What is a Human Experiment?
Friday, August 29, 2025 10:27AM
Numerous experiments which were performed on human test subjects in the United States in the past are now considered to have been unethical, because they were performed without the knowledge or informed consent of the test subjects.[1] Such tests have been performed throughout American history, but have become significantly less frequent with the advent and adoption of various safeguarding efforts.[1] Despite these safeguards, unethical experimentation involving human subjects is still occasionally uncovered.[2]
Past examples of unethical experiments include the exposure of humans to chemical and biological weapons (including infections with deadly or debilitating diseases), human radiation experiments, injections of toxic and radioactive chemicals, surgical experiments, interrogation and torture experiments, tests which involve mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of other experiments. Many of these tests are performed on children,[3] the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of "medical treatment". In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners.
Many of these experiments violated US law even at the time and were in some cases directly sponsored by government agencies or rogue elements thereof, including the Centers for Disease Control, the United States military, and the Central Intelligence Agency; and in other cases were sponsored by private corporations which were involved in military activities.[4][5][6] The human research programs were usually highly secretive and performed without the knowledge or authorization of Congress, and in many cases information about them was not released until many years after the studies had been performed.
The ethical, professional, and legal implications of this in the United States medical and scientific community were quite significant and led to many institutions and policies that attempted to ensure that future human subject research in the United States would be ethical and legal. Public outrage in the late 20th century over the discovery of government experiments on human subjects led to numerous congressional investigations and hearings, including the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission, both of 1975, and the 1994 Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments, among others.
Surgical experiments
Throughout the 1840s, J. Marion Sims, who is often referred to as "the father of gynecology," performed surgical experiments on infants, enslaved African women, and girls as young as 13 without anesthesia for the treatment of conditions including vesicovaginal fistula, Neonatal tetanus, and other similar conditions.[7][8] Slaveowners were willing to negotiate with Sims for access to these women due to their fertility's economic value if cured.[9]
The patients—one of whom was operated on 30 times—suffered from infections and many failed surgeries before they were finally cured of vaginal fistula. The period between 1845 and 1849 during which Sims operated on enslaved women was one during which the new practice of anesthesia was not universally accepted as safe and effective.[10] While Sims did not use anesthesia in the experiments he performed on enslaved women, he would later use it on white female patients.[9]
In 1874, Mary Rafferty, an Irish servant woman, came to Roberts Bartholow of the Good Samaritan Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio for treatment of a lesion on her head. The lesion was diagnosed as a cancerous ulcer and surgical treatments were attempted. Bartholow saw Rafferty's condition as terminal but felt there was a research opportunity. He inserted electrode needles into her exposed brain matter to gauge her responses. This was done with no intention of treating her. Although Rafferty came out of the coma caused by the experiment three days later, she died from a massive seizure the following day. Bartholow described his experiment as follows:
When the needle entered the brain substance, she complained of acute pain in the neck. To develop more decided reactions, the strength of the current was increased ... her countenance exhibited great distress, and she began to cry. Very soon, the left hand was extended as if in the act of taking hold of some object in front of her; the arm presently was agitated with clonic spasm; her eyes became fixed, with pupils widely dilated; lips were blue, and she frothed at the mouth; her breathing became stertorous; she lost consciousness and was violently convulsed on the left side. The convulsion lasted five minutes and was succeeded by a coma. She returned to consciousness in twenty minutes from the beginning of the attack, and complained of some weakness and vertigo.
— Bartholow's research report[11]
In the subsequent autopsy, Bartholow noted that some brain damage had occurred due to the electrodes but that she had died due to the cancer. Bartholow was criticized by fellow physicians and the American Medical Association formally condemned his experiments as he had caused direct harm to the patient, not in an attempt to treat her, but solely to gain knowledge. Additional issues were raised with the consent obtained. Although she gave "cheerful assent" to the procedure, she was described as "feeble-minded" and may not have fully understood. Bartholow apologized for his actions and expressed regret that some knowledge had been gained "at the expense of some injury to the patient."[11]
In 1896, Arthur Wentworth performed spinal taps on 29 young children without the knowledge or consent of their parents at Children's Hospital Boston (now Boston Children's Hospital) in Boston, Massachusetts to discover whether doing so would be harmful.[12]
From 1913 to 1951, Leo Stanley, chief surgeon at the San Quentin Prison, performed a wide variety of experiments on hundreds of prisoners. Many of the experiments involved testicular implants, where Stanley would take testicles out of executed prisoners and surgically implant them into living prisoners. In other experiments, he attempted to implant the testicles of rams, goats, and boars into living prisoners. Stanley also performed various eugenics experiments and forced sterilizations on prisoners.[13] Stanley believed that his experiments would rejuvenate old men, control crime (which he believed had biological causes), and prevent the "unfit" from reproducing.[13][14]
From 1955 to 1960, Sonoma State Hospital in northern California served as a permanent drop-off location for mentally disabled children diagnosed with cerebral palsy or lesser disorders. The children subsequently underwent painful experimentation without adult consent. Many were given spinal taps "for which they received no direct benefit." Reporters of 60 Minutes learned that in these five years, the brain of every child with cerebral palsy who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied without parental consent.[15]
Pathogens, disease and biological warfare agents
Late 19th century
In the 1880s, in Hawaii, a Californian physician working at a hospital for lepers injected six girls under the age of 12 with syphilis.[12]
In 1895, New York City pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two mentally disabled boys—one four-year-old and one sixteen-year-old—with gonorrhea as part of a medical experiment. A review of the medical literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries found more than 40 reports of experimental infections with gonorrheal culture, including some, where gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children.[12][16][17]
U.S. Army doctors in the Philippines infected 5 prisoners with bubonic plague directly, and separately induced beriberi in 29 prisoners resulting in the deaths of four test subjects.[18] In 1906, Professor Richard P. Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with a live cholera vaccine, which had somehow become contaminated with bubonic plague. He did this without the consent of the patients, and without informing them of what he was doing. All of the subjects became sick and 13 died.[18][19]
Early 20th century
In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin at St. Vincent Orphanage in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, causing permanent blindness in some of the children and painful lesions and inflammation of the eyes in many of the others. In the study, they refer to the children as "material used".[20]
In 1909, Frank Crozer Knowles published a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing how he had deliberately infected two children in an orphanage with Molluscum contagiosum—a virus that causes wart-like growths but usually disappears entirely—after an outbreak in the orphanage, to study the disease. The author then goes on to admit that the mechanisms studied were already well understood and described in literature, so well in fact that he found it unnecessary to go beyond providing basic explanations of the processes at work, stating quote; "The subject has been so fully described in the excellent paper of C. J.White and W. H. Eobey, Jr., that only a few of the important points will be emphasized here."[12][21]
In 1911, Professor William Henry Welch, Board of Scientific Directors at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City urged staff member Hideyo Noguchi, who developed a diagnostic test for syphilis, to conduct human trials. Of the 571 subjects, 315 previously had syphilis.[22] The rest were control. The remaining subjects were hospital patients; some of which were between the ages of 2 and 18 years.[22] The test using inactive syphilis extract was distributed to hospitals who administered it. None of subjects were infected with syphilis as it had been sterilized, but the patients had not been given enough information to consent, breaching the right of patients. It was considered 'a wrong without injury' and a breach of ethics by the Rockefeller Institute.[23][22]
Doctor draws blood from a subject involved in the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, circa 1932
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment ("Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male")[24] was a clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, by the U.S. Public Health Service. In the experiment, 399 impoverished black males who were infected with syphilis were then offered "treatment" by the researchers, who did not tell the test subjects that they had syphilis and did not give them treatment for the disease, but rather just studied them to chart the progress of the disease. By 1947, penicillin became available as treatment, but those running the study prevented study participants from receiving treatment elsewhere, lying to them about their true condition, so that they could observe the effects of syphilis on the human body. By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. 28 of the original 399 men had died of syphilis, 100 were dead of related complications, 40 of their wives had been infected, and 19 of their children were born with congenital syphilis. The study was not shut down until 1972, when its existence was leaked to the press, forcing the researchers to stop in the face of a public outcry.[25]