of pain. Also, the victim was a puppy.

The two men felt that perhaps Milgram’s subjects realized that their victims were faking reactions, which would explain why the subjects so readily delivered shocks when asked to. Determined to remove that possibility, Sheridan and King recreated the experiment with a puppy who actually received electric shocks.

The volunteers were told that the puppies were conditioned to pose a certain way when prompted by a light. If they stood incorrectly, the volunteers were to throw a switch, giving the puppy an increasingly strong electric shock.

Over half of male participants, though distraught, obeyed to the fullest extent. Even more surprising, every single woman fully obeyed, some of them crying the entire time.

5The Broken Toy Experiment

Researchers at the University of Iowa gave toddlers toys, instructing them not to break them. The researchers had secretly rigged the toys to break in a matter of seconds, subjecting the children to an immediate flood of guilt.

As soon as the toy shattered, the researchers gave a brief “oh, my” to express their disappointment. They then carefully watched the toddlers for reactions, verbal or non-verbal.

Once a minute passed, the researchers left the room with the broken toy and returned shortly with an identical non-broken toy, assuring the child that they were faultless in the toy’s breaking. However, like any study involving children, this raises a number of issues about informed consent. (Various parents whose children participated in the study claim that there have been no adverse effects.)

4Chester M. Southam’s Cancer Experiments

Chester M. Southam was a well-known cancer researcher in the 1960s, working diligently to study the immune system’s effect on tumors. He wanted to study whether a person already weakened by a different disease would be able to fight off cancer cells. To test this theory, he needed people on which to experiment, and he found them at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in New York City. Convincing the medical director of the potential benefits, Southam was allowed to inject 22 people with foreign, live cancer cells to study the effects.

This was nontherapeutic experimentation performed on elderly, terminal patients, so Southam didn’t even get consent. He convinced the medical director that it was common practice not to. (Some were informed that they were to be part of an experiment but were not told the details.) In addition, some of the patients’ doctors told Southam that they didn’t want their patients to be a part of Southam’s experiment, but he used them anyway.

In the end, Southam was censured and put on a year’s probation. The experiment also brought the idea of informed consent back to the forefront of the American medical discussion.

3The Visual Cliff Experiment

The visual cliff experiment was thought up by two Cornell University researchers, Eleanor Gibson and Richard Walk. A strong glass pane was placed on a table, with one end extending some distance off the tabletop. A checkered tablecloth covered the table, but below the rest of the glass, the distant floor was visible.

Gibson and Walk used this setup to discover whether depth perception was innate in various animals. If an animal avoided walking on glass beyond the table, it could perceive depth visually. They experimented on rats raised in complete darkness and found that the rodents could indeed perceive depth. So they next moved on to human babies.

The babies were made to crawl over the glass. The researchers placed the mothers at the end of the glass, having them call out to their offspring. To get to their mothers, the babies had to crawl across the glass, apparently over a sheer drop. Some babies did seem hesitant to move, implying that they were able to perceive depth—and implying that the experimenters had successfully inspired fear in them.

2Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study

One of several human experiments undertaken to further the US effort in World War II, the Stateville Penitentiary Malaria study was designed to test experimental malaria drugs. To find subjects, the government turned to prisons and contracted hundreds of prisoners to become guinea pigs. Even though the men were all sane, mentally capable, and told of the specifics of the experiment, whether or not prisoners can actively consent remains debatable.

No one died due to the experiment, and many prisoners who took part in the study received generous compensation. Most also received reduced sentences for their patriotic service. However, nearly every man who was bitten by an infected mosquito contracted the disease

1Robert Heath’s Electric Sex Stimulation

In 1970, Tulane University ‘s Dr. Robert Heath turned to deep brain stimulation to treat something that he saw as a problem: homosexuality.

A 24-year-old gay man (“B-19”) suffering from paranoia and depression was chosen as the candidate. Stimulation of the brain’s septal region is associated with pleasure. So Dr. Heath inserted electrodes under the man’s skull and shocked his brain. The man did indeed report extreme pleasure. Offered next the ability to shock himself, the man—a suicidal addict—did so thousands of times, in sessions that lasted hours.

Shortly after, Heath monitored the man’s brain activity while B-19 masturbated to heterosexual pornography. The subject successfully orgasmed.

The final part of the experiment consisted of the patient having sex with a female prostitute that Heath had hired. The doctor continually shocked his brain during this process. B-19 didn’t seem interested in the woman, sitting still for over an hour, until she approached him and initiated intercourse.

In a follow-up interview a year later, the patient stated that he had been regularly having sex with both men and women. Deeming the experiment partially successful, Heath moved on to other fields of research, never again attempting to cure homosexuality.

Throughout history, some of the most important scientists have “bent the rules” every once in a while to achieve their goals. Always for the betterment of humanity as a whole, the suffering of a few to save the masses is always worth the risk—or is it?

Here are 10 examples that just might make you think twice about how you answer that question. The actions of some of these scientists may just cause you to wonder how many times our lives have really been gambled with over the centuries.

10 Giovanni Aldini
The Original ‘Doctor Frankenstein’

Giovanni Aldini (1762–1834) was a professor of physics at Bologna who had a scientific interest in a variety of fields. But the one that stands out most was galvanism. Aldini helped put together a group of scientists in Bologna to experiment in this area, which involves the therapeutic use of electrical currents.

This interest led him to create one of the most macabre road shows ever devised. Traveling all over Europe, Aldini choreographed countless gruesome theatrical displays. Crowds of patrons would pay to gather and gleefully stare in horror while the proverbial “mad scientist” electrified an assortment of grisly human and animal body parts. Aldini put on spectacular demonstrations, producing hair-raising spasmodic convulsions of arm and leg muscles and even more spine-tingling contractions of the facial muscles of dead human heads.

Using the severed remains of animals and humans and the current of a powerful battery, Aldini would cause eyes to roll, jaws to open, teeth to clack, and fleshy-smelling smoke to curl eerily into the electrically charged air. A truly appalling spectacle, witnesses were reported to say that they could not shake the feeling that the “victims” had really just been brought back to life only to suffer death again.

Always the showman, Aldini enjoyed his most famous performance in 1803 at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Using the corpse of an executed convict named George Forster, he proceeded to poke and prod the dead man with a pair of conducting rods connected to a battery, causing various parts of the corpse to quake, quiver, and contort.

In his day, he was not considered to be a “mad scientist” especially since the emperor of Austria, in recognition of his achievements, made Aldini a knight of the Iron Crown and councillor of state at Milan.

9 A Real Haitian Zombie And Zombie Poison

A worn, ragged-looking man shows up in a rural Haitian town claiming to have died on May 2, 1962. One of the problems with this picture is that the year was 1980. Clairvius Narcisse swore that he had been pronounced dead in Deschapelles, Haiti, at Albert Schweitzer Hospital. He also said that he was awake and conscious during the entire ordeal.

Narcisse also claimed that he had been completely paralyzed and could do nothing but lie there in horror as he was pronounced dead, nailed into a coffin, and unceremoniously buried alive. He also claimed that the bocor (Haitian witch doctor) who had made him a zombie had also dug him up and forced him to work as a zombie.

In Haiti, zombies are not only common in folklore but commonly feared as well. Scientists have uncovered innumerable reports of the bodies of friends and family members coming back to life. According to the legends, zombies are not aware of anything in their surroundings so they are generally harmless unless, of course, you allow them to regain their senses by eating salt.

Despite countless reports, investigators could locate little evidence either proving or disproving the phenomenon. A common theme with the zombie stories concerns people dying without receiving any medical care before their alleged deaths. This raises the red flags of fraud and possible mistaken identity for investigators to deal with.

Right about this time in the early 1980s, anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis just happened to be in Haiti to investigate the causes of zombies. Davis was there at the request of anesthesiologist Nathan Kline, who theorized that a drug was somehow involved and that it could have valuable medicinal uses. Davis was hoping to get his hands on samples of these zombie concoctions so that they could be chemically analyzed in the US for medicinal purposes.

Davis managed to gather eight samples of zombie powder from four different regions of the country. The ingredients in all of them were not the same, but seven of the eight had four ingredients in common. They were the neurotoxin tetrodotoxin (derived from puffer fish), the marine toad (also containing numerous toxic substances), the Hyla tree frog that secretes a very irritating but not lethal substance, some other ingredients derived from indigenous animals and plants, and even ground glass.

The use of puffer fish was the most intriguing to the scientists because the active ingredient tetrodotoxin causes both paralysis and death, and those poisoned with it are known to stay conscious right up until it occurs. The scientists theorized that the powder would create irritation if applied topically and subsequent scratching would break the skin of the victim and allow the tetrodotoxin to enter the bloodstream.

This would paralyze the victim and cause him to only appear to be dead. After the family buries the victim, the bocor returns and digs up the grave. If everything goes according to plan and the victim survives the horrific ordeal, the toxin would eventually wear off. Through the use of other debilitating drugs, the victim could come to truly believe that he had been turned into a zombie.

8 Poison Labs Of The Former Soviet Union

At one time, the former Soviet Union operated secret poison labs to experiment with new ways to covertly eliminate subversives and enemies of the state. The most infamous of these was a laboratory known as the Kamera (“Chamber”) where Russian scientists conducted experiments to look for better methods of poisoning people. Everyone knows that the KGB was infamous for murdering and kidnapping those who spoke out against the state—regardless of their location on the planet. As time went by, the KGB continuously perfected this sinister art with labs like the Kamera.

The “holy grail” for the scientists would have been a poison that was not only tasteless and odorless but also undetectable during an autopsy. The technicians also looked for both slow- and fast-acting toxins that left no clues at an autopsy. They conducted experiments using delivery systems like injections, drinks, and powders and powerful toxins such as curare, digitoxin, ricin, and mustard gas.

Eventually, they had enough poisons to work with and started focusing on delivery methods and the systems to administer the toxins. A good example was one occasion where two Soviet officials were murdered using a type of vapor gun containing a poison that made it appear as though they had both died of heart attacks.

In fact, these official “natural deaths” were never once suspected to be assassinations until years later when a Soviet agent defected and took credit for the crimes. The scientists tested their gruesome creations on political prisoners held in prison camps all over the Soviet Union. If any of these test subjects were not killed by the poisons, they were summarily shot.

It seems as though the fate of the Kamera is unclear. According to a declassified CIA document from 1964, the Soviets abandoned the Kamera in 1953, although it is believed to still exist in some form or another.

7 Jose Delgado
Electronic Control Of The Mind

Streaming hotly over the wooden structures and below into the ring, the bright afternoon Sun lights up fiery eyes as it falls onto a powerful and angry bull staring down his prey. Enraged at being disturbed, the bull charges at the man standing there, seemingly unarmed and looking very vulnerable.

But incredibly, just as the behemoth reaches his defenseless target, the huge animal stops dead in his tracks and just stands there, snorting heavily and looking around nervously. Only then do you see that the “unarmed and defenseless” man was actually a scientist, now looking rather smug, with a radio transmitter in his hand. The scientist had only to press a button to stop a charging bull.

You watch again in silent amazement as the scientist presses another button on the device, and the bull smartly turns and simply trots harmlessly out of the ring. What you do not know was that the day before, the scientist—Dr. Jose Delgado of Yale University—had painlessly implanted a series of fine wire electrodes into predetermined regions of the brain of the animal. The bull was obeying commands caused by electrical stimulation of specific areas of his brain using wireless radio signals tuned to the frequency of the wire electrodes connected to him.

Conducted in the 1960s in Cordoba, Spain, this experiment was one of the most incredible displays of intentional animal behaviorial modification using external control of the brain. The doctor was attempting to discover what makes bulls brave. Just as in his other experiments that concentrated on finding biological reasons for things such as emotions, personality traits, and behaviorial patterns in both animals and man, he succeeded by way of electrical stimulation of the brain.

Simply put, he found that people could be made to act in a variety of ways with just the push of a button. He could cause sudden and acute bouts of passion, euphoria, and anger in patients at will. In one chilling and disturbing experiment, a calm and collective epileptic woman nonchalantly playing her guitar was made, at the push of a button, to suddenly start smashing the instrument against the wall in an instant fit of rage.

Delgado concluded that only an increase or decrease in aggression was possible using this technique and that a specific behavior could not be accurately produced. Controversy over whether his motives were geared more toward mind control or preventive psychology exists, but Delgado maintains that the latter was and has always been the case.

6 Egas Moniz
A Lobotomy Gets Him Shot

Egas Moniz, a Portuguese neurologist in 1936, devised a surgical procedure to treat schizophrenia called a prefrontal leukotomy, or more commonly, a lobotomy. The operation calls for incisions to be made in the brain, destroying connections between the prefrontal lobe and other areas of this vital organ. The exceedingly delicate operation was successfully used globally for treating schizophrenia, earning Moniz the Nobel Prize in 1949. But the accolades didn’t last long.

Introduced in 1952, chlorpromazine was our first neuroleptic drug and the first one discovered to have a positive effect on schizophrenia. The idea of a noninvasive treatment for schizophrenia, such as an oral medication, would and did win over the scientific community soon after it was known to work and medically available. Since 1960, a more aggressive form of lobotomy is sometimes used but only when severe anxieties and uncontrollable syndromes resistant to other forms of therapy are being treated.

Moniz conceded that some personality and behavioral degradation is expected with some lobotomized patients. But he also insisted that the negative cases were overshadowed by a corresponding decrease in the adverse effects of mental illness. Despite this statement, Moniz had at least one disgruntled patient who did not agree with him and proceeded to shoot him as a result, leaving him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

5 Ivan Pavlov
His Experiments On Dogs Graduate To Kids

“Pavlovian conditioning,” like most notable advances in science, was accidentally discovered. This time, it was by a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov. During the 1890s, the scientist was investigating salivation (drooling) in dogs in response to food.

Pavlov noticed that whenever he entered the room, even without food for them, the dogs would salivate. By 1902, he was looking at the idea that there are certain things that a dog does not need to learn such as salivating over food. This reflex must be “hardwired” into the animal since they do not learn to salivate whenever they see food. It just happens.

In behaviorist terms, this is called an “unconditioned response.” Pavlov proved the existence of the unconditioned response by giving a dog a bowl of food and then measuring its saliva output. When he discovered that even something only reminding the dog of food still triggered it to drool, he knew he was onto something of scientific value. As a result, he would dedicate his entire career to this line of study.

Pavlov quickly noted that the lab dogs had learned to associate his lab assistant with food. He had to assume this behavior had been learned because there was a time that they did not do this. So a point had arrived when this had changed. Pavlov knew that the dogs in his lab had somehow learned to associate food with his lab assistant. Since changes in behavior are usually the result of learning, the assistant must have started as a neutral stimulus for the dogs, which became a positive one after being unintentionally associated with the unconditioned stimulus of food.

Pavlov used a bell in his experiments as a neutral stimulus. Whenever a dog got food, he would ring the bell. After a dog became conditioned to the procedure, he just rang the bell without giving the dog any food and, as expected, the action caused an increase in salivation.

Since this response had been learned, it was called a “conditioned response” and the neutral stimulus had become a “conditioned stimulus” in the process. With dogs, Pavlov discovered that two stimuli had to be introduced one right after the other for the association to be made. He dubbed this the “law of temporal contiguity.”

In 1920, John B. Watson, a Johns Hopkins professor, was fascinated with Pavlov’s research on conditioned stimulus. Watson wanted to try to create a conditioned response in a human child. The professor found his subject in a nine-month-old child named “Albert B.” (aka “Little Albert”).

To start the experiment, Little Albert was given, among other things, a white rat, a Santa Claus mask, a white rabbit, and a dog. The toddler was not afraid of any of them and seemed to favor the white rat. After Albert became acclimated to the items, a scientist would smack a metal bar, making a loud bang and scaring the child whenever he made a choice.

Soon, due to this conditioning, Little Albert became afraid of the mask and the rat and even a fur coat. What was particularly disturbing about the entire ordeal was that Watson never attempted to undo any of the harm he may have inflicted on his innocent subject.

4 The Russians’ First Cosmonaut

On November 3, 1957, the former Soviet Union put their first cosmonaut into space, and it was not Yuri Gagarin. The achievement was touted worldwide as a soaring victory for the Soviet Union, giving them a commanding lead over the US in the race to space. What many do not know, though, is that it was a suicide mission for the lone passenger of the small spacecraft—a dog called Laika.

It was the dawn of spaceflight and just getting there was the battle. Getting back was another story and a problem that would have to wait for future missions. According to the Associated Press, Laika was a stray recovered in Moscow just a week or so before launch. She was promoted to cosmonaut because she was small enough and had a good disposition. In total, the Soviet Union sent up 36 dogs in rockets, and although not the first sent up, Laika was the first to achieve a successful orbit.

The Soviet Union was leading the US in the space race—or at least, it appeared that way. Sputnik I, the first man-made satellite, had been put into orbit just one month earlier. When Sputnik II achieved orbit with Laika aboard, the US fell even further behind. The media could not decide whether to ridicule the event or praise it, which should probably be expected, because the bottom line was simple: Somebody had to send an animal up first, and it was just a question of who that would be.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Cold War, leaked information from the former Soviet Union began to surface, clearly stating that the animal did not die the “humane” death that was advertised by the Soviets. They had long reported that the dog had died a painless death after a week in orbit. But the Institute of Biological Problems in Moscow leaked the truth in 2002. According to the leak, Laika had become overheated and panicked, causing her death within just a matter of hours after launch.

Personally, the more I think about it, this is a rare case of the truth being better than the lie because a quick demise in just a matter of hours for Laika seems a lot more humane to me than a week floating in space scared, lonely, and slowly dying. If one must go, the quicker the better, right? What do you think?

3 Talk About A Stomachache

William Beaumont obtained his medical license in June 1812 from the Medical Society of Vermont. That same month, the War of 1812 erupted and Beaumont joined the US Army with a commission as surgeon’s mate. After a short retirement in 1815, he accepted a commission as a post surgeon in what is now Michigan at Fort Mackinac. On June 6, 1822, an accident occurred that would make Beaumont famous. A 19-year-old French Canadian fur trapper named Alexis St. Martin was accidentally shot in the abdomen with a shotgun at close range.

In spite of a horrible prognosis for someone with a gutshot, St. Martin did recover. But it took 10 months to do it. After almost a year, a hole remained in his abdomen that would not close, producing a passageway directly into his stomach. Seeing an opportunity to do some serious science, Beaumont took St. Martin into his own home to treat him.

The stomach and digestive system were a complete mystery to science 200 years ago. Realizing this, Beaumont saw his chance in May 1825 and started conducting experiments on his young houseguest. For the eight years from 1825 to 1833, Beaumont conducted four sets of experiments on St. Martin while stationed at various posts around the Great Lakes region. This caused gaps in his experiments—and in his notes—lasting from months to years, which was also due to his forays into Canada.

But eventually realizing his limited knowledge of chemistry, Beaumont employed the services of Yale chemistry professor Benjamin Silliman and University of Virginia physiology professor Robley Dunglison. Both scientists analyzed specimens of gastric juice from St. Martin and determined that it consisted of hydrochloric acid, which confirmed the suspicions that Beaumont had formed from his experiments.

Beaumont would dangle pieces of different foodstuffs like meat or eggs into the stomach of his patient, all the while taking detailed notes on how long various foods took to digest. These could not have been very pleasant experiments, to say the least.

2 Domestic Biological Warfare

With operation names like “Drop Kick,” “Big Itch,” and “Big Buzz,” the United States Army Chemical Corps, according to some, let loose mosquitoes infected with yellow fever over Avon Park, Florida, and Savannah, Georgia, back in the 1950s. At the time, the Chemical Corps thought strongly that a surprise attack with some 230,000 infected mosquitoes would be impossible for a nation to react to as well as extremely hard to detect in time to do anything about it.

The corps put its theory to the test in the 1950s by exploring the possibility of weaponizing vermin such as mosquitoes and fleas when they released uninfected mosquitoes over Avon Park, Florida, and Savannah, Georgia. The tests were done just to determine how far the insects would spread once released into the environment.

Many bloggers and watchdog groups have made unproven claims that the military released infected mosquitoes over Savannah and Avon Park, although no outbreaks of yellow fever in those areas have ever been reported. Allegedly, after every mosquito release, army agents would come in acting as health officials to document the results.

Recently declassified documents reveal that these tests were actually conducted but with mosquitoes that were not infected with yellow fever. Reports by an unidentified Avon Park resident refer to an outbreak of dengue fever in the area that allegedly could be traced back to the army experiments and the CIA. There are also other unconfirmed claims that these alleged experiments in biological warfare caused six or seven American deaths.

At the corps’ historical office in Maryland, there is a document called “Summary of Major Events and Problems” which states:

In 1956, the corps released 600,000 uninfected mosquitoes from a plane at Avon Park Bombing Range, Florida. Within a day, the mosquitoes had spread a distance of between [2–3 kilometers (1–2 mi)] and had bitten many people. [ . . . ] In 1958, further tests at Avon Park AFB, Florida, showed that mosquitoes could easily be disseminated from helicopters, would spread more than [2 kilometers (1 mi)] in each direction, and would enter all types of buildings.

Beatrice Peterson, a longtime Avon Park resident, never knew of the mosquito releases, but she did recall the screwworm flies that were released in the mid- to late 1950s. She was 14 and remembered planes dropping boxes, but she could not recall what type of aircraft they were.

In the end, it seems as though the army did drop uninfected mosquitoes. But in my humble view, the action remains a public health hazard that should not be practiced by any government.

1 The Japanese And Unit 731

During World War II, two biological warfare research facilities were owned and operated by the Japanese Imperial Empire. This was in complete violation of the 1925 Geneva Convention and the resulting ban on chemical and biological warfare.

These research facilities were called Unit 100 and Unit 731 and were commanded by Lieutenant General Ishii Shiro. Under his command, 3,000 Japanese scientists and researchers labored at infecting human subjects with dangerous diseases such as the anthrax virus and the black plague.

Before dying of their respective afflictions, these test subjects were then eviscerated, or surgically gutted, with no anesthesia whatsoever in order to study the effects of these diseases upon human organs. Due to the highly secretive nature of these units, a complete list of their horrific experiments is not available.

Actual testimony from participating surgeons helps to shed some gory light on these gruesome experiments. One medical assistant, who wished to remain anonymous, described his first vivisection in a 1995 interview with The New York Times: “I picked up the scalpel . . . he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly.”

Unit 731 did not stop at vivisections since they were known to try out new biological weapons on their subjects, including dirty bombs loaded with plague-infested fleas or deadly cultures. One horrific experiment conducted by the Japanese scientists involved placing subjects dubbed “logs” inside pressure chambers to see how much pressure it took to blow their eyes out of their sockets. Other subjects were forced to stay outside during winter until their limbs were frozen solid so that Japanese doctors could find better ways to treat frostbite.

Unit 731 was also tasked with developing better toxic gases for the Japanese army. “Logs” made perfect subjects for these morbid experiments, too. A graduate student in Tokyo found documentation in a bookstore describing horrendous experiments conducted on humans during the war. The documents speak of the adverse effects of massive dosages of the tetanus vaccine, with tables indicating the time it took victims to die. It also described the bodies’ muscle spasms.

During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army used biological and chemical weapons developed by Unit 731 to kill or injure at least 300,000 Chinese victims. At least 3,000 Korean, Mongolian, Russian, and Chinese victims also died due to the experiments conducted by Unit 731 in the six years between 1939 and 1945. Not one prisoner came out alive.

Duane lives in northwestern Pennsylvania in the United States of America and in “one of the Original 13” as he likes to say, where he grew up with a fascination for collectibles like baseball cards, coins, stamps, and old bottles, just to name a few. Always a self-starter, he has taught himself many different things and has ended up with a large variety of skills and hobbies in both old and new and has recently started putting them to use on the Internet. He has been writing in several capacities for several decades.

Scientists can be an eccentric bunch of people, especially when it comes to animals. Throughout history scientists have performed all manner of weird and wonderful experiments on animals, some of which have produced surprisingly useful results. For example, giving a robotic arm to a monkey could revolutionize the prosthetic limb. Vibrating earthworms on a loudspeaker might provide the inspiration for a new form of neurotechnology. And feeding helium to an alligator and putting an artificial tail on a chicken have both improved our understanding of the dinosaurs.

At other times, scientists have decided to perform ridiculous feats with no real purpose like feeding LSD to a spider or swallowing a shrew. Nonetheless here are ten of the most absurd, hair-brained experiments ever performed on animals.

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10 The scientist who ate a shrew

Scientists have performed some pretty disgusting experiments over the years, but one of the absolute worst is the man who ate a shrew. In 1994, two strong-stomached scientists decided to find out what would happened if one of them swallowed, digested and excreted a northern short-tailed shrew.

New York anthropologists Brian D Crandall and Peter W Stahl took great care to prepare the shrew for consumption. According to their report—Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton—the pair began by skinning and disemboweling the shrew. It was then, in their words, “lightly boiled” before one of the two scientists (they don’t reveal which one) swallowed the carcass without chewing.

But their experiment did not stop there. The pair decided to analyze what remained of the shrew once it had been digested and excreted. However, despite an exceptionally thorough inspection, not all if the shrew’s bones made it out of the other end. Among the “missing” body parts were one major jawbone, four molar teeth, much of the leg and foot, all but one of the 31 vertebrae, and a significant amount of the shrew’s skull.

Given that the carcass was swallowed whole, without taking a bite, the scientists were amazed by what they discovered. “Any damage,” they explain in their report, “occurred as the remains were processed internally. Mastication undoubtedly damages bone, but the effects of this process are perhaps repeated in the acidic, churning environment of the stomach.”^[1]

9 Playing hide-and-seek with rats

Rats are often seen as filthy, loathsome creatures, but it turns out they have a childish side too. The scurrying rodents are said to love a game of hide-and-seek, often giggling with delight when they are discovered.

In 2019, a team of neuroscientists at Humboldt University in Berlin devised a way to play hide-and-seek with male adolescent rats. The researchers set up a small playroom full of boxes and shelters to hide behind. The rats quickly learned how to play the game, and began to develop strategies to better evade and locate their human opponents.

During their training, the rats were not rewarded with food or water; instead they were tickled and given positive physical contact. But they seemed to enjoy more than just the reward. The researchers believe the rats would play hide-and-seek for the sheer fun of it. When they were caught, the rodents would often let out ultrasonic giggles and jump for joy, then scamper off to a different hiding place.

This might sound like a silly experiment, but scientists have found that play behavior is vital for cognitive development.^[2]

8 Magnetized cockroaches

When you think of magnets, cockroaches are probably not the first things that come to mind. But, believe it or not, the hardy insects have a number of strange magnetic properties. Cockroaches, like birds, navigate by sensing the Earth’s magnetic field, and some scientists believe they could help improve the design of magnetic sensors.

In order to learn more, researchers at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore placed a group of American cockroaches inside a magnetic field. The little creatures became magnetized in next to no time. But the effect was not permanent. Outside the field, their magnetism faded away and the cockroaches returned to their normal, non-magnetized selves.

But the scientists noticed something unusual. They found that the time taken for the cockroaches’ magnetism to decay varied by as much as fifty minutes to fifty hours. And it all depended on whether the cockroaches were alive or dead.

The scientists concluded that this strange effect was caused by the different viscosities of living and dead cockroaches. Basically dead cockroaches take longer to demagnetize because they are much stickier than live ones. There are actually tiny magnetic particles nestled within the bodies of cockroaches. Typically these particles are scattered about and facing in different directions. But when a magnetic field is applied they begin to line up. Then, when the field is removed, they return to their random orientation. This process is fairly quick in live cockroaches (around 50 minutes) because the magnetic particles are housed in a gloopy fluid, so they can move about with ease. But when the insects die, the fluid hardens up, which is why the particles can take over two days to return to their original orientation.^[3]

So, what are these magnetic particles and where they come from? Sadly scientists are still none the wiser. But this bizarre experiment has proven there is much more to cockroaches than meets the eye.

7 Alligators on helium

What happens when an alligator inhales helium? Strange question, but a team of experimental biologists believe the answer has helped them better understand how the snapping reptiles communicate.

As I’m sure you are all aware, when humans inhale helium our voices become squeaky. The reason for this is simple: helium gas is lighter than air, which means sound waves speed up as they travel through it. This causes the helium molecules to vibrate at frequencies much higher than air, which is what makes your voice sound like Donald Duck.

Although it seems like a novelty party trick, this concept becomes far more useful when applied to alligators. Alligators are known to make loud bellowing noises to mark their territory and attract partners during mating season. But until recently scientists have been in the dark about how these bellows are produced.

To learn more, researchers from the University of Vienna put a small Chinese alligator in an airtight tank, then filled the tank with heliox (a safe mix of helium and oxygen). The alligator actually sounded deeper in the heliox tank, but later analysis confirmed that the frequency of her bellows had, in fact, increased. This suggests that alligators communicate with each other like birds and humans by making the air in their vocal tracts resonate. And, by extension, perhaps dinosaurs communicated that way too.^[4]

6 Songbirds on drugs sing “free-form jazz”

From Jimi Hendrix to Snoop Dogg, all number of musicians have performed under the influence of drugs. But what about birds? Now, thanks to biologists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, European starlings have been heard singing “free-form jazz” while on opiates.

In a 2020 study, a group of starlings were given a small dose of fentanyl. Fentanyl is a medical painkiller that, like morphine, induces feelings of euphoria. The scientists were curious to learn if the drugged-up birds would burst into song just for the fun of it. And they did. Shortly after the starlings had taken fentanyl, they began to sing a kind of “free-form jazz”, scatting away on opioids like Charlie Parker.

Research suggests that flocks of starlings often sing together out of joy of being among other birds. It is thought that the birds carry on singing alone to try to reproduce that social pleasure. “It’s evidence that a positive state is induced by the presence of flock-mates, which stimulates song,” lead author Lauren Riters told The Times, “and that birds continue to produce gregarious song because it is rewarding.”^[5]

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5 Vibrating live earthworms

In 2020, two Melbourne-based scientists made headlines after using a loudspeaker to vibrate earthworms—research they claim could hold significance for neurotechnology.

This seemingly bizarre experiment is actually a lot more scientific than it first appears. The researchers began by sedating earthworms with alcohol. They then placed them on a loudspeaker, cranked up the volume, and watched as the worms began to wobble. Using a laser, they were able to monitor what effect the speaker had on the worms.

The bodies of earthworms are mostly made of water. This means that when they are shaken they behave like droplets of water and begin to ripple. But the vibrations from the loudspeaker produced a particular type of ripple known as a Faraday wave, named after the pioneer of electromagnetism Michael Faraday.^[6]

While this might not sound remarkable, the pair believes their outlandish research could be used to develop a safe, non-invasive method to connect the human brain to a computer. Essentially this bunch of drunken worms wobbling on top of speaker may one day help produce a far less harmful version of Elon Musk’s Neuralink. Who knows what the future holds?

4 Chicken walks like a dinosaur

Studying dinosaurs is a difficult businesses, given they have been extinct for 65 million years. Studying old bones and fossils can only teach you so much, and scientists are constantly on the lookout for new ways to better understand the terrible lizards.

Then in 2014 a team of scientists in Chile had a brainwave: why not put a plunger on a chicken’s bum? Chickens, like all birds, are descended from a group of dinosaurs known as the therapods (e.g. velociraptor, T. rex). So, by giving a chicken an artificial tail, the scientists believed they could alter its centre of gravity and make it walk like a dinosaur.^[7]

Remarkably the experiment worked. A short video produced by the researchers clearly shows the chicken prowling around like a no-budget version of Jurassic Park.

3 Monkey with a mind control robot arm

It sounds like something out of a surrealist sci-fi movie, but in 2008 scientists released footage of a monkey controlling a robotic arm with its brain. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh designed a highly-sophisticated mind-controlled arm, then taught a macaque monkey to use it to feed itself marshmallows.

The monkey was able to control the arm using an advanced brain implant. Electrodes had to be inserted into the monkey’s motor cortex to detect signals from the brain, which the implant translated into commands for the arm. The engineers had taken great care to make the arm’s movement as realistic as possible. The prosthetic limb was given a dynamic shoulder, an elbow that only bends one way and a claw-like hand.^[8]

Following the remarkable work of the Pittsburgh researchers, scientists have gone on to build similar prosthetics limbs for humans to help paralyzed people live independently.

2 Drugged spiders weave odd webs

NASA has performed some incredible feats over the years, but one of their weirdest moments was the time they got spiders high. In 1995, researchers were interested to learn the effects of various drugs on spider web patterns. Scientists at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama fed spiders various toxic substances—including marijuana, caffeine and amphetamine—then watched as they spun webs while tripping.

Unsurprisingly the arachnids exposed to the most toxic chemicals produced the most misshapen webs. The one on marijuana wove most its web to begin with, but lost interest around midway. In contrast, the amphetamine spider spun with a huge amount of enthusiasm but was let down by its lack of order; its web was full of gaping holes. And the one on caffeine produced something halfway between a traditional web and a spiral mandala.^[9]

1 The sex life of rats wearing different pants

If you want to be successful in romance you have to dress sharp. That is not only true of humans but rats as well. In the 1990s, Egyptian scientist Ahmed Shafik conducted an experiment dressing rats in different kinds of pants and studying the effects on their sex lives.

In total, 75 rats were made to wear pants over the course of a year. By the end of the experiment, Shafik found that those wearing cotton or wool were significant more likely to get lucky, whereas the ones dressed in polyester and poly-cotton blend often struck out

So why are the woolen-panted rats such Casanovas compared to their polyester pals? Shafik believed the polyester material created irritating electrostatic fields around the genitals, which led a drop in sexual activity. However American humorist Mary Roach has a different theory. “Having seen an illustration of a rat wearing the pants,” she wrote in her 2008 book Bonk, “I would say there’s an equal possibility that it’s simply harder to get a date when you dress funny.”^[10]

10 Amazing Mummified Animals We Have Found

Scientists can be a strange bunch of people. Some scour for answers to some of the great mysteries of the universe, or work towards cutting-edge technological breakthroughs. Others give cannabis to traumatized elephants and fit cuttlefish with 3D glasses.

Scientists are responsible for all manner of bizarre, off-the-wall discoveries. In recent months, researchers have, for example, created iridescent chocolate, built an artificial sun and studied the effects of mixing Coke and Mentos on top of a mountain. Here are ten of the weirdest discoveries.

10 Psychological Experiments That Will Blow Your Mind

10 Levitating Boat Floats Upside Down

Scientists in France have achieved a remarkable feat of science, getting a toy boat to float upside down along a layer of liquid suspended in air. According to Emmanuel Fort, researchers at the Higher School of Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris were playing about with their equipment when they essentially stumbled upon this striking phenomenon. As he told reporters, “we had no idea it would work.”

Held in position by a delicate balance of forces and vibrations, the boat appears to defy gravity. This bizarre effect allows the toy to sail the wrong way round on the underside of a layered mix of glycerol and silicon oil.

At the time the team were investigating the effects of certain vibrations on the behavior of water. With the right frequencies bubbles can be made to float down, and heavy object can be stopped from sinking.^[1]

9 Iridescent Chocolate

Sparkling rainbow chocolate sounds like something out of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. But now, thanks to one Los Angeles-based physicist, iridescent chocolate has arrived. The shimmering confectionery has been cooked up, not by Oompa Loompas, but by Samy Kamkar. Kamkar achieves this dazzling effect not with any special ingredient or coating, but by perforating the surface of his chocolate with an array of tiny holes. These holes, known as a diffraction grating, scatter beams of light as they pass through, giving the chocolate its multi-colored appearance

Kamkar began by 3D printing a mushroom-shaped mold full of microscopic ridges and grooves. He then poured tempered chocolate into the mold and left it to set in a vacuum chamber. Although this sounds incredibly hi-tech, Kamkar explained that his iridescent treats can be whipped up by anyone. “Anyone can do this at home,” he told reporters back in May. “There’s no coating. There’s no special ingredient. It’s the surface texture of the chocolate itself that’s producing it.”^[2]

8 Mixing Coke And Mentos On Top Of A Mountain

 

As any young person can tell you, drop a few Mentos mints in a bottle of Coke and it creates one almighty fizz. But in 2020, a Spring Arbor University chemistry professor and a Colorado high school teacher decided to test the power of mints and fizzy drink at over 10,000 feet above sea level. In fact, the pair repeated their experiment at a number of remote locations, including California’s Death Valley and Pikes Peak in the Rocky Mountains.

Fizzy drinks like Coke are packed full of tiny bubbles of carbon dioxide. When you pick a bottle off the shelf, the gas is dissolved in the liquid under pressure. But as soon as you open the cap, the pressure changes and some of the CO2 escapes into the air with a little froth. Adding Mentos into the bottle allows a much larger quantity of gas to escape, hence the enormous plume of foam. Mentos shells are covered in microscopic ridges which trap incredibly small bubbles of air, so the carbon dioxide in the Coke has a much larger amount of air to shoot into.

By testing the Coke-Mentos experiment at different air pressures, the pair deduced that the holes in a Mentos mint must measure two to seven micrometers across. The two scientists were even able to publish a research paper in the Journal of Scientific Education.^[3]

7 Why We All Subconsciously Judge Ugly People

 

Like it or not, you judge people on the way they look. So do I. So do all of us, according to new research from psychologists at the University of Melbourne. Prejudice against people that we find aesthetically unpleasant is an inbuilt response that we use to protect ourselves from disease.

Although ugliness is subjective, there are certain traits that are widely considered to be repulsive, like bodily fluids and skin conditions. But, the researchers point out, these ugly traits are also potentially infectious. Disgust, they argue, is an impulsive defense set up by our behavioral immune system to keep us safe and healthy.

However this response is said to surpass logical thinking. In the majority of cases, unattractive people are no more contagious than attractive people, and yet we instinctively behave as if they are riddled with germs. Unconscious bias against those with less than flattering appearances is a widespread issue that can have a seriously impact on people’s lives. Science has shown that unattractive people are less employable, less successful and are more likely to be sentenced in court. Challenging our psychological prejudices is important, the researchers argue, and it begins with becoming aware of them.^[4]

6 Polish Zoo Relaxes Their Elephants With Cannabis

 

An elephant never forgets, but perhaps marijuana might help take the sting off unpleasant memories.

Warsaw Zoo found that their elephants were feeling agitated after Erna, the elder of the herd, sadly died back in March. In the months following Erna’s passing, three of the youngest elephants began displaying signs of stress and discomfort. So the zoo has decided to calm the animals with CBD, one of the main calming chemicals found in cannabis.

In August, staff at Warsaw Zoo announced that they would be giving the substance to Fredzia, the elephant most affected by Erna’s death. They announced that they were monitoring the effects by testing Fredzia’s feces and bodily fluids for cortisol, a hormone commonly linked to stress. Eventually they hope to move all three elephants onto CBD to help them process their grief.^[5]

10 Nonconsensual Experiments That Led To Medical Advancements

5 Mice With Milkshakes Help Scientists Understand Autism

 

Mice, milkshakes and autism. Three things that have more in common that you might imagine. In October, scientists at The Florey Institute in Australia unveiled a rodent-based experiment that they say has provided them with a new insight into neurodivergent behavior. Dr Emma Burrows and Shuting Li came up with the experiment by modifying a popular attention test known as the Posner task. The researchers tested a range of mice, some of which had been genetically modified to display autistic characteristics.

It is not easy to test the attention of a mouse. Many scientists have tried, but more often than not the mouse loses interest and starts fidgeting and moving about. To stop them from wandering off, Li placed each of her mice in a testing box and kept them in place with laser beams “like a diamond heist”. Then, on a screen, a stimulus would flash up, and the mice were rewarded with strawberry milkshake if they could prod it with their noses. Sometimes Burrows and Li would try to trick the mice into thinking the target was on the other side of the screen. As you would expect, the mice were a little slower whenever the researchers fooled them.

Feeding mice milkshake for poking their noses into a screen sounds rather quaint, but the researchers believe it could improve their understanding of neurodivergent behavior. What’s more, it offers fresh potential for further research into the effects of drugs and genetics on autism and similar conditions.^[6]

4 Two Chatbots On A First Date

 

Dating can be difficult at the best of times, but a first date is especially hard when you and your date are both digital chatbots. In 2020 two AI-powered avatars – Kuki, a blue-haired Leeds United fan, and Blenderbot a Facebook-loving coin collector – were sent on a two-week long date together to see if they could mimic actual human conversation.

For two strangers, Kuki and Blenderbot discussed a wide range of topics, including hobbies, religion, sport, politics, and whether the royal family are actually a group of shape-shifting reptile aliens. Blenderbot, it seems, may have picked up a few odd ideas from some of the darker recesses of social media. At one point he told his date that he had “killed many people”, and described Hitler as a “great man” and an inspiration. If you ask me, Kuki could do a lot better.^[7]

3 South Korea’s Record-Breaking Artificial Sun

 

In December 2020, scientists at KSTAR unveiled a new world record for a high-temperature ‘artificial Sun’. The team’s replica star reached an eye-watering 100 million degrees Celsius and maintained that heat for twenty seconds – doubling the previous record.

KSTAR – short for the Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research – deploys magnetic fields to create a strange form of matter known as plasma. The plasma is then heated up to immense temperatures comparable to the Sun. Researchers hope that one day this method can be used to generate power via nuclear fusion. “The technologies required for long operations of 100 million-degree plasma are the key to the realization of fusion energy,” explained Si-Woo Yoon, a nuclear physicist at KSTAR. However there is much work to be done before they can realizes their goal of achieving fusion power. By 2025, staff at KSTAR hope to be able to maintain 100 million degrees for as long as five minutes.^[8]

2 Human Gene For Monkey Mind Expansion

 

Scientists have found a way to increase the size of a monkey’s brain using a gene found in humans. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics introduced the gene to 101-day-old marmoset fetuses. The gene, known as ARHGAP11B, has been shown to stimulate the growth of stem cells in the brain. Scientists reckon that it had an instrumental role in the history of human evolution.

The marmosets soon responded to the foreign gene. Researchers saw a marked enlargement in the neocortex region of the brain – the area responsible for reasoning and language. Similar experiments have been conducted before with mice and ferrets, but this is the first study to introduce the gene to non-human primates.^[9]

1 Cuttlefish Given 3D Glasses For Sight Experiment

 

At the start of the year, researchers decided to put a pair of 3D glasses on a cuttlefish to study how they attack their prey. Scientists at the University of Minnesota showed the underwater mollusks footage of tasty-looking shrimp to better understand how they judge distance before deciding to attack.

The most difficult task, the researchers admitted, was getting the cuttlefish to accept the glasses. The team were worried that the animals would either tear them off or spray their tanks with ink. So they had to devise a special method, which involved gentle handling, distraction, and bribery with a large amount of shrimp. As Dr Trevor Wardill explained to the press, “you’ve got to get in the mind of the cuttlefish and make them happy.”

Even by the standards of marine life, which is overwhelmingly odd, cuttlefish have some very strange eyes. The wavy-looking slits can actually move independently, giving the mollusks a 360-degree field of vision. But the scientists wanted to test their perception of depth. Some animals, like humans and praying mantises, are able to calculate distance by calculating slight differences between what each eye sees, using a technique called stereopsis. After their absurd experiment, the scientists concluded that cuttlefish also triangulate distance using stereopsis.^[10]

Top 10 Outlandish Science Experiments Performed On Animals

What does the term “government experiments” immediately remind you of? Many would think about weird conspiracy theories, comic book super soldiers, and even eerie mutated animals.

But nothing is farther from the truth. Of course, when you exit the fascinating world of horror flicks and comics, you’ll soon discover-to your amazement- that governments don’t have a budget to fund such fictitious programs. Rarely do these “mad scientists”- or “atomic supermen”- receive the money they earnestly request to carry out such experiments. Nevertheless, some witty scientists have convinced high-ranking state officials to sponsor some crazy projects that end up confounding everyone.

Let’s dive into the list of the top ten scariest government experiments.

In the 1960s, during the Cold War (pitting the US against its rival, the USSR), espionage was the name of the game. Think of this rather interesting happening- the US Central Intelligence Unit (CIA) squandered a whopping $10 million in attempts to train “a spy cat!”

In this eerie project, the CIA surgically implanted listening gadgets, a tail-based antenna, and a battery. The agency intended to win these spy wars by all means. Yet, more drama would follow the costly espionage war. In the CIA’s efforts to outfit the cat, named Acoustic Kitty, the unthinkable happened; the poor animal slid under a speeding taxicab and was crushed!

Was this accidental? Was it a deliberate sacrificial act to close a controversial, monstrous program? We’ll probably never know. Interestingly, the government did not tell Americans about Acoustic Kitty until 2001, when the Clinton administration finally released the secret classified documents.

Don’t you agree this was a crazy government program?

You’ll likely know about the horrific science fiction movies that feature living disembodied heads. Still, many governments have funded such creepy programs by medics who want to achieve a chilling first in the real world. In 1954, doctors finally performed a pioneer human organ transplant, the first being a kidney transplant. Experts then suggested the possibility of a future head transplant!

True enough, in 1908, US surgeon Charles Guthrie successfully transplanted a dog’s head onto another dog’s neck, all funded by the government. Later on, in 1951, Vladimir Demikhov, a Soviet surgeon, attempted to perform a canine upper body transplant.

In response to Demikhov’s work, in the mid-1960s, the US government funded the renowned neurosurgeon Robert J. White’s project. Dr. White sought to experiment by transplanting dog and monkey brains into other animal’s necks and abdomens. Finally, in 1970, Dr. White successfully transplanted a living rhesus monkey’s head onto another monkey’s headless body.

8 Japanese Biological Warfare Tests

Have you heard about Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army special unit? The squad committed shocking atrocities disguised cleverly as “scientific experiments.” In 1984, the Japanese government finally admitted that state-funded researchers had conducted cruel experiments on humans. The state believed that these experiments would help the Japanese prepare for possible germ warfare.

The dreaded Unit 731 was first established in 1938 to develop biological weapons. The unit received support from Japanese medical schools and universities. They supplied the unit with research staff and doctors who carried out questionable experiments.

In this project, Unit 731 employed civilians and Chinese prisoners as guinea pigs to develop lethal diseases. The researchers injected wartime prisoners with anthrax, the plague, cholera, and other pathogens. Most horrifying, some of these experiments featured vivisection without anesthesia.

The researchers even used pressure chambers to test how much a human being can take before bursting! Disgustingly, the post-war US administration offered safe passage to the perpetrators of these terrible atrocities to access information on their findings.

7 Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment involved a study of untreated syphilis among the Negro male population. In the name of receiving free treatment, this study turned into an infamous tragedy, attracting widespread condemnation. Initially, 600 men enrolled for this project. The scientists in charge carried out the study from 1932 to 1972. 399 of these men had latent syphilis. 201 men provided the experimental control. 

Doctors from the US Public Health Service monitored the project. Instead of giving the then recommended penicillin treatment, the doctors administered placebos, including mineral supplements and aspirin, to the test subjects. The doctors sought to understand the effect and spread of syphilis on humans.

Tragically, 28 men died of syphilis as a direct result of these unethical procedures. 100 more perished of syphilis-related complications while 40 spouses contracted the disease. Consequently, 19 women who gave birth passed on syphilis to their newborn children.

In 1997, US President Bill Clinton apologized to the survivors and their families due to the tragic government experiment. The President admitted that the government action was “profoundly and morally wrong.”

Vladimir Demikhov is recognized as the first medic to successfully perform a coronary artery bypass surgery on a warm-blooded creature. Despite being a successful surgeon in coronary and organ transplant surgery, the medic performed some embarrassing experiments, thrusting him into disrepute. The infamous two-headed dogs’ experiment is one notorious example of his downfall.

In the two-headed dogs’ project, Dr. Demikhov stitched a puppy’s head, shoulders, and front legs onto a German shepherd’s neck. Since both dogs could move around independently after the surgery, the project appeared successful. However, they soon died due to tissue rejection. Demikhov repeated his experiment 20 times, but the longest these creatures lived was one month.

Many considered this a cruel experiment, and I bet you do too!

5 Human Testicle Transplants

In a most disturbing experiment, Dr. Leo Stanley, a physician at California’s San Quentin Prison, transplanted some executed criminal’s testicles onto living inmates. The doctor believed that these criminal males had a common characteristic: they all had low testosterone levels. He believed that raising testosterone levels would reduce crime rates.

In his theory, Dr. Stanley turned over 600 inmates into his test subjects. Then came the most horrifying action- the doctor injected his victims with liquefied animal testicles when he could not get enough human testicles!

To prove his success, Dr. Stanley later cited a Caucasian inmate who claimed to feel energetic after undergoing a testicle transplant from an executed convict of an African American background.

4 The Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, researchers from Stanford University experimented with investigating why prisoners and guards always seemed to be at loggerheads. The researchers assigned 24 students the roles of prisoners and guards, putting them into a prison-like environment.

However, in just six days, this bizarre study abruptly came to an end. They initially planned to experiment for two weeks, but that did not happen. The researchers found it impossible to maintain and control the order in the experimental cells.

Interestingly, prisoners who became guards were instructed to shun violence. Shockingly, a third of the guards became abusive. The surprising thing is that the abused prisoners passively accepted cruel treatment, leading two of them to emotional trauma.

3 The Zombie Dog Experiment

Shockingly, two Russian scientists Dr. Boris Levinskovsky and Sergei Brukhoneko, once released controversial videos featuring dog heads kept alive through an artificial blood circulation system. The released videos were known as Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. In the controversial video, the scientists used the autojektor, a piece of special heart-lung equipment, to display dog heads blinking their eyes, licking their mouths, and wiggling ears in response to sound.

In 2005, American Scientists repeated the same experiment by flushing the dog’s blood and replacing it with sugar-filled saline and oxygen. The unthinkable happened; the dogs came back from the dead three hours later, after undergoing an electric shock and a blood transfusion.

2The CIA MKUltra Project

Pundits consider the MKUltra among the CIA’s most notable projects. The CIA intended to develop a mind-control technique to be unleashed against enemies during war. The agency carried out the project from 1950 to 1970. The primary goal was to put America in the lead of mind-control technology. However, in time, the project degenerated into an illegal drug-testing regime targeting thousands of citizens.

The CIA used drugs and chemicals, like LSD, to inflict psychological torture. The agency even tried to manipulate the victim’s mental states by altering brain functions. In a curious move, the authorities ordered the destruction of all project-related documentation. Despite this, in 2001, more than 20,000 pages of the program’s documents were released under the Freedom of Information Act.

1Regenerating Dead Human Cells

This might sound more like science fiction, but can you imagine a scientists’ gallant attempt to grow human brains in mice? The surprising truth is that it happened.

A group of scientists discovered that they could dry pig-bladder tissue into an extracellular matrix powder. In turn, this powder could help regrow human fingers. Interestingly, the researchers also found that pig-bladder lining cells commonly contain a unique protein that boosts tissue growth. This is strikingly similar to the way lizards regrow their tails. In contrast, the typical mammal grows scar tissue to heal injuries; this prevents future cell growth.

More recently, a few scientists achieved the impossible; they succeeded in injecting a human embryo’s stem cells into the brains of an unborn fetal mouse. After birth, the human brain cells continued developing together with the mouse brain cells. Astoundingly, this proved human stem cells can grow into such cells while “encased” in another living creature.

Doctors have used similar treatments to develop new fingertips, reattach severed fingers, and regenerate an Iraqi war veteran’s destroyed muscles. Ultimately, many scholars believe this knowledge could boost human brain disorder research and improve researchers’ testing experimental medications.

+Bonus Experiment: Spider Genes in Goats

In another development, a team of scientists succeeded in inserting the genes of spider silk into goats. Once they did this, the goats’ milk contained a protein that forms silk. In turn, this likely makes it possible to harvest massive quantities of silk from the goats’ milk. Experts consider spider silk to be five times stronger than ordinary steel! Overall, medics believe this discovery will help them design artificial limbs and bullet-proof vests.

Conclusion

These horrifying tales prove that humans will do anything to further their ambitions. One crucial detail is that the researchers accomplished all these listed atrocities with official government support and funding.

There is a very thin line—one that’s easy to cross and even easier to blur in the field of medicine—where ethical experimentation and the malicious pursuit of knowledge through unethical means meet and perhaps even overlap. What is ethical science in the world of human subjects, and who’s to be the judge of that?

Is consent all that’s really needed for an experiment to be considered humane, and if so, how much consent? How many of the details does a patient need to know to reach the threshold of doctors safely saying that consent was, in fact, informed consent?

Throughout history, this line has been crossed many times, much to the tragic dismay, torture, and even death of some of the so-called patients who’ve been experimented on. There have been great breakthroughs in medical science through experimentation on living human beings, but at what cost?

Sometimes, tests were conducted upon individuals without their knowledge that they were the subjects of an experiment. Here are 10 such cases that led to medical breakthroughs.

10 Influenza
1941

Nobody likes getting the flu. It comes along when we least expect it, infecting us and making us sick for days or even weeks, sometimes leaving us bedridden for extended periods of time. But imagine getting the flu unsuspectingly and then finding out that someone had administered it to you. Well, that’s exactly what happened in the United States from 1941 onward in the name of experimentation.

Thomas Francis Jr., the microbiologist who originally isolated the viruses known as influenza A and B, conducted some of these experiments in 1941 on institutionalized persons, including children. Many of the experiments were conducted using people who’d become property of the state or were otherwise in mental asylums.

Francis didn’t tell them that he was spraying his recently isolated flu virus up their noses when he gave them a nasal spray. Even more terrifying, when the medical community found out about it, they seemed to think that the ends justified the means. The dominant ideology of the day was that it was perfectly okay to subject unwitting people to diseases and medical mistreatment as long as the research led to breakthroughs.^[1]

These tests paved the way for a greater understanding of influenza as a series of viruses and led to vaccines, many of which protected US troops during World War II.

9 Gynecology

Gynecology is a science that has a history replete with unethical tests and especially surgeries on subjects. What a nightmarish thought it is to be strapped or forced down while someone performs a surgery on you without your consent as you struggle to break free.

James Marion Sims was a surgeon and scientist who’s often credited as being “the father of modern gynecology.” The ways he came to his conclusions in medicine were rather striking.

His experiments took place in the 1840s in the United States when slavery was still legal. They were conducted without anesthesia almost exclusively on enslaved women who hadn’t given consent. Extremely painful surgeries were performed on helpless women who couldn’t legally say no.

Through these methods, Sims invented all sorts of dilators which opened the vagina, especially to treat vaginal fistulas, abscesses, or openings that connect one organ to another unnaturally. He forced his various instruments on unwitting women in the name of science and sadly paved the way for a lot of gynecological work as we know it today.

If anything, these faceless women who suffered at the hands of medical experimentation should be called “the mothers of modern gynecology” rather than giving James Marion Sims a similar title.^[2]

8 Spinal Taps

Back in 1896, we didn’t quite yet know whether spinal taps would be harmful procedures with short-term or long-term effects. Thus, some tests needed to be done. In one of the most twisted cases of medical experimentation, a doctor by the name of Arthur Wentworth stepped up to the plate.

He performed spinal taps on 29 children to test the safety of the procedure. Obviously, these children could not consent, and some argued that the kids weren’t even sick. Even for that time, people were outraged that a doctor was using children to test the safety of a new surgical procedure.

Even worse, it was immediately alleged that Wentworth didn’t even gather consent from the parents, who also didn’t know that their children would be used to study the effectiveness of spinal taps. But it’s certain that Wentworth was instrumental in pioneering many modern surgical procedures, such as the lumbar puncture which is still used today.^[3]

His supporters at the time claimed that the ends justified the means, while his opponents were mortified.

7 San Quentin

San Quentin is a prison in Northern California near San Francisco. It became the place that would facilitate one of the worst cases of experimentation on living, non-consenting subjects in history. These nightmarish tests were conducted by Leo Stanley, who served as the chief medical surgeon for the prison from 1913 to 1951. Stanley brought about some medical advancements in an extremely unorthodox way. In fact, he taught us exactly what not to do.

During his tenure, Stanley was obsessed with the genitals of men. He fixated on Hitler-like eugenics, hated homosexuality, thought that white Christians were the superior race, and thus advocated the active sterilization of the rest.

In some of the most evil experiments in world history, Stanley took the testicles from deceased prisoners and grafted them into living ones. Even more disturbing, Stanley sometimes transplanted animal testicles into living people.^[4]

His experiments affected countless men over decades and were his search for a more “vital” man through regulating testosterone production. This was the forerunner to modern hormone therapy before they got the chemistry figured out.

Ultimately, Stanley advanced the field of medicine by giving an undeniable example of the need for more oversight in the medical facilities within prison walls. For the longest time, many people like Leo Stanley were able to operate unhindered as long as they conducted their bizarre experiments on prisoners. He helped to give us a reason to usher in the new area of medical ethics for those who’ve been imprisoned.

6 Tuskegee Experiment

The Tuskegee experiment is another long-standing, unethical, horrifying case of medical science gone wrong. An idea that was already morally awful in theory became tremendously worse in practice.

Beginning in 1932, the experiment sought to identify the stages of syphilis and how to treat them as there was no known cure at the time. It was the era of the Jim Crow laws in the United States. Technically, African Americans had been freed from slavery, but racism and horrible treatment was still very much alive and well as proven by the Tuskegee experiment.

The study was performed on a large group of African-American men who had contracted syphilis and another group who had not. The researchers intentionally gave syphilis to the group who was initially free of the disease and observed the results.

Before this, the major known work on syphilis was a Norwegian study conducted in Oslo, Norway, in 1928. But this research only used people who’d already contracted the disease, not patients who were newly infected with it.

So the Tuskegee study sought to complement the Oslo research. Of course, the major problem with Tuskegee was that they did not obtain the consent of those in the study and didn’t even tell them what was happening.^[5]

Before it had even begun, the study lost its funding with the stock market crash of 1929. The researchers decided to go through with it anyway and promised free medical treatment and food to those who participated.

But the free medical treatment never came. They just left the subjects to get progressively worse. The study went on for 40 years until a whistle-blower discovered it and leaked the information to a reporter. By 1972, everyone knew what was happening.

While horribly unethical, much of our knowledge of the ever-changing syphilis infection comes from the research done over this 40-year period as, oddly enough, the researchers never actually tried to hide what they were doing. They published their findings for the medical community.

We now know well the stages of syphilis from beginning to end. Our knowledge of a terrible disease was greatly advanced but at a tragic and deeply unethical cost.

5 Hepatitis
1947

In 1947, a rather disgusting study on the spread and control of the hepatitis virus was conducted by Dr. Joseph Stokes Jr., who gathered test subjects and fed them. However, he didn’t tell them exactly what he was feeding them.

In another example of plainly cruel medical research, Stokes gave participants chocolate milkshakes without telling them that the shakes had been mixed in a blender with livers containing the hepatitis virus. Feces containing the virus were also blended into the milkshakes.

The subjects were prisoners with no history of jaundice or presence of the hepatitis virus. So Stokes intentionally infected otherwise healthy people without their knowledge. As a result, he gave hepatitis to them and likely many other prisoners after the original patients returned to the general prison population, thus allowing the disease to spread.

In 1950, Stokes performed more experiments by intentionally giving 200 female prisoners hepatitis to further study the virus.

His work led to some advancements in our understanding of the hepatitis virus, namely how to control the disease and that having one type of hepatitis doesn’t protect someone from contracting another type. In fact, Stokes discovered that having one type of the virus increased the likelihood that a person would contract another type of hepatitis. But this knowledge came at a horrible cost.^[6]

4 MK-ULTRA

MK-ULTRA was a series of experiments conducted by the CIA to test many different things—from electric shock therapy to the effects of drugs. The premise was to discover or counteract means of controlling the mind, especially those of military prisoners.

The studies were conducted between 1953 and 1973. Among other things, they included dosing unsuspecting people with LSD to see how they would react. The unknowing subjects were at bars or the beach when researchers dropped drugs in their drinks and then observed their reactions. It was like date rape without the rape but with all the nightmarish psychological torture.

The CIA even dosed its own agents without their knowledge. One of their top scientists died when he was drugged without his knowledge and fell from a hotel building.^[7]

Though much of the documentation was destroyed, most major advancements in our knowledge of illegal drugs such as MDMA and especially LSD came from these horrific experiments that claimed lives and caused permanent damage in people who survived.

3 Acres Of Skin

The phrase “acres of skin” is exactly what Dr. Albert Kligman admitted to thinking when he entered the walls of Holmesburg Prison in Pennsylvania. The prisoners were his new test subjects.

His experiment? To test mind-altering drugs and weapons of war on the prison population.

Yes, this was legalized torture in small degrees that both the US military and 33 different corporations had funded. It often included applying small amounts of poisonous substances onto or into the skin of patients.

The military purpose of one experiment was to determine the minimum dose of a drug needed to render at least 50 percent of a population impotent. The tests at Holmesburg Prison were nightmarish. Even the more harmless substances tested, such as toothpaste and deodorant, were torturous because Kligman would have the application sites on the patients biopsied and observed.

These experiments lasted from 1951 to 1974. They produced a slew of information that led to advancements in many of the products we use today, especially with respect to skin care.

Ever notice that many topical creams and other products contain very small amounts of active ingredients? These tests determined the harmful amounts and narrowed them down to the appropriate doses.^[8]

Dr. Kligman has over 500 publications and thousands of citations by others in subsequent works today. Yet again, the questions remain: At what cost? Did the ends justify the means?

2 Blood Substitute

Sometimes, medical advancements come in the form of telling us exactly what not to do. Such is the case with the controversy surrounding a company called Northfield Laboratories and their ethics in administering a product called artificial blood.

In the 2000s, Northfield traveled to cities and towns and began informing the residents about the company’s new product, which was artificial blood. It was a blood substitute that didn’t carry the risks, such as disease, of actual blood transfusions and could also be given to people with religious objections.

Then Northfield was backed by the FDA in conducting a no-consent study. As their unwitting test subjects, the company used trauma patients who were incapable of consenting to receive the blood product. An alarming 13.2 percent of the blood substitute patients died as compared to the 9.6 percent death rate with the saline control group.

The study was a complete disaster. At a tragic cost in human lives lost, the researchers learned that artificial blood may mimic human blood, but a lot of work and lab testing needs to be done before artificial blood can come close to performing the same functions as actual blood.^[9]

1 Syphilis
1946–1948

While the Tuskegee study was ongoing, another experiment involving syphilis was conducted in Guatemala. In 1946, we had penicillin, which was known for its strength as an antibiotic, and we had syphilis, a curiously difficult disease to treat. Researchers decided to determine the effectiveness of using penicillin in syphilis cases.

They came up with a horrible idea to make this happen. US researchers infected unsuspecting people in Guatemala with the bacteria which causes the disease. Some of the victims were prostitutes, the mentally handicapped, prisoners, and even orphaned children.

The researchers’ methods were particularly gruesome. They poured the syphilis bacteria into the penises of men or slyly sneaked it into something that would be applied to the skin of individuals who had open wounds. They intentionally infected people to observe the effects of the treatment.

Fortunately for some, the penicillin worked. But what about the control group?

This particular experiment taught us much in how to use penicillin in conjunction with things like condoms to control the spread of the disease.^[10] But again, those results came at a tragic cost due to the unethical nature of the methods employed.

Here’s a fun little one on unethical, nonconsensual medical tests and experiments which ultimately led to knowledge and advancements in the medical field. Sometimes, those advancements were knowing exactly what not to do.

Dairy on the supermarket shelf is deceptively well-behaved. In other parts of the world, it initiates enormous fires and bizarre experiments. From yogurt that comes from space or somebody’s private regions to cheese raised on music, researchers have no limits when testing the capabilities of dairy.

This world is also remarkably competitive. There are ugly fights about the word “milk,” and the margarine war was just weird. Dairy replacements also get strange—think in the direction of cockroach milk that might solve world hunger.

10 Jamaicans Invented Chocolate Milk

Every year, lunchrooms in New York City serve 60 million cartons of chocolate milk. That is not even counting the sales from supermarkets, cafeterias, or vending machines.

According to Britain’s Natural History Museum, one man invented the popular drink. Named Sir Hans Sloane, he was a botanist from Ireland. In the early 1700s, he worked in Jamaica and shuddered when the locals offered him cocoa. He found the beverage “nauseous” and mixed it with milk. The result was palatable enough to take back to England, and his name went down in history as the inventor of chocolate milk.

However, this is not accurate. Historian Jame Delbougo noted that the Jamaicans boiled a brew from cacao, milk, and cinnamon as early as 1494. This spicy version is good enough to give the title to Jamaica.^[1]

There is a chance that the first inventors could be more ancient. After all, chocolate’s earliest mention dates to 350 BC and it is difficult to believe that nobody ever considered adding it to milk.

9 The Definition Of Milk

The milk industry got crabby in 2018. Those who sold products made from animal milk did not appreciate the word being attached to milk substitutes. Thus, they went to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The FDA agreed that “milk” cannot be a plant-based liquid. Furthermore, such products using the term are misleading, although most customers know soy milk comes from beans and not goats.

The war gets weirder. If the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) has its way, it could force the FDA to ban the word “milk” from being used with all nondairy products that mimic the real thing.

The pretend ice creams and milk are not a plot to overthrow the power of cows. Plenty of people love dairy products but are allergic to them. Soy milk and similar alternatives also allow those with lactose intolerance or a vegan lifestyle to enjoy dairy.

However, the NMPF may have a point with the claim that the substitutes are trying to hijack the healthy image of real milk. After all, “nut juice” does not have the same nutritious ring as coconut milk or almond milk.^[2]

8 3-D-Printed Cheese

People love to 3-D print stuff. It was only a matter of time before somebody said, “Hey, can we do this with cheese?” 3-D printing involves squeezing a material, like gel or paste, through a nozzle to shape an object. The ability of cheese to go from solid to pliable and then to a solid again made it a perfect candidate.

Recently, scientists found that processed cheese worked best. The reason was likely because the method to make regular processed cheese is similar to 3-D printing. Both mix and mold ingredients into a new shape. The team liquefied the processed cheese at 75 degrees Celsius (167 °F) for several minutes and then squished the molten dairy out through the syringe using different speeds.

The results were compared to processed cheese made the regular way. The 3-D-printed cheese was darker for some reason but up to 49 percent softer. Its solid state was springier and, when melted at the same temperature as regular processed cheese, a lot gooier.^[3]

Unfortunately, the samples were too small to taste. But there is no reason why the flavor should not stay the same.

7 Most Authentic Fake Milk

Milk replacements are usually squeezed from almonds, rice, and soybeans. The problem is that they require a lot of water. For instance, almond milk needs around 5 liters (1.3 gal) of water per nut.

In 2016, a company whipped up something that could replace both real and replica dairy. The most remarkable thing is that this new liquid is still made from milk proteins.^[4]

Instead of getting these proteins from cows, researchers developed a yeast strain that turns sugar into the milk protein casein. If all goes well, it should taste like the real thing and cost about the same. It has no lactose or cholesterol and is packed with all the nutrients of normal milk.

Manufacturing this cow-free juice emits 84 percent less carbon than the method used by traditional milk farms. This newer process also uses 98 percent less water. As it is created in a laboratory, almost no land is needed, either. Needless to say, it balances environmental concerns well, something that often takes a back seat to mass food production.

6 The Tunnel Fire

In 2013, a bizarre incident started out with a cheese delivery. The truck driver was tasked with transporting 30 tons of brunost. This cheese is a Norwegian delicacy prized for its sweetness and brown, caramelized look.

When the truck entered the Brattli Tunnel in northern Norway, something sparked a fire. Realizing that the cheese was ablaze, the driver abandoned the vehicle inside the tunnel.

The goat cheese kept the fire burning for five days. Poisonous gases filled the tunnel so densely that firefighters dared not enter it. The damage also shut down the tunnel for months.

The scary truth is that cheese is flammable, but brunost is extra combustible. It contains more sugar than most other cheeses and is up to 30 percent fat. The high fat and sugar content of the treat makes it burn like petrol when the heat is just right.

The cheese fire could not be subdued by plain water but needed the chemical mist of a Class K extinguisher.^[5]

5 Vaginal Yogurt

In 2015, researcher Cecilia Westbrook decided to make yogurt using the bacteria from her own vagina. Westbrook swiped her nether regions with a wooden spoon and left the utensil overnight in a bowl of milk. The resulting yogurt tasted tangy and sour and caused her tongue to tingle.

The whole thing sounds insane, but Westbrook realized that there were no studies about the vast amount of bacteria that live inside the vagina. Current research is more obsessed with gut bacteria’s benefits to our health. However, some microbiologists are so aware of the positive effects of vaginal bacteria that they smear their own newborns with such fluids.

Although eating it may have been too daring (there are bad genital bacteria, too), other researchers were inspired to tack on with more graceful experiments. Soon, they also proved that bacteria could be cultured from the human vagina. Future applications for this “yogurt” are more medicinal than culinary, especially in the field of probiotics and yeast infections.^[6]

4 Margarine Smear Campaign

When France invented margarine in 1869, it became a cheap alternative to butter. It was a hit in the United States, where dairy farmers decided to fight back in an ugly manner. Their campaign insisted that margarine was unhealthy, caused mental illness, and threatened the moral order. Worse, it threatened the American way of life.

The campaign’s claims about shady sources for margarine’s ingredients were so successful that the legal system created the 1886 Margarine Act. It was the first of many laws designed to tax the substitute into submission.

This nearly destroyed the margarine industry. Cartoonists jumped in and portrayed margarine makers putting unmentionables, including arsenic and stray cats, inside their products.

Most bizarrely, the state of New Hampshire ordered that margarine had to be pink. As it looked strange, sales dropped. But defying the pink law meant two months in prison. Eventually, the Supreme Court said that it was a stupid law (in so many words) and reversed it.^[7]

Margarine survived, but most people are still divided on their preference for it or butter.

3 Space Yogurt

In 2006, a rocket left the Baikonur Cosmodrome with two unusual passengers. Himawari Dairy from Japan had placed two strains of bacteria aboard. Both were used in the manufacture of dairy foods.

The strains were lactic acid bacteria and a unique line of Lactobacillus paracasei. The expectation was that cosmic radiation would somehow boost the bacteria’s flavor and immune system benefits in yogurt.

After 10 days in orbit, almost half of the delicate bacteria died. The rest made yogurt back on Earth. Himawari Dairy claims that the organisms that survived space imbued their product with a stronger flavor than yogurts spawned by mere Earthbound bacteria. They even called it “Uchu O Tabi Shita Yogurt” (“yogurt that traveled in space”).^[8]

2 Musical Cheese Flavors

In 2018, Beat Wampfler probably seemed crazy when he took his idea to Michael Harenberg. After all, Wampfler was a veterinarian who made cheese in his spare time, and he suggested to Harenberg that music could affect the flavor of cheese. As the music director at the Bern University of the Arts, Harenberg typically expected a soberer approach to the use of melodies.

Wampfler’s enthusiasm won out. Together with a team from Bern University, he matured nine cheese wheels in a cellar for six months. Placed in its own crate, each Emmental cheese listened to a nonstop loop of a single song.

There was a “rock” box that listened to “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin. The classical cheese got classy to sounds from Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Vril’s “UV” raised a techno cheese, while an ambient wedge was soothed by Yello’s “Monolith.”

The other cheeses were used as silent controls or exposed to single tones. It was the hip-hop cheese that came out on top with the cheesiest flavor. That particular wheel got treated to A Tribe Called Quest’s “Jazz (We’ve Got).”^[9]

1 The Next Superfood

To feed the growing global population requires out-of-the-box thinking. In 2016, researchers took their brains out of the box and into the insect world—more precisely, to Cockroach City.

Although roaches are not the most adorable or appetizing thing to look at, a species called Diploptera punctate could be the answer to world hunger. This roach feeds its offspring with a milk protein crystal. Here is the zinger. A single crystal has three times more energy than buffalo milk, which is more nutritious than cow’s milk.

As it is not feasible to milk a cockroach, scientists isolated the genes behind the crystal production. The next step will be to see if the genes and the milk can be recreated in the laboratory.

The effort will be well worth it. These crystals are a complete food that contains fats, sugars, and proteins. In addition, they have all the essential amino acids and release more protein during digestion. For those needing a dense source of sustenance that continues to provide energy long after eating, this could be the perfect supplement.^[10]

“Space, the final frontier,” as described by Star Trek’s opening sequence, is a place of mystery and exploration, where humans have only just begun to scratch the surface of what exists. We have sent many probes and astronauts into space to conduct experiments in our quest to understand the universe and our place in it.

Some of these experiments might prove beneficial. However, others might seem pointless in helping us to better understand our universe and the laws that govern it. So grab your astronaut ice cream, and let’s explore ten experiments in space that seem pointless…but maybe aren’t.

Related: 10 Social And Biological Experiments With Freaky Results

10 A Rose by a Different Scent

In 1998, NASA partnered with the International Flavors and Fragrances (IFF) to study the impact of microgravity on the smell of a rose. They wanted to develop a new perfume from what they hoped would be the result.

As it turns out, putting a rose into microgravity changes the number of volatile oils the rose produces. The volatile oils of a rose carry the scent of the flower. When the rose was tested in space, it produced less of the oils, which completely changed the fragrance of the rose.

IFF decided to create a new perfume called “Zen” by Shiseido Cosmetics using the findings of this experiment. After sending a rose to space, I can only imagine the IFF’s R&D bill.

9 A Tragedy’s Small Silver Lining

In 2003, the space shuttle Columbia exploded on re-entry, killing the entire crew. While cleaning up the wreckage, crews found a salvaged experiment containing nematode worms.

The worm’s survival was an important discovery because it showed that life could survive landing on another planet without being protected by a ship. It may also explain how life has spread throughout the galaxy.

Even today, nematode worms are being sent up to the International Space Station for further experiment and observation.

8 The Twins Study

What are the long-term effects of space travel? That is what researchers hope to find out with the Twins Study. NASA has been studying astronaut Mark Kelly and his identical twin brother Scott. For how smart the people at NASA are, they aren’t clever when naming their experiments.

Scott was sent to the International Space Station to spend almost an entire year in microgravity. And while Scott was floating, Mark was here on earth completing the same trials, so the 84 researchers working on this experiment could see just how much microgravity affected the human body.

Not surprisingly, since our bodies are developed to handle earth’s gravity and conditions, there were a lot of changes to Scott. Some of those changes included:

• Decreased body mass
• Changed eye shape
• Overactive immune system
• Changes in his chromosomes

Once Scott was back on earth, his body mostly recovered. Scientists are hoping to help humans handle the stress of living in space through this study, but nothing has been provided to the public on its results. I can only imagine finding astronaut twins is a tall order to meet.

7 Extreme Tether Ball

When we can put a satellite into orbit, attaching one on a 21-kilometer-long (13-mile) tether behind a shuttle doesn’t seem to make any sense to the average civilian. But that is exactly what scientists wanted and did; scientists wanted satellites to generate electricity while they were pulled through the earth’s magnetic field by a space shuttle.

Both attempts failed. The first shuttle managed to release only 840 feet of cable before jamming. The second attempt in 1996 was closer to success; the shuttle Columbia managed to release 12.2 miles of cable before it snapped, effectively slingshotting the satellite into deep space.

The tether cable was only 2.54 millimeters (1/10th of an inch) thick; surprisingly, it did well for what it was. According to NASA, the system had been generating electricity, about 3,500 volts and 0.5 amps. So it is possible to generate green energy during launch; we might just want to try a stronger and thicker cable.

6 Growing Plants in Space

Anyone who has seen the movie The Martian, starring Matt Damon, understands this experiment’s theoretical importance. If we are ever going to colonize Mars, we will need to be able to grow our own food. That really is the goal for understanding what it takes to grow fruits and veggies in space.

Remember what happened to sailors when they didn’t eat enough vitamin C. They got scurvy because they couldn’t keep fresh produce on their ships. So far, scientists haven’t grown much but a few varieties of lettuce, cabbage, kale mustard, and flowers. Eventually, scientists want to be able to grow all kinds of vegetables and fruits since even having the plants on board makes the astronauts happier.

5 The Water Walls Experiment

The Water Walls (what a unique name, huh?) experiment is designed to study how water behaves in microgravity. It involves using a water-filled “bags” system to create walls of water that astronauts can use for a wide variety of purposes.

Engineers are hoping that they might be able to replace some or all of the critical life support systems currently in use. They want to have a bag for the ship’s gray water, one for black water, another for air purification, one for edible algae, and lastly, one to shield astronauts from space radiation.

The best part is that if successful, it would dramatically reduce the mechanical and technical equipment required for today’s life support systems. The only mechanical piece on the water walls would be water pumps to move the water where it is needed.

4 Mighty Mouse Isn’t Fiction Anymore

Any experiment that starts with genetically modified “mighty mice” will spark the interest of just about anyone. The mice in the experiment were mutated to have double the muscle mass of their plain jane counterparts.

The point of the experiment was to see what effects microgravity had on muscle loss and bone mass. The results were that over 33 days in space, the genetically superior mighty mice didn’t lose any of their muscle or bone mass. At the same time, the regular space mice lost around 18% of theirs in that same time.

Scientists are hopeful that with these results, they might be able to help people both on Earth and astronauts that have to deal with muscle loss either because of disease or low gravity. According to geneticist Se-Jin Lee, we are still years away from human testing.

3 The Fire Experiment

One of the worst things that could happen on a spaceship is a fire, as it can quickly spread and destroy vital support systems. NASA’s plan to avoid that disaster is to safely light the International Space Station (ISS) on fire. Yup, you read that right.

The project has been named SoFIE, which stands for Solid Fuel Ignition and Extinction. SoFIE experiments will be carried out in the ISS’s combustion rack. Scientists hope to learn how fire spreads and acts with different materials while in low gravity, with the end goal of establishing colonies on the moon and Mars with minimal risk of fire destroying everything.

2 The Ice Crystal Experiment

The Ice Crystal experiment is designed to study how ice crystals form in space. I know what you are thinking; ice is ice—water gets cold and freezes, space is cold, end of the story. And you would be correct at the most basic level; all ice is just frozen water.

However, the way it forms and acts in space is different than what it does on Earth. Why is this important? Because it could help us find planets or other celestial objects with water and decide whether it would be possible for life to live there. Remember, water is life for us, and as far as we understand, everything else.

You’ve probably noticed that almost all the experiments have long-term space travel or colonies in mind. This is no different; if we can find objects with enough water that can support life, the galaxy will become just a little smaller.

1 The Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project is an ongoing effort to map the entire human genome. There are around 3 billion letters held within human DNA, so understandably this experiment took years for scientists to consider a success. In 2003, after 13 years of progress, scientists completed mapping 92% of the genome and considered the project completed. After another 14 years, the human genome has been mapped in its entirety.

The project has been and continues to be important for various reasons. It has helped scientists learn more about the genetic causes of diseases, has led to the development of new and better treatments for illnesses, and has even helped us understand where human evolution is headed.

Some geneticists believe that the map of the human genome is the key to successfully saving the human race. Christopher Mason, who was the lead geneticist for the Twin Study mentioned above, believes that we will be able to use the map to modify humans and other species to handle the struggles of space exploration better.