experiment gone wrong

Ugly past of U.S. human experiments uncovered

Shocking as it may seem, U.S. government doctors once thought it was fine to experiment on disabled people and prison inmates. Such experiments included giving hepatitis to mental patients in Connecticut, squirting a pandemic flu virus up the noses of prisoners in Maryland, and injecting cancer cells into chronically ill people at a New York hospital.

Much of this horrific history is 40 to 80 years old, but it is the backdrop for a meeting in Washington this week by a presidential bioethics commission. The meeting was triggered by the government's apology last fall for federal doctors infecting prisoners and mental patients in Guatemala with syphilis 65 years ago.

U.S. officials also acknowledged there had been dozens of similar experiments in the United States — studies that often involved making healthy people sick.

An exhaustive review by The Associated Press of medical journal reports and decades-old press clippings found more than 40 such studies. At best, these were a search for lifesaving treatments; at worst, some amounted to curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people but provided no useful results.

Inevitably, they will be compared to the well-known Tuskegee syphilis study. In that episode, U.S. health officials tracked 600 black men in Alabama who already had syphilis but didn't give them adequate treatment even after penicillin became available.

These studies were worse in at least one respect — they violated the concept of "first do no harm," a fundamental medical principle that stretches back centuries.

"When you give somebody a disease — even by the standards of their time — you really cross the key ethical norm of the profession," said Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

Attitude similar to Nazi experiments Some of these studies, mostly from the 1940s to the '60s, apparently were never covered by news media. Others were reported at the time, but the focus was on the promise of enduring new cures, while glossing over how test subjects were treated.

Attitudes about medical research were different then. Infectious diseases killed many more people years ago, and doctors worked urgently to invent and test cures. Many prominent researchers felt it was legitimate to experiment on people who did not have full rights in society — people like prisoners, mental patients, poor blacks. It was an attitude in some ways similar to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews.

"There was definitely a sense — that we don't have today — that sacrifice for the nation was important," said Laura Stark, a Wesleyan University assistant professor of science in society, who is writing a book about past federal medical experiments.

The AP review of past research found:

A federally funded study begun in 1942 injected experimental flu vaccine in male patients at a state insane asylum in Ypsilanti, Mich., then exposed them to flu several months later. It was co-authored by Dr. Jonas Salk, who a decade later would become famous as inventor of the polio vaccine.

Some of the men weren't able to describe their symptoms, raising serious questions about how well they understood what was being done to them. One newspaper account mentioned the test subjects were "senile and debilitated." Then it quickly moved on to the promising results.

In federally funded studies in the 1940s, noted researcher Dr. W. Paul Havens Jr. exposed men to hepatitis in a series of experiments, including one using patients from mental institutions in Middletown and Norwich, Conn. Havens, a World Health Organization expert on viral diseases, was one of the first scientists to differentiate types of hepatitis and their causes.

A search of various news archives found no mention of the mental patients study, which made eight healthy men ill but broke no new ground in understanding the disease.

Researchers in the mid-1940s studied the transmission of a deadly stomach bug by having young men swallow unfiltered stool suspension. The study was conducted at the New York State Vocational Institution, a reformatory prison in West Coxsackie. The point was to see how well the disease spread that way as compared to spraying the germs and having test subjects breathe it. Swallowing it was a more effective way to spread the disease, the researchers concluded. The study doesn't explain if the men were rewarded for this awful task.
A University of Minnesota study in the late 1940s injected 11 public service employee volunteers with malaria, then starved them for five days. Some were also subjected to hard labor, and those men lost an average of 14 pounds. They were treated for malarial fevers with quinine sulfate. One of the authors was Ancel Keys, a noted dietary scientist who developed K-rations for the military and the Mediterranean diet for the public. But a search of various news archives found no mention of the study.
For a study in 1957, when the Asian flu pandemic was spreading, federal researchers sprayed the virus in the noses of 23 inmates at Patuxent prison in Jessup, Md., to compare their reactions to those of 32 virus-exposed inmates who had been given a new vaccine.
Government researchers in the 1950s tried to infect about two dozen volunteering prison inmates with gonorrhea using two different methods in an experiment at a federal penitentiary in Atlanta. The bacteria was pumped directly into the urinary tract through the penis, according to their paper.

The men quickly developed the disease, but the researchers noted this method wasn't comparable to how men normally got infected — by having sex with an infected partner. The men were later treated with antibiotics. The study was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, but there was no mention of it in various news archives.

Though people in the studies were usually described as volunteers, historians and ethicists have questioned how well these people understood what was to be done to them and why, or whether they were coerced.

Victims for science Prisoners have long been victimized for the sake of science. In 1915, the U.S. government's Dr. Joseph Goldberger — today remembered as a public health hero — recruited Mississippi inmates to go on special rations to prove his theory that the painful illness pellagra was caused by a dietary deficiency. (The men were offered pardons for their participation.)

But studies using prisoners were uncommon in the first few decades of the 20th century, and usually performed by researchers considered eccentric even by the standards of the day. One was Dr. L.L. Stanley, resident physician at San Quentin prison in California, who around 1920 attempted to treat older, "devitalized men" by implanting in them testicles from livestock and from recently executed convicts.

Newspapers wrote about Stanley's experiments, but the lack of outrage is striking.

"Enter San Quentin penitentiary in the role of the Fountain of Youth — an institution where the years are made to roll back for men of failing mentality and vitality and where the spring is restored to the step, wit to the brain, vigor to the muscles and ambition to the spirit. All this has been done, is being done ... by a surgeon with a scalpel," began one rosy report published in November 1919 in The Washington Post.

Around the time of World War II, prisoners were enlisted to help the war effort by taking part in studies that could help the troops. For example, a series of malaria studies at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois and two other prisons was designed to test antimalarial drugs that could help soldiers fighting in the Pacific.

It was at about this time that prosecution of Nazi doctors in 1947 led to the "Nuremberg Code," a set of international rules to protect human test subjects. Many U.S. doctors essentially ignored them, arguing that they applied to Nazi atrocities — not to American medicine.

The late 1940s and 1950s saw huge growth in the U.S. pharmaceutical and health care industries, accompanied by a boom in prisoner experiments funded by both the government and corporations. By the 1960s, at least half the states allowed prisoners to be used as medical guinea pigs.

But two studies in the 1960s proved to be turning points in the public's attitude toward the way test subjects were treated.

The first came to light in 1963. Researchers injected cancer cells into 19 old and debilitated patients at a Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in the New York borough of Brooklyn to see if their bodies would reject them.

The hospital director said the patients were not told they were being injected with cancer cells because there was no need — the cells were deemed harmless. But the experiment upset a lawyer named William Hyman who sat on the hospital's board of directors. The state investigated, and the hospital ultimately said any such experiments would require the patient's written consent.

At nearby Staten Island, from 1963 to 1966, a controversial medical study was conducted at the Willowbrook State School for children with mental retardation. The children were intentionally given hepatitis orally and by injection to see if they could then be cured with gamma globulin.

Those two studies — along with the Tuskegee experiment revealed in 1972 — proved to be a "holy trinity" that sparked extensive and critical media coverage and public disgust, said Susan Reverby, the Wellesley College historian who first discovered records of the syphilis study in Guatemala.

'My back is on fire!' By the early 1970s, even experiments involving prisoners were considered scandalous. In widely covered congressional hearings in 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.

Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia made extensive use of inmates for medical experiments. Some of the victims are still around to talk about it. Edward "Yusef" Anthony, featured in a book about the studies, says he agreed to have a layer of skin peeled off his back, which was coated with searing chemicals to test a drug. He did that for money to buy cigarettes in prison.

"I said 'Oh my God, my back is on fire! Take this ... off me!'" Anthony said in an interview with The Associated Press, as he recalled the beginning of weeks of intense itching and agonizing pain.

The government responded with reforms. Among them: The U.S. Bureau of Prisons in the mid-1970s effectively excluded all research by drug companies and other outside agencies within federal prisons.

As the supply of prisoners and mental patients dried up, researchers looked to other countries.

It made sense. Clinical trials could be done more cheaply and with fewer rules. And it was easy to find patients who were taking no medication, a factor that can complicate tests of other drugs.

Additional sets of ethical guidelines have been enacted, and few believe that another Guatemala study could happen today. "It's not that we're out infecting anybody with things," Caplan said.

Still, in the last 15 years, two international studies sparked outrage.

One was likened to Tuskegee. U.S.-funded doctors failed to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study in Uganda even though it would have protected their newborns. U.S. health officials argued the study would answer questions about AZT's use in the developing world.

The other study, by Pfizer Inc., gave an antibiotic named Trovan to children with meningitis in Nigeria, although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease. Critics blamed the experiment for the deaths of 11 children and the disabling of scores of others. Pfizer settled a lawsuit with Nigerian officials for $75 million but admitted no wrongdoing.

Last year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' inspector general reported that between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown. The report also noted that U.S. regulators inspected fewer than 1 percent of foreign clinical trial sites.

Monitoring research is complicated, and rules that are too rigid could slow new drug development. But it's often hard to get information on international trials, sometimes because of missing records and a paucity of audits, said Dr. Kevin Schulman, a Duke University professor of medicine who has written on the ethics of international studies.

Syphilis study These issues were still being debated when, last October, the Guatemala study came to light.

In the 1946-48 study, American scientists infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis, apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted disease. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.

Story: U.S. apologizes for Guatemala syphilis experiments

The Guatemala study nauseated ethicists on multiple levels. Beyond infecting patients with a terrible illness, it was clear that people in the study did not understand what was being done to them or were not able to give their consent. Indeed, though it happened at a time when scientists were quick to publish research that showed frank disinterest in the rights of study participants, this study was buried in file drawers.

"It was unusually unethical, even at the time," said Stark, the Wesleyan researcher.

"When the president was briefed on the details of the Guatemalan episode, one of his first questions was whether this sort of thing could still happen today," said Rick Weiss, a spokesman for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

That it occurred overseas was an opening for the Obama administration to have the bioethics panel seek a new evaluation of international medical studies. The president also asked the Institute of Medicine to further probe the Guatemala study, but the IOM relinquished the assignment in November, after reporting its own conflict of interest: In the 1940s, five members of one of the IOM's sister organizations played prominent roles in federal syphilis research and had links to the Guatemala study.

So the bioethics commission gets both tasks. To focus on federally funded international studies, the commission has formed an international panel of about a dozen experts in ethics, science and clinical research. Regarding the look at the Guatemala study, the commission has hired 15 staff investigators and is working with additional historians and other consulting experts.

The panel is to send a report to Obama by September. Any further steps would be up to the administration.

Some experts say that given such a tight deadline, it would be a surprise if the commission produced substantive new information about past studies. "They face a really tough challenge," Caplan said.

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Controversial and Unethical Psychology Experiments

There have been a number of famous psychology experiments that are considered controversial, inhumane, unethical, and even downright cruel—here are five examples. Thanks to ethical codes and institutional review boards, most of these experiments could never be performed today.

At a Glance

Some of the most controversial and unethical experiments in psychology include Harlow's monkey experiments, Milgram's obedience experiments, Zimbardo's prison experiment, Watson's Little Albert experiment, and Seligman's learned helplessness experiment.

These and other controversial experiments led to the formation of rules and guidelines for performing ethical and humane research studies.

Harlow's Pit of Despair

Psychologist Harry Harlow performed a series of experiments in the 1960s designed to explore the powerful effects that love and attachment have on normal development. In these experiments, Harlow isolated young rhesus monkeys, depriving them of their mothers and keeping them from interacting with other monkeys.

The experiments were often shockingly cruel, and the results were just as devastating.

The Experiment

The infant monkeys in some experiments were separated from their real mothers and then raised by "wire" mothers. One of the surrogate mothers was made purely of wire.

While it provided food, it offered no softness or comfort. The other surrogate mother was made of wire and cloth, offering some degree of comfort to the infant monkeys.

Harlow found that while the monkeys would go to the wire mother for nourishment, they preferred the soft, cloth mother for comfort.

Some of Harlow's experiments involved isolating the young monkey in what he termed a "pit of despair." This was essentially an isolation chamber. Young monkeys were placed in the isolation chambers for as long as 10 weeks.

Other monkeys were isolated for as long as a year. Within just a few days, the infant monkeys would begin huddling in the corner of the chamber, remaining motionless.

The Results

Harlow's distressing research resulted in monkeys with severe emotional and social disturbances. They lacked social skills and were unable to play with other monkeys.

They were also incapable of normal sexual behavior, so Harlow devised yet another horrifying device, which he referred to as a "rape rack." The isolated monkeys were tied down in a mating position to be bred.

Not surprisingly, the isolated monkeys also ended up being incapable of taking care of their offspring, neglecting and abusing their young.

Harlow's experiments were finally halted in 1985 when the American Psychological Association passed rules regarding treating people and animals in research.

Milgram's Shocking Obedience Experiments

Isabelle Adam/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

If someone told you to deliver a painful, possibly fatal shock to another human being, would you do it? The vast majority of us would say that we absolutely would never do such a thing, but one controversial psychology experiment challenged this basic assumption.

Social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments to explore the nature of obedience . Milgram's premise was that people would often go to great, sometimes dangerous, or even immoral, lengths to obey an authority figure.

The Experiments

In Milgram's experiment, subjects were ordered to deliver increasingly strong electrical shocks to another person. While the person in question was simply an actor who was pretending, the subjects themselves fully believed that the other person was actually being shocked.

The voltage levels started out at 30 volts and increased in 15-volt increments up to a maximum of 450 volts. The switches were also labeled with phrases including "slight shock," "medium shock," and "danger: severe shock." The maximum shock level was simply labeled with an ominous "XXX."

The results of the experiment were nothing short of astonishing. Many participants were willing to deliver the maximum level of shock, even when the person pretending to be shocked was begging to be released or complaining of a heart condition.

Milgram's experiment revealed stunning information about the lengths that people are willing to go in order to obey, but it also caused considerable distress for the participants involved.

Zimbardo's Simulated Prison Experiment

Darrin Klimek / Getty Images

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo went to high school with Stanley Milgram and had an interest in how situational variables contribute to social behavior.

In his famous and controversial experiment, he set up a mock prison in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University. Participants were then randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards. Zimbardo himself served as the prison warden.

The researchers attempted to make a realistic situation, even "arresting" the prisoners and bringing them into the mock prison. Prisoners were placed in uniforms, while the guards were told that they needed to maintain control of the prison without resorting to force or violence.

When the prisoners began to ignore orders, the guards began to utilize tactics that included humiliation and solitary confinement to punish and control the prisoners.

While the experiment was originally scheduled to last two full weeks it had to be halted after just six days. Why? Because the prison guards had started abusing their authority and were treating the prisoners cruelly. The prisoners, on the other hand, started to display signs of anxiety and emotional distress.

It wasn't until a graduate student (and Zimbardo's future wife) Christina Maslach visited the mock prison that it became clear that the situation was out of control and had gone too far. Maslach was appalled at what was going on and voiced her distress. Zimbardo then decided to call off the experiment.

Zimbardo later suggested that "although we ended the study a week earlier than planned, we did not end it soon enough."

Watson and Rayner's Little Albert Experiment

If you have ever taken an Introduction to Psychology class, then you are probably at least a little familiar with Little Albert.

Behaviorist John Watson and his assistant Rosalie Rayner conditioned a boy to fear a white rat, and this fear even generalized to other white objects including stuffed toys and Watson's own beard.

Obviously, this type of experiment is considered very controversial today. Frightening an infant and purposely conditioning the child to be afraid is clearly unethical.

As the story goes, the boy and his mother moved away before Watson and Rayner could decondition the child, so many people have wondered if there might be a man out there with a mysterious phobia of furry white objects.

Controversy

Some researchers have suggested that the boy at the center of the study was actually a cognitively impaired boy who ended up dying of hydrocephalus when he was just six years old. If this is true, it makes Watson's study even more disturbing and controversial.

However, more recent evidence suggests that the real Little Albert was actually a boy named William Albert Barger.

Seligman's Look Into Learned Helplessness

During the late 1960s, psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier conducted experiments that involved conditioning dogs to expect an electrical shock after hearing a tone. Seligman and Maier observed some unexpected results.

When initially placed in a shuttle box in which one side was electrified, the dogs would quickly jump over a low barrier to escape the shocks. Next, the dogs were strapped into a harness where the shocks were unavoidable.

After being conditioned to expect a shock that they could not escape, the dogs were once again placed in the shuttlebox. Instead of jumping over the low barrier to escape, the dogs made no efforts to escape the box.

Instead, they simply lay down, whined and whimpered. Since they had previously learned that no escape was possible, they made no effort to change their circumstances. The researchers called this behavior learned helplessness .

Seligman's work is considered controversial because of the mistreating the animals involved in the study.

Impact of Unethical Experiments in Psychology

Many of the psychology experiments performed in the past simply would not be possible today, thanks to ethical guidelines that direct how studies are performed and how participants are treated. While these controversial experiments are often disturbing, we can still learn some important things about human and animal behavior from their results.

Perhaps most importantly, some of these controversial experiments led directly to the formation of rules and guidelines for performing psychology studies.

Blum, Deborah. Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the science of affection . New York: Basic Books; 2011.

Sperry L. Mental Health and Mental Disorders: an Encyclopedia of Conditions, Treatments, and Well-Being . Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, an imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC; 2016.

Marcus S. Obedience to Authority An Experimental View. By Stanley Milgram. illustrated . New York: Harper &. The New York Times.

Le Texier T. Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment . Am Psychol . 2019;74(7):823‐839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401

Fridlund AJ, Beck HP, Goldie WD, Irons G. Little Albert: A neurologically impaired child . Hist Psychol. 2012;15(4):302-27. doi:10.1037/a0026720

Powell RA, Digdon N, Harris B, Smithson C. Correcting the record on Watson, Rayner, and Little Albert: Albert Barger as "psychology's lost boy" . Am Psychol . 2014;69(6):600‐611. doi:10.1037/a0036854

Seligman ME. Learned helplessness . Annu Rev Med . 1972;23:407‐412. doi:10.1146/annurev.me.23.020172.002203

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."

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Science News

These are science’s top 10 erroneous results.

Mistakes from the past demonstrate the reliability of science

By Tom Siegfried

Contributing Correspondent

November 10, 2020 at 6:00 am

Astronomers viewing supernova 1987A, pictured here, thought they saw a signal from a rapidly spinning neutron star too bizarre to comprehend. But the signal turned out to come from a quirk in the electronics of a camera used to aim the telescope.

10. A weird form of life

A report in 2010 claimed that a weird form of life incorporates arsenic in place of phosphorus in biological molecules. This one sounded rather suspicious, but the evidence, at first glance, looked pretty good. Not so good at second glance , though. And arsenic-based life never made it into the textbooks.

9. A weird form of water

In the 1960s, Soviet scientists contended that they had produced a new form of water. Ordinary water flushed through narrow tubes became denser and thicker, boiled at higher than normal temperatures and froze at much lower temperatures than usual. It seemed that the water molecules must have been coagulating in some way to produce “polywater.” By the end of the 1960s chemists around the world had begun vigorously pursuing polywater experiments. Soon those experiments showed that polywater’s properties came about from the presence of impurities in ordinary water.

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8. Neutrinos, faster than light

Neutrinos are weird little flyweight subatomic particles that zip through space faster than Usain Bolt on PEDs. But not as fast as scientists claimed in 2011, when they timed how long it took neutrinos to fly from the CERN atom smasher near Geneva to a detector in Italy. Initial reports found that the neutrinos arrived 60 nanoseconds sooner than a beam of light would. Faster-than-light neutrinos grabbed some headlines, evoked disbelief from most physicists and induced Einstein to turn over in his grave. But sanity was restored in 2012 , when the research team realized that a loose electrical cable knocked the experiment’s clocks out of sync, explaining the error.

7. Gravitational waves from the early universe

All space is pervaded by microwave radiation, the leftover glow from the Big Bang that kicked the universe into action 13.8 billion years ago. A popular theory explaining details of the early universe — called inflation — predicts the presence of blips in the microwave radiation caused by primordial gravitational waves from the earliest epochs of the universe.

In 2014, scientists reported finding precisely the signal expected, simultaneously verifying the existence of gravitational waves predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity and providing strong evidence favoring inflation. Suspiciously, though, the reported signal was much stronger than expected for most versions of inflation theory. Sure enough, the team’s analysis had not properly accounted for dust in space that skewed the data. Primordial gravitational waves remain undiscovered, though their more recent cousins, produced in cataclysmic events like black hole collisions, have been repeatedly detected in recent years .

6. A one-galaxy universe

In the early 20th century, astronomers vigorously disagreed on the distance from Earth of fuzzy cloudlike blobs shaped something like whirlpools (called spiral nebulae). Most astronomers believed the spiral nebulae resided within the Milky Way galaxy, at the time believed to comprise the entire universe. But a few experts insisted that the spirals were much more distant, themselves entire galaxies like the Milky Way, or “island universes.” Supposed evidence against the island universe idea came from measurements of internal motion in the spirals. It would be impossible to detect such motion if the spirals were actually way far away. But by 1924, Edwin Hubble established with certainty that at least sone of the spiral nebulae were in fact island universes, at vast distances from the Milky Way. Those measurements of internal motion were difficult to make — and they just turned out to be wrong.

5. A supernova’s superfast pulsar

Astronomers rejoiced in 1987 when a supernova appeared in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the closest such stellar explosion to Earth in centuries. Subsequent observations sought a signal from a pulsar, a spinning neutron star that should reside in the middle of the debris from some types of supernova explosions. But the possible pulsar remained hidden until January 1989, when a rapidly repeating radio signal indicated the presence of a superspinner left over from the supernova. It emitted radio beeps nearly 2,000 times a second — much faster than anybody expected (or could explain). But after one night of steady pulsing, the pulsar disappeared. Theorists raced to devise clever theories to explain the bizarre pulsar and what happened to it. Then in early 1990, telescope operators rotated a TV camera (used for guiding the telescope) back into service, and the signal showed up again — around a different supernova remnant. So the supposed signal was actually a quirk in the guide camera’s electronics — not a message from space.

4. A planet orbiting a pulsar

In 1991, astronomers reported the best case yet for the existence of a planet around a star other than the sun. In this case, the “star” was a pulsar, a spinning neutron star about 10,000 light-years from Earth. Variations in the timing of the pulsar’s radio pulses suggested the presence of a companion planet, orbiting its parent pulsar every six months. Soon, though, the astronomers realized that they had used an imprecise value for the pulsar’s position in the sky in such a way that the signal anomaly resulted not from a planet, but from the Earth’s motion around the sun.

3. Age of Earth

In the 1700s, French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffonestimated an Earth age of about 75,000 years, while acknowledging it might be much older. And geologists of the 19th century believe it to be older still — hundreds of millions of years or more — in order to account for the observation of layer after layer of Earth’s buried history. After 1860, Charles Darwin’s new theory of evolution also implied a very old Earth, to provide time for the diversity of species to evolve. But a supposedly definite ruling against such an old Earth came from a physicist who calculated how long it would take an originally molten planet to cool. He applied an age limit of about 100 million years, and later suggested that the actual age might even be much less than that. His calculations were in error, however — not because he was bad at math, but because he didn’t know about radioactivity.

Radioactive decay of elements in the Earth added a lot of heat into the mix, prolonging the cooling time. Eventually estimates of the Earth’s age based on rates of radioactive decay ( especially in meteorites that formed around the same time as the Earth) provided the correct current age estimate of 4.5 billion years or so.

2. Age of the universe

When astronomers first discovered that the universe was expanding, at the end of the 1920s, it was natural to ask how long it had been expanding. By measuring the current expansion rate and extrapolating backward, they found that the universe must be less than 2 billion years old. Yet radioactivity measurements had already established the Earth to be much older, and it was very doubtful (as in impossibly ridiculous) that the universe could be younger than the Earth. Those early calculations of the universe’s expansion, however, had been based on distance measurements relying on Cepheid variable stars.

Astronomers calculated the Cepheids’ distances based on how rapidly their brightness fluctuated, which in turn depended on their intrinsic brightness. Comparing intrinsic brightness to apparent brightness provided a Cepheid’s distance, just as you can gauge the distance of a lightbulb if you know its wattage (oh yes, and what kind of lightbulb it is). It turned out, though, that just like lightbulbs, there is more than one kind of Cepheid variable , contaminating the expansion rate calculations. Nowadays converging methods give an age of the universe of 13.8 billion years, making the Earth a relative newcomer to the cosmos.

1. Earth in the middle

OK, we’re going to name and blame Aristotle for this one. He wasn’t the first to say that the Earth occupies the center of the universe, but he was the most dogmatic about it, and believed he had established it to be incontrovertibly true — by using logic. He insisted that the Earth must be in the middle because earth (the element) always sought to move toward its “natural place,” the center of the cosmos. Even though Aristotle invented formal logic, he apparently did not notice a certain amount of circularity in his argument. It took a while, but in 1543 Copernicus made a strong case for Aristotle being mistaken. And then in 1610 Galileo’s observation that Venus went through a full set of phases sealed the case for a sun-centered solar system.

Now, it would be nice if there were a lesson in this list of errors that might help scientists do better in the future. But the whole history of science shows that such errors are actually unavoidable. There is a lesson, though, based on what the mistakes on this list have in common: They’re all on a list of errors now known to be errors. Science, unlike certain political philosophies and personality cults, corrects its mistakes. That’s the lesson, and that’s why respecting science is so important to avoiding errors in other realms of life.

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9 evil medical experiments

Many evil medical experiments have been conducted in the name of science, here are nine of the most horrific.

An SS operating theatre used for evil medical experiments

Separating triplets

Nazi medical experiments, japan's unit 731, the "monster study", the burke and hare murders, surgical experiments on slaves, guatemala syphilis study, the tuskegee study, additional resources:, related links:, bibliography:.

Throughout history a number of evil experiments have been carried out in the name of science. We all know the stereotype of the mad scientist, often a villain in popular culture. Yet in real-life, while science often saves lives, sometimes scientists commit horrific crimes in order to achieve results.

Some are ethical mistakes, lapses of judgement made by people convinced they're doing the right thing. Other times, they're pure evil. Here are nine of the worst experiments on human subjects in history.

Robert Shafran, David Kellman and Eddy Galland sit for a photo at a home in Howard Beach in Queens, New York, on Sept. 28, 1980, after the triplets had been reunited.

In the 1960s and 1970s , clinical psychologists led by Peter Neubauer ran a secret experiment in which they separated twins and triplets from each other and adopted them out as singlets. The experiment, said to have been partly funded by the National Institute of Mental Health , came to light when three identical triplet brothers accidentally found each other in 1980. They had no idea they had siblings.

David Kellman, one of the triplets, felt anger towards the experiment: ''We were robbed of 20 years together,'' said Kellman in the Orlando Sentinel article. His brother, Edward Galland died by suicide in 1995 at his home in Maplewood, New Jersey, according to the LA Times .

The child psychiatrists who headed up the study — Peter Neubauer and Viola Bernard — showed no remorse, according to news reports, going as far as saying they thought they were doing something good for the kids, separating them so they could develop their individual personalities, said Bernard, according to Quillette . As for what Neubauer learned from his secret "evil" experiment, that's anyone's guess, as the results of the controversial study are being stored in an archive at Yale University, and they can't be unsealed until 2066, NPR reported in 2007 . Neubauer published some of his findings in a 1996 book, Nature's Thumbprint: The New Genetics of Personality , primarily concerning his son. According to Psychology today, as of 2021, some of Dr Viola Bernard's papers have become viewable at Columbia University .

Director Tim Wardle chronicled the lives of the triplets in the film " Three Identical Strangers ," which debuted at Sundance 2018.

The entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp

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

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

Some of the doctors responsible for these atrocities were later tried as war criminals, but Mengele escaped to South America. He died in Brazil in 1979, of a heart attack, his final years spent lonely and depressed according to The Guardian .

Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Japanese Imperial Army conducted biological warfare and medical testing on civilians, mostly in China . Led by General Shiro Ishii, the lead physician at UNIT 731, the death toll of these brutal experiments is unknown, but as many as 200,000 may have died, estimates Historian Sheldon H Harris according to a 1995 New York Times report .

Numerous diseases were studied in order to determine their potential use in warfare. Among them were plague, anthrax , dysentery, typhoid, paratyphoid and cholera, according to a paper by Dr Robert K D Peterson for Montana University . Numerous atrocities were committed including infecting wells with cholera and typhoid and spreading plague-ridden fleas across Chinese cities.

According to Peterson the fleas were dropped in clay bombs, which were dropped at a height of 200-300 meters and showed no trace. Prisoners were marched in freezing weather and then experimented on to determine the best treatment for frostbite.

Former members of the unit have told media outlets that prisoners were dosed with poison gas, put in pressure chambers until their eyes popped out, and even dissected while alive and conscious. After the war, the U.S. government helped keep the experiments secret as part of a plan to make Japan a cold-war ally, according to the Times report.

It was not until the late 1990's that Japan first acknowledged the existence of the unit and not until 2018 that the names of thousands of members of the Unit were disclosed, according to The Guardian .

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

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

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

The anatomist Dr Robert Knox, who Burke and Hare supplied the bodies of their victims to

Until the 1830s, the only legally available bodies for dissection by anatomists were those of executed murderers. Executed murderers being a relative rarity, many anatomists took to buying bodies from grave robbers — or doing the robbing themselves. “Body snatching as a ‘professional’ occupation didn’t really start to take shape until the end of the 18th century” Suzie Lennox, the author of Bodysnatchers: Digging Up the Untold Stories of Britain's Resurrection Men told All About History in an interview “up till then the students and anatomists would have carried out their own raids in graveyards, acquiring cadavers as and when they could”.

Edinburgh boarding house owner William Hare and his friend William Burke found a way to deliver fresh corpses to Edinbrugh's anatomy tables without ever actually stealing a body. From 1827 to 1828, the two men smothered more than a dozen lodgers at the boarding house and sold their bodies to anatomist Robert Knox, according to Mary Roach's " Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers " (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003). Knox apparently didn't notice (or didn't care) that the bodies his newest suppliers were bringing him were suspiciously fresh, Roach wrote.

Burke was later hanged for his crimes, and the case spurred the British government to loosen the restrictions on dissection. "The scandal led to the Anatomy Act of 1832 which made greater numbers of cadavers legally available to schools" Maclolm McCallum, the curator of the Edinburgh Anatomical Museum told All About History in an interview. "If you died in an asylum or hospital, and had no relatives or means to cover your funeral costs, your body would go to the schools for dissection. Crucially, the institutions which were providing the cadavers only supplied them to anatomy schools that were associated with teaching hospitals".

James Marion Sims, the 'father of gynecology', whose experiments on slaves continue to cause controversy

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

Sims performed the surgeries without anesthesia , in part because anesthesia had only recently been discovered, and in part because Sims believed the operations were "not painful enough to justify the trouble," as he said in alecture according to NPR .

Arguments still rage as to whether Sims' patients would have consented to the surgeries had they been entirely free to choose. Nonetheless, wrote University of Alabama social work professor Durrenda Ojanuga in the Journal of Medical Ethics in 1993 , Sims "manipulated the social institution of slavery to perform human experimentations, which by any standard is unacceptable." In 2018, a statue of Sims was removed in response to the ongoing controversy, according to The Guardian .

Many people erroneously believe that the government deliberately infected the Tuskegee participants with syphilis, which was not the case. But the work of professor Susan Reverby recently exposed a time when the U.S. Public Health Service researchers did just that, according to Wellesley College . Between 1946 and 1948, Reverby found, the U.S. and Guatemalan governments co-sponsored a study involving the deliberate infection of 1,500 Guatemalan men, women and children with syphilis according to The Guardian .

The study was intended to test chemicals to prevent the spread of the disease. According to Michael A. Rodriguez in a 2013 paper; "The experiments were not conducted in a sterile clinical setting in which bacteria that cause STDs were administered in the form of a pin prick vaccination or a pill taken orally. The researchers systematically and repeatedly violated profoundly vulnerable individuals, some in the saddest and most despairing states, and grievously aggravated their suffering" Those who got syphilis were given penicillin as a treatment, Reverby found, but the records she uncovered indicate no follow-up or informed consent by the participants. On Oct. 1, 2010, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a joint statement apologizing for the experiments , according to The Guardian .

The most famous lapse in medical ethics in the United States lasted for 40 years. In 1932, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Public Health Service launched a study on the health effects of untreated syphilis in black men.

The researchers tracked the progression of the disease in 399 black men in Alabama and also studied 201 healthy men , telling them they were being treated for "bad blood." In fact, the men never got adequate treatment, even in 1947 when penicillin became the drug of choice to treat syphilis. It wasn't until a 1972 newspaper article exposed the study to the public eye that officials shut it down, according to the official Tuskegee site.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

Phillip Zimbardo whose controversial Stanford Prison experiment continues to generate interest

In 1971, Philip Zimbardo , now professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University , set out to test the "nature of human nature," to answer questions such as "What happens when you put good people in evil situations?" How he went about answering his human nature questions was and is thought by many to have been less than ethical. He set up a prison and paid college students to play guards and prisoners, who inevitably seemed to transform into abusive guards and hysterical prisoners. The two-week experiment was shut down after just six days because things turned chaotic fast. "In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress," Zimbardo stated, according to Times Higher Education . The guards, pretty much from the get-go, treated the prisoners awfully, humiliating them by stripping them naked and spraying their bodies with delousing chemicals and generally harassing and intimidating them, according to the Stanford Prison Experiment site

Turns out, according to a report on Medium , a news publication, in June 2018, the guards didn't become aggressive on their own — Zimbardo encouraged the abusive behavior — and some of the prisoners faked their emotional breakdowns. For instance, Douglas Korpi, a volunteer prisoner said that he faked a meltdown to get released early so he could study for an exam.

Even so, the Stanford Prison Experiment has been the basis of psychologists' and even historians' understanding of how even healthy people can become so evil when placed in certain situations, according to the American Psychological Association .

For more concerning the atrocities committed during the Holocaust, check out the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum . The New York Times original 1995 report on the events that occured at Manchu 731 is available here . Those interested in the Stanford Prison Experiment should check out the experiments website .

The Holocaust: Facts and Remembrance
The Top 10 Mad Scientists
Amy Kaufman: " The surreal, sad story behind the acclaimed new doc ‘Three Identical Strangers " Los Angeles Times, July 1 2018
Nancy L Segal: " Shame and Silence: The LWS Twin Studies Revisited " Quillette, 26th Sep 2021
Holocaust Encyclopedia: Josef Mengele
Dachau: High Altitude Experiments, Jewish Virtual Library
Jan Rocha, " Mengele Letters Reveal Life Ended in Pain and Poverty ", The Guardian, 23 Nov 2004
Nicholas D Kristoff: " Unmasking Horror - A Special Report " The New York Times, March 17th 1995
Dr Robert K D Peterson: "Japan’s Role in Developing Biological Weapons in World War II and its Effect on Contemporary Relations between Asian Countries " Montana State University
Justin McCurry: " Unit 731: Japan discloses details of notorious chemical warfare division " The Guardian, 17th April 2018
Gretchen Reynolds: " The Stuttering Doctor's 'Monster Study ", New York Times, March 16th 2003
Mary Roach's " Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers " (W.W. Norton & Company, 2003)
Sarah Zhang: " The Surgeon Who Experimented on Slaves ", The Atlantic, April 18th 2018
Camila Domonoske: " Father Of Gynecology,' Who Experimented On Slaves, No Longer On Pedestal In NYC " NPR, April 17th 2018
Durrenda Ojanuga: " The Medical Ethics of the 'Father of Gynaecology', Dr J Marion Sims ' Journal of Medical Ethics, 1993
Nadja Sayej: " J Marion Sims: controversial statue taken down but debate still rages ", The Guardian, Sat 21st April 2018
Rory Caroll, " Guatemala victims of US syphilis study still haunted by the 'devil's experiment ", The Guardian, 8th June 2011
Michael A Rodriguez, National Library of Medicine
Chris McGreal: " US says sorry for 'outrageous and abhorrent' Guatemalan syphilis tests ", The Guardian, 1st October 2010
Matthew Reisz, " Re-engaging with the Stanford Prison Experiment ". Times Higher Education, Sep 26th 2018

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Stephanie Pappas is a contributing writer for Live Science, covering topics ranging from geoscience to archaeology to the human brain and behavior. She was previously a senior writer for Live Science but is now a freelancer based in Denver, Colorado, and regularly contributes to Scientific American and The Monitor, the monthly magazine of the American Psychological Association. Stephanie received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of South Carolina and a graduate certificate in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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10 Outrageous Experiments Conducted on Humans

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Prisoners, the disabled, the physically and mentally sick, the poor -- these are all groups once considered fair game to use as subjects in your research experiments. And if you didn't want to get permission, you didn't have to, and many doctors and researchers conducted their experiments on people who were unwilling to participate or who were unknowingly participating.

Forty years ago the U.S. Congress changed the rules; informed consent is now required for any government-funded medical study involving human subjects. But before 1974 the ethics involved in using humans in research experiments was a little, let's say, loose. And the exploitation and abuse of human subjects was often alarming. We begin our list with one of the most famous instances of exploitation, a study that eventually helped change the public view about the lack of consent in the name of scientific advancements.

Tuskegee Syphilis Study
The Nazi Medical Experiments
Watson's 'Little Albert' Experiment
The Monster Study of 1939
Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study
The Aversion Project in South Africa
Milgram Shock Experiments
CIA Mind-Control Experiments (Project MK-Ultra)
The Human Vivisections of Herophilus

10: Tuskegee Syphilis Study

Syphilis was a major public health problem in the 1920s, and in 1928 the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a charity organization, launched a public healthcare project for blacks in the American rural south. Sounds good, right? It was, until the Great Depression rocked the U.S. in 1929 and the project lost its funding. Changes were made to the program; instead of treating health problems in underserved areas, in 1932 poor black men living in Macon County, Alabama, were instead enrolled in a program to treat what they were told was their "bad blood" (a term that, at the time, was used in reference to everything from anemia to fatigue to syphilis). They were given free medical care, as well as food and other amenities such as burial insurance, for participating in the study. But they didn't know it was all a sham. The men in the study weren't told that they were recruited for the program because they were actually suffering from the sexually transmitted disease syphilis, nor were they told they were taking part in a government experiment studying untreated syphilis, the "Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male." That's right: untreated.

Despite thinking they were receiving medical care, subjects were never actually properly treated for the disease. This went on even after penicillin hit the scene and became the go-to treatment for the infection in 1945, and after Rapid Treatment Centers were established in 1947. Despite concerns raised about the ethics of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study as early as 1936, the study didn't actually end until 1972 after the media reported on the multi-decade experiment and there was subsequent public outrage.

9: The Nazi Medical Experiments

During WWII, the Nazis performed medical experiments on adults and children imprisoned in the Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. The accounts of abuse, mutilation, starvation, and torture reads like a grisly compilation of all nine circles of hell. Prisoners in these death camps were subjected to heinous crimes under the guise of military advancement, medical and pharmaceutical advancement, and racial and population advancement.

Jews were subjected to experiments intended to benefit the military, including hypothermia studies where prisoners were immersed in ice water in an effort to ascertain how long a downed pilot could survive in similar conditions. Some victims were only allowed sea water, a study of how long pilots could survive at sea; these subjects, not surprisingly, died of dehydration. Victims were also exposed to high altitude in decompression chambers -- often followed with brain dissection on the living -- to study high-altitude sickness and how pilots would be affected by atmospheric pressure changes.

Effectively treating war injuries was also a concern for the Nazis, and pharmaceutical testing went on in these camps. Sulfanilamide was tested as a new treatment for war wounds. Victims were inflicted with wounds that were then intentionally infected. Infections and poisonings were also studied on human subjects. Tuberculosis (TB) was injected into prisoners in an effort to better understand how to immunize against the infection. Experiments with poison, to determine how fast subjects would die, were also on the agenda.

The Nazis also performed genetic and racially-motivated sterilizations, artificial inseminations, and also conducted experiments on twins and people of short stature.

8: Watson's 'Little Albert' Experiment

In 1920 John Watson, along with graduate student Rosalie Rayner, conducted an emotional-conditioning experiment on a nine-month-old baby -- whom they nicknamed "Albert B" -- at Johns Hopkins University in an effort to prove their theory that we're all born as blank slates that can be shaped. The child's mother, a wet nurse who worked at the hospital, was paid one dollar for allowing her son to take part.

The "Little Albert" experiment went like this: Researchers first introduced the baby to a small, furry white rat, of which he initially had no fear . (According to reports, he didn't really show much interest at all). Then they re-introduced him to the rat while a loud sound rang out. Over and over, "Albert" was exposed to the rat and startling noises until he became frightened any time he saw any small, furry animal (rats, for sure, but also dogs and monkeys) regardless of noise.

Who exactly "Albert" was remained unknown until 2010, when his identity was revealed to be Douglas Merritte. Merritte, it turns out, wasn't a healthy subject: He showed signs of behavioral and neurological impairment, never learned to talk or walk, and only lived to age six, dying from hydrocephalus (water on the brain). He also suffered from a bacterial meningitis infection he may have acquired accidentally during treatments for his hydrocephalus, or, as some theorize, may have been -- horrifyingly -- intentionally infected as part of another experiment.

In the end, Merritte was never deconditioned, and because he died at such a young age no one knows if he continued to fear small furry things post-experiment.

7: The Monster Study of 1939

Today we understand that stuttering has many possible causes. It may run in some families, an inherited genetic quirk of the language center of the brain. It may also occur because of a brain injury, including stroke or other trauma. Some young children stutter when they're learning to talk, but outgrow the problem. In some rare instances, it may be a side effect of emotional trauma. But you know what it's not caused by? Criticism.

In 1939 Mary Tudor, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, and her faculty advisor, speech expert Wendell Johnson, set out to prove stuttering could be taught through negative reinforcement -- that it's learned behavior. Over four months, 22 orphaned children were told they would be receiving speech therapy, but in reality they became subjects in a stuttering experiment; only about half were actually stutterers, and none received speech therapy.

During the experiment the children were split into four groups:

Half of the stutterers were given negative feedback.
The other half of stutterers were given positive feedback.
Half of the non-stuttering group were all told they were beginning to stutterer and were criticized.
The other half of non-stutterers were praised.

The only significant impact the experiment had was on that third group; these kids, despite never actually developing a stutter, began to change their behavior, exhibiting low self-esteem and adopting the self-conscious behaviors associated with stutterers. And those who did stutter didn't cease doing so regardless of the feedback they received.

6: Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study

It's estimated that between 60 to 65 percent of American soldiers stationed in the South Pacific during WWII suffered from a malarial infection at some point during their service. For some units the infection proved to be more deadly than the enemy forces were, so finding an effective treatment was a high priority [source: Army Heritage Center Foundation]. Safe anti-malarial drugs were seen as essential to winning the war.

Beginning in 1944 and spanning over the course of two years, more than 400 prisoners at the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois were subjects in an experiment aimed at finding an effective drug against malaria . Prisoners taking part in the experiment were infected with malaria, and then treated with experimental anti-malarial treatments. The experiment didn't have a hidden agenda, and its unethical methodology didn't seem to bother the American public, who were united in winning WWII and eager to bring the troops home — safe and healthy. The intent of the experiments wasn't hidden from the subjects, who were at the time praised for their patriotism and in many instances given shorter prison sentences in return for their participation.

5: The Aversion Project in South Africa

If you were living during the apartheid era in South Africa, you lived under state-regulated racial segregation. If that itself wasn't difficult enough, the state also controlled your sexuality.

The South African government upheld strict anti-homosexual laws. If you were gay you were considered a deviant — and your homosexuality was also considered a disease that could be treated. Even after homosexuality ceased to be considered a mental illness and aversion therapy as a way to cure it debunked, psychiatrists and Army medical professionals in the South African Defense Force (SADF) continued to believe the outdated theories and treatments. In particular, aversion therapy techniques were used on prisoners and on South Africans who were forced to join the military under the conscription laws of the time.

At Ward 22 at 1 Military hospital in Voortrekkerhoogte, Pretoria, between 1969 and 1987 attempts were made to "cure" perceived deviants. Homosexuals, gay men and lesbians were drugged and subjected to electroconvulsive behavior therapy while shown aversion stimuli (same-sex erotic photos), followed by erotic photos of the opposite sex after the electric shock. When the technique didn't work (and it absolutely didn't), victims were then treated with hormone therapy, which in some cases included chemical castration. In addition, an estimated 900 men and women also underwent gender reassignment surgery when subsequent efforts to "reorient" them failed — most without consent, and some left unfinished [source: Kaplan ].

4: Milgram Shock Experiments

Ghostbuster Peter Venkman, who is seen in the fictional film conducting ESP/electro-shock experiments on college students, was likely inspired by social psychologist Stanley Milgram's famous series of shock experiments conducted in the early 1960s. During Milgram's experiments "teachers" — Americans recruited for a Yale study they thought was about memory and learning — were told to read lists of words to "learners" (actors, although the teachers didn't know that). Each person in the teacher role was instructed to press a lever that would deliver a shock to their "learner" every time he made a mistake on word-matching quizzes. Teachers believed the voltage of shocks increased with each mistake, and ranged from 15 to 450 possible volts; roughly two-thirds of teachers shocked learners to the highest voltage , continuing to deliver jolts at the instruction of the experimenter.

In reality, this wasn't an experiment about memory and learning; rather, it was about how obedient we are to authority. No shocks were actually given.

Today, Milgram's shock experiments continue to be controversial; while they're criticized for their lack of realism, others point to the results as important to how humans behave when under duress. In 2010 the results of Milgram's study were repeated — with about 70 percent of teachers obediently administering what they believed to be the highest voltage shocks to their learners.

3: CIA Mind-Control Experiments (Project MK-Ultra)

If you're familiar with "Men Who Stare at Goats" or "The Manchurian Candidate" then you know: There was a period in the CIA's history when they performed covert mind-control experiments. If you thought it was fiction, it wasn't.

During the Cold War the CIA started researching ways they could turn Americans into CIA-controlled "superagents," people who could carry out assassinations and who wouldn't be affected by enemy interrogations. Under what was known as the MK-ULTRA project, CIA researchers experimented on unsuspecting American (and Canadian) citizens by slipping them psychedelic drugs, including LSD , PCP and barbiturates, as well as additional — and additionally illegal — methods such as hypnosis, and, possibly, chemical, biological, and radiological agents. Universities participated, mostly as a delivery system, also without their knowledge. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates 7,000 soldiers were also involved in the research, without their consent.

The project endured for more than 20 years, during which the agency spent about $20 million. There was one death tied to the project, although more were suspected; tin 1973 the CIA destroyed what records were kept.

2: Unit 731

Using biological warfare was banned by the Geneva Protocol in 1925, but Japan rejected the ban. If germ warfare was effective enough to be banned, it must work, military leaders believed. Unit 731 , a secret unit in a secret facility — publicly known as the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit — was established in Japanese-controlled Manchuria, where by the mid-1930s Japan began experimenting with pathogenic and chemical warfare and testing on human subjects. There, military physicians and officers intentionally exposed victims to infectious diseases including anthrax , bubonic plague, cholera, syphilis, typhus and other pathogens, in an effort to understand how they affected the body and how they could be used in bombs and attacks in WWII.

In addition to working with pathogens, Unit 731 conducted experiments on people, including — but certainly not limited to — dissections and vivisections on living humans, all without anesthesia (the experimenters believed using it would skew the results of the research).

Many of the subjects were Chinese civilians and prisoners of war, but also included Russian and American victims among others — basically, anyone who wasn't Japanese was a potential subject. Today it's estimated that about 100,000 people were victims within the facility, but when you include the germ warfare field experiments (such as reports of Japanese planes dropping plague-infected fleas over Chinese villages and poisoning wells with cholera) the death toll climbs to estimates closer to 250,000, maybe more.

Believe it or not, after WWII the U.S. granted immunity to those involved in these war crimes committed at Unit 731 as part of an information exchange agreement — and until the 1980s, the Japanese government refused to admit any of this even happened.

1: The Human Vivisections of Herophilus

Ancient physician Herophilus is considered the father of anatomy. And while he made significant discoveries during his practice, it's how he learned about internal workings of the human body that lands him on this list.

Herophilus practiced medicine in Alexandria, Egypt, and during the reign of the first two Ptolemaio Pharoahs was allowed, at least for about 30 to 40 years, to dissect human bodies, which he did, publicly, along with contemporary Greek physician and anatomist Erasistratus. Under Ptolemy I and Ptolemy II, criminals could be sentenced to dissection and vivisection as punishment, and it's said the father of anatomy not only dissected the dead but also performed vivisection on an estimated 600 living prisoners [source: Elhadi ].

Herophilus made great strides in the study of human anatomy — especially the brain , eyes, liver, circulatory system, nervous system and reproductive system, during a time in history when dissecting human cadavers was considered an act of desecration of the body (there were no autopsies conducted on the dead, although mummification was popular in Egypt at the time). And, like today, performing vivisection on living bodies was considered butchery.

Frequently Asked Questions

How have these experiments influenced current ethical standards in research, what protections are in place today to prevent similar unethical research on humans, lots more information, author's note.

There is no denying that involving living, breathing humans in medical studies have produced some invaluable results, but there's that one medical saying most of us know, even if we're not in a medical field: first do no harm (or, if you're fancy, primum non nocere).

What will medicine consider unethical in 100 years?
How Human Experimentation Works
Top 5 Crazy Government Experiments
10 Cover-ups That Just Made Things Worse
10 Really Smart People Who Did Really Dumb Things
How Scientific Peer Review Works

14 Experiments Gone Wrong

Franz Reichelt is now remembered as the "flying tailor."

In 1971, 24 men were enlisted in the Stanford Prison Experiment . Led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University, the experiment was supposed to measure the effect of role-playing and social expectations over a two-week period in the basement of a school building. The participants were assigned the roles of either prisoners or guards, while others were held back as alternates. However, the events that took place over the next few days traumatized some prisoners so much they had to be removed from the experiment altogether. When an outsider witnessed some of the disturbing events taking place, they quickly sounded the alarm, which brought an abrupt end to the study after just six days. Many researchers don't believe this study could ever be replicated because it doesn't reach modern research ethics standards, and some psychologists doubt the Prison Experiment's core findings.

But science isn't responsible for all failed experiments; marketing has played a major role as well. The Cleveland Indians, for example, tried out a promotion to increase fan attendance by offering unlimited beer for 10 cents a cup in 1974, which certainly made for an eventful game against the Texas Rangers. What began with some drunken fans running onto the field and exposing themselves quickly escalated to fireworks being launched at the Texas Rangers’s dugout. Eventually, a riot broke out and some players were injured after having rocks hurled at them.

In this episode of The List Show, we're looking into the history of experiments gone wrong, from Franz Reichelt's failed parachute to a baby being raised alongside a chimp. You can watch the full episode below.

For more videos like this, be sure to head here and subscribe.

More than 160 students, teachers nationwide hurt in science experiments gone wrong

by JOCE STERMAN, ALEX BRAUER and ANDREA NEJMAN, Sinclair Broadcast Group

A demonstration conducted by the ATF shows the phenomenon known as flame jetting as it could happen in a classroom science experiment gone wrong (Photo: Alex Brauer)

WASHINGTON (SBG) — As many students return to in-person learning, experts are warning about a danger they could face in the classroom: not COVID-19 , but a phenomenon known as flame jetting. It's already injured dozens of students and teachers across the nation in classroom science experiments gone terribly wrong.

Spotlight on America got a firsthand look at the phenomenon known as flame jetting from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives , going behind the scenes at the agency's Fire Research Laboratory in Maryland. As trained and equipped representatives from the ATF demonstrated, the phenomenon can turn a flammable liquid inside a container into a flame thrower, creating a wall of fire that shoots forward with an intense force, torching anything in its path.

According to Jonathan Butta with the ATF, it can happen when alcohols, especially methanol, are used in demonstrations involving an open flame. While the idea is to liven up classroom experiments and give a real-life application to a chemical concept, the results can be tragic. Butta explained, "It essentially turns a typical flammable liquid container into a flamethrower."

"We actually see the flame front propagate up the stream of flammable liquid into that container and expand those vapors and shoot those liquid droplets out with it," said Jonathan Butta with the ATF.

Dozens of students across the country have actually seen flame jetting in action, with tragic consequences. W.T. Woodson High School in Virginia is just one example.

In 2015, a demonstration known as the "Rainbow Experiment" designed to show how burning different salts results in different colors, went wrong at the school. Experts say flame jetting occurred during the experiment, with the tragic outcome detailed in stunning photos . The incident left a classroom at Woodson High School charred and five students injured, including two who had to be airlifted to the hospital with serious burns. Just weeks after the incident, Nick Dache exclusively told our affiliate WJLA , "I think the whole thing was just a freak accident."

Dache actually stepped in to assist one of the students who was burned during the incident. As the young woman ran out of the classroom still on fire, Dache explained he chased her down and used his hands to scuff out the flames on her shirt.

"It almost looked like a blanket. Someone else described it as a fireball," student Nick Dache said of the aftermath of the Rainbow Experiment gone wrong in 2015. "I don't think that's completely accurate because that seems more violent. It got very widespread but it didn't seem super concentrated."

A similar flame jetting incident happened in Ohio in 2006, when student Calais Weber Biery was burned over 40 percent of her body during an experiment in her school's chemistry lab. She's featured in a 2013 Youtube video produced by the U.S. Chemical Safety Board called "After the Rainbow." The video, the organization said, was created in an effort to help prevent classroom accidents in chemistry labs.

"I remember thinking, 'I'm on fire, oh my gosh, I'm on fire,'" student Calais Weber Biery recalled in a Youtube video about the dangers of the Rainbow Experiment. "It's tragic and it shouldn't happen."

Spotlight on America has learned those two incidents are far from isolated. A 2018 study published in the Journal of Chemical Education , an arm of the American Chemical Society , found 164 children and teachers have been injured in classroom demonstrations using flammable solvents since 1988. Additionally, we discovered at least three additional incidents last year alone. Experiments where students and teachers have been injured have happened in the following states:

North Carolina
Pennsylvania

The real number of classroom accidents could actually be much higher because Spotlight on America has learned there's no requirement to report accidents to the US Chemical Safety Board , which along with the ACS, has done tremendous outreach, trying to improve experiment safety. In 2015, Kristen Kulinowski, a former member of the USCSB, talked with our affiliate WJLA about the number of accidents in classroom labs, calling them a significant problem. She said, "All of these incidents could have been prevented."

Courts in at least four states including Georgia, Florida, New York and Ohio have agreed, handing over millions in cases filed by students injured in fiery classroom experiments. In one of those cases , nearly $60 million was awarded to a high school student in New York who was badly burned and left with permanent scarring on much of his body as a result of an experiment gone wrong. The award was appealed but just this summer a judge upheld the jury's decision.

For years, some safety advocates have called for banning experiments involving flammable solvents and open flames altogether, while others have lobbied for mandating specific safety protocols to protect students in the classroom. For its part, the ACS has dedicated an entire section of its website to provide resources for educators on how to safely conduct demonstrations and experiments in the classroom. Their efforts even include showing teachers a safe, alternative way to conduct the Rainbow Experiment without putting students at risk.

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud.

The most famous psychological studies are often wrong, fraudulent, or outdated. Textbooks need to catch up.

by Brian Resnick

The Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most famous and compelling psychological studies of all time, told us a tantalizingly simple story about human nature.

The study took paid participants and assigned them to be “inmates” or “guards” in a mock prison at Stanford University. Soon after the experiment began, the “guards” began mistreating the “prisoners,” implying evil is brought out by circumstance. The authors, in their conclusions, suggested innocent people, thrown into a situation where they have power over others, will begin to abuse that power. And people who are put into a situation where they are powerless will be driven to submission, even madness.

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been included in many, many introductory psychology textbooks and is often cited uncritically . It’s the subject of movies, documentaries, books, television shows, and congressional testimony .

But its findings were wrong. Very wrong. And not just due to its questionable ethics or lack of concrete data — but because of deceit.

Philip Zimbardo defends the Stanford Prison Experiment, his most famous work

A new exposé published by Medium based on previously unpublished recordings of Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford psychologist who ran the study, and interviews with his participants, offers convincing evidence that the guards in the experiment were coached to be cruel. It also shows that the experiment’s most memorable moment — of a prisoner descending into a screaming fit, proclaiming, “I’m burning up inside!” — was the result of the prisoner acting. “I took it as a kind of an improv exercise,” one of the guards told reporter Ben Blum . “I believed that I was doing what the researchers wanted me to do.”

The findings have long been subject to scrutiny — many think of them as more of a dramatic demonstration , a sort-of academic reality show, than a serious bit of science. But these new revelations incited an immediate response. “We must stop celebrating this work,” personality psychologist Simine Vazire tweeted , in response to the article . “It’s anti-scientific. Get it out of textbooks.” Many other psychologists have expressed similar sentiments.

( Update : Since this article published, the journal American Psychologist has published a thorough debunking of the Stanford Prison Experiment that goes beyond what Blum found in his piece. There’s even more evidence that the “guards” knew the results that Zimbardo wanted to produce, and were trained to meet his goals. It also provides evidence that the conclusions of the experiment were predetermined.)

Many of the classic show-stopping experiments in psychology have lately turned out to be wrong, fraudulent, or outdated. And in recent years, social scientists have begun to reckon with the truth that their old work needs a redo, the “ replication crisis .” But there’s been a lag — in the popular consciousness and in how psychology is taught by teachers and textbooks. It’s time to catch up.

Many classic findings in psychology have been reevaluated recently

The Zimbardo prison experiment is not the only classic study that has been recently scrutinized, reevaluated, or outright exposed as a fraud. Recently, science journalist Gina Perry found that the infamous “Robbers Cave“ experiment in the 1950s — in which young boys at summer camp were essentially manipulated into joining warring factions — was a do-over from a failed previous version of an experiment, which the scientists never mentioned in an academic paper. That’s a glaring omission. It’s wrong to throw out data that refutes your hypothesis and only publicize data that supports it.

Perry has also revealed inconsistencies in another major early work in psychology: the Milgram electroshock test, in which participants were told by an authority figure to deliver seemingly lethal doses of electricity to an unseen hapless soul. Her investigations show some evidence of researchers going off the study script and possibly coercing participants to deliver the desired results. (Somewhat ironically, the new revelations about the prison experiment also show the power an authority figure — in this case Zimbardo himself and his “warden” — has in manipulating others to be cruel.)

The Stanford Prison Experiment is based on lies. Hear them for yourself.

Other studies have been reevaluated for more honest, methodological snafus. Recently, I wrote about the “marshmallow test,” a series of studies from the early ’90s that suggested the ability to delay gratification at a young age is correlated with success later in life . New research finds that if the original marshmallow test authors had a larger sample size, and greater research controls, their results would not have been the showstoppers they were in the ’90s. I can list so many more textbook psychology findings that have either not replicated, or are currently in the midst of a serious reevaluation.

Social priming: People who read “old”-sounding words (like “nursing home”) were more likely to walk slowly — showing how our brains can be subtly “primed” with thoughts and actions.
The facial feedback hypothesis: Merely activating muscles around the mouth caused people to become happier — demonstrating how our bodies tell our brains what emotions to feel.
Stereotype threat: Minorities and maligned social groups don’t perform as well on tests due to anxieties about becoming a stereotype themselves.
Ego depletion: The idea that willpower is a finite mental resource.

Alas, the past few years have brought about a reckoning for these ideas and social psychology as a whole.

Many psychological theories have been debunked or diminished in rigorous replication attempts. Psychologists are now realizing it’s more likely that false positives will make it through to publication than inconclusive results. And they’ve realized that experimental methods commonly used just a few years ago aren’t rigorous enough. For instance, it used to be commonplace for scientists to publish experiments that sampled about 50 undergraduate students. Today, scientists realize this is a recipe for false positives , and strive for sample sizes in the hundreds and ideally from a more representative subject pool.

Nevertheless, in so many of these cases, scientists have moved on and corrected errors, and are still doing well-intentioned work to understand the heart of humanity. For instance, work on one of psychology’s oldest fixations — dehumanization, the ability to see another as less than human — continues with methodological rigor, helping us understand the modern-day maltreatment of Muslims and immigrants in America.

In some cases, time has shown that flawed original experiments offer worthwhile reexamination. The original Milgram experiment was flawed. But at least its study design — which brings in participants to administer shocks (not actually carried out) to punish others for failing at a memory test — is basically repeatable today with some ethical tweaks.

And it seems like Milgram’s conclusions may hold up: In a recent study, many people found demands from an authority figure to be a compelling reason to shock another. However, it’s possible, due to something known as the file-drawer effect, that failed replications of the Milgram experiment have not been published. Replication attempts at the Stanford prison study, on the other hand, have been a mess .

In science, too often, the first demonstration of an idea becomes the lasting one — in both pop culture and academia. But this isn’t how science is supposed to work at all!

Science is a frustrating, iterative process. When we communicate it, we need to get beyond the idea that a single, stunning study ought to last the test of time. Scientists know this as well, but their institutions have often discouraged them from replicating old work, instead of the pursuit of new and exciting, attention-grabbing studies. (Journalists are part of the problem too , imbuing small, insignificant studies with more importance and meaning than they’re due.)

Thankfully, there are researchers thinking very hard, and very earnestly, on trying to make psychology a more replicable, robust science. There’s even a whole Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science devoted to these issues.

Follow-up results tend to be less dramatic than original findings , but they are more useful in helping discover the truth. And it’s not that the Stanford Prison Experiment has no place in a classroom. It’s interesting as history. Psychologists like Zimbardo and Milgram were highly influenced by World War II. Their experiments were, in part, an attempt to figure out why ordinary people would fall for Nazism. That’s an important question, one that set the agenda for a huge amount of research in psychological science, and is still echoed in papers today.

Textbooks need to catch up

Psychology has changed tremendously over the past few years. Many studies used to teach the next generation of psychologists have been intensely scrutinized, and found to be in error. But troublingly, the textbooks have not been updated accordingly .

That’s the conclusion of a 2016 study in Current Psychology. “ By and large,” the study explains (emphasis mine):

introductory textbooks have difficulty accurately portraying controversial topics with care or, in some cases, simply avoid covering them at all. ... readers of introductory textbooks may be unintentionally misinformed on these topics.

The study authors — from Texas A&M and Stetson universities — gathered a stack of 24 popular introductory psych textbooks and began looking for coverage of 12 contested ideas or myths in psychology.

The ideas — like stereotype threat, the Mozart effect , and whether there’s a “narcissism epidemic” among millennials — have not necessarily been disproven. Nevertheless, there are credible and noteworthy studies that cast doubt on them. The list of ideas also included some urban legends — like the one about the brain only using 10 percent of its potential at any given time, and a debunked story about how bystanders refused to help a woman named Kitty Genovese while she was being murdered.

The researchers then rated the texts on how they handled these contested ideas. The results found a troubling amount of “biased” coverage on many of the topic areas.

But why wouldn’t these textbooks include more doubt? Replication, after all, is a cornerstone of any science.

One idea is that textbooks, in the pursuit of covering a wide range of topics, aren’t meant to be authoritative on these individual controversies. But something else might be going on. The study authors suggest these textbook authors are trying to “oversell” psychology as a discipline, to get more undergraduates to study it full time. (I have to admit that it might have worked on me back when I was an undeclared undergraduate.)

There are some caveats to mention with the study: One is that the 12 topics the authors chose to scrutinize are completely arbitrary. “And many other potential issues were left out of our analysis,” they note. Also, the textbooks included were printed in the spring of 2012; it’s possible they have been updated since then.

Recently, I asked on Twitter how intro psychology professors deal with inconsistencies in their textbooks. Their answers were simple. Some say they decided to get rid of textbooks (which save students money) and focus on teaching individual articles. Others have another solution that’s just as simple: “You point out the wrong, outdated, and less-than-replicable sections,” Daniël Lakens , a professor at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands, said. He offered a useful example of one of the slides he uses in class.

Anecdotally, Illinois State University professor Joe Hilgard said he thinks his students appreciate “the ‘cutting-edge’ feeling from knowing something that the textbook didn’t.” (Also, who really, earnestly reads the textbook in an introductory college course?)

And it seems this type of teaching is catching on. A (not perfectly representative) recent survey of 262 psychology professors found more than half said replication issues impacted their teaching . On the other hand, 40 percent said they hadn’t. So whether students are exposed to the recent reckoning is all up to the teachers they have.

If it’s true that textbooks and teachers are still neglecting to cover replication issues, then I’d argue they are actually underselling the science. To teach the “replication crisis” is to teach students that science strives to be self-correcting. It would instill in them the value that science ought to be reproducible.

Understanding human behavior is a hard problem. Finding out the answers shouldn’t be easy. If anything, that should give students more motivation to become the generation of scientists who get it right.

“Textbooks may be missing an opportunity for myth busting,” the Current Psychology study’s authors write. That’s, ideally, what young scientist ought to learn: how to bust myths and find the truth.

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7 easy science experiments gone terribly wrong, here are some funny examples of experiments that went very wrong..

Christopher McFadden

7 Easy Science Experiments Gone Terribly Wrong

MichalLudwiczak/iStock

Experimentation is both fun and highly educational. The vast majority of experiments are well designed and are completed without any problems.

But there are countless examples of times when experiments can, and do, go horribly wrong. You probably have some examples from your school days.

Here are 7 humourous, and thankfully harmless, examples of simple experiments that did not go to plan.

RELATED: 9 EASY SCIENCE EXPERIMENTS TO DO WITH YOUR KIDS BEFORE THE SUMMER ENDS

What are some easy science experiments?

We’ve already covered quite a few in the link above. But if you want some more examples of easy science experiments here are some you can easily do at home (credit to noguiltmom.com ): –

Light refraction with a water bottle.
Frozen Slime recipe.
Write Invisible Messages.
Edible Chocolate play dough.
Inverted balloon in a bottle.
Egg-drop experiment.

What errors can occur in an experiment?

Errors in experiments are something of an occupational hazard in science. Whatever can go wrong, usually does.

It is the job of an experimental practitioner to identify and eliminate any, and ideally all, errors that could possibly arise during their conduct of the experiment.

Errors may occur in the following areas, but not limited to (credit to businessdictionary.com ): –

Human errors during the experiment or during data entry following its completion,
Systematic or design flaws in the experiment itself,
Random, unforeseen errors introduced by environmental conditions or other unpredictable factors.

A good experiment design should seek to minimize experimental error, in order to produce the most accurate data possible.

What should you not do in a lab?

There are some basic things that should never be done in a research lab. In fact, there are many exhaustive guides, codes of conduct and health and safety regulations on just this subject.

But, generally speaking, the following are good-examples of no-no’s when working in a lab (courtesy of adastra.fit.edu) : –

Wearing open-toed shoes.
Keeping long hair down.
Eating or drinking.
Erasing data from your notebook.
Showing up late.
Forgetting to label samples or materials.
Incorrectly disposing of your materials.
Wearing shorts.

Examples of simple experiments that went horribly wrong

And so, without further ado, here are 7 simple experiments that did not go to plan. They really should’ve known better.

1. Exploding sheep lungs

One class experiment that went horribly wrong involves a bicycle pump and some sheep’s lungs . In the biology class, the teacher was showing their pupils the anatomy of the lungs.

On this particular day, the class was to dissect the lungs to examine their internal anatomy. But, the teacher had another ‘great’ idea, or so they thought.

They had decided to use a bicycle pump to show the class how the lungs look when the inflate and deflate. Unfortunately for the lungs, and the class in general, the teacher was a little overzealous with his pumping.

Within a short period of the time, the class, and classroom were showered in a gory blanket of sheep lung bits and old blood. We wonder how the teacher explained that one to the class’s parents.

2. More explosions – this time with potassium

In one chemistry class , the students were being told about chemical reactions – – especially with potassium and water. The teacher told the class that a very small amount of the metal will fizz and dance on the water surface.

Then she was called out of the classroom.

Inevitably one student decided to find out if she was right but wanted something of a more impressive result. The class clown grabbed a baked bean sized piece of potassium and threw it into a beaker full of water.

As you have probably already worked out, the result was indeed impressive. It exploded gloriously, sending chunks of water and broken glass in all directions.

Shocked, the class sat in silence for a few moments and then the smoke alarm went off. The entire class was evacuated to the playing fields.

3. “How high is too high”

Here’s another ‘simple’ experiment that went horribly wrong. At least, it could’ve been a lot worse.

A class of students was asked to conduct their own home experiments of their design. One student decided to find out how high was too high for something to fall.

It seems reasonable at first glance, but what did she decide to use as her test subject? Some fruit? An Egg?

No, apparently she was trying to find out the maximum height a human can safely fall – – as you do.

After starting out at reasonable heights, presumably, she pushed the experiment a little too far. What were her results?

The above image tells you all you need to know. Thankfully she managed to walk away with only a few broken bones and a bruised pride.

4. “Teats: An Exhaustive Comparative Study”

In yet another simple experiment that went wrong, this ingenious student had a brainwave . He decided to conduct an experiment to study the purpose and morphology of teats in various mammals.

His experiment started out reasonably enough by studying cows udders. However, being a teenage boy, he managed to shoehorn in the human female anatomy.

Using various pornographic magazines as his source material, it appears he was quite ‘thorough’ in his data gathering. We’d be interested to know the reaction of his parents and teacher.

But, more importantly, how did he rank at the science fair? Kudos for imagination.

5. “All that glitters is not gold”

In another simple experiment that went horribly wrong, a class was being told that gold can’t be dissolved in common acids . One student didn’t believe it and decided to find out for themselves.

They had recently gotten engaged and wanted to test the premise using her recently acquired 18k engagement ring. Dutifully the student bought themselves some sulfuric acid and dropped her gold ring into it.

It seems her fiance hadn’t been entirely honest with her, and the ring quickly began to dissolve in front of her very eyes. Shocked and surprised, she decided to try to rescue what was left of her ring before it was too late.

Thankfully, and much to the relief of her friends, she quickly came to her senses and left the ring to its fate.

This experiment could’ve gone a lot worse!

6. Countdown to destruction

As an accident investigator will tell you, most tragedies are the end result of a chain of, usually avoidable, events . This is epitomized by this next example of a simple experiment that went horribly wrong.

An undergraduate biology student recently recalled one such example during their days at university. In their third year, they managed to accidentally set a petri dish full of ethanol alight.

It seems simple enough to deal with apart from the fact that ethanol had been accidentally spilled over the paper bench cover prior to this event. Within seconds the entire bench was engulfed in flames.

Thankfully no one was hurt and the student actually graduated.

The moral of the story? Always clean up your workbench after spills!

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ABOUT THE EDITOR

Christopher McFadden Christopher graduated from Cardiff University in 2004 with a Masters Degree in Geology. Since then, he has worked exclusively within the Built Environment, Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Consultancy industries. He is a qualified and accredited Energy Consultant, Green Deal Assessor and Practitioner member of IEMA. Chris’s main interests range from Science and Engineering, Military and Ancient History to Politics and Philosophy.

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When experiments go wrong: the U.S. perspective

Affiliation.

1 World Health Organization, Geneva.
PMID: 15202353

The view that once prevailed in the U.S.--that research is no more dangerous than the activities of daily life--no longer holds in light of recent experience. Within the past few years, a number of subjects (including normal volunteers) have been seriously injured or killed in research conducted at prestigious institutions. Plainly, when we are talking about research going wrong, we're talking about something very important. We have seen that experiments can go wrong in several ways. Subjects can be injured--physically, mentally, or by having other interests violated. Investigators can commit fraud in data collection or can abuse subjects. And review mechanisms--such as IRBs--don't always work. The two major issues when research goes wrong in any of these ways are, first: What will be done for subjects who have suffered an injury or other wrong? and second: How will future problems be prevented? The present system in the U.S. is better at the second task than the first one. Part of the difficulty in addressing the first lies in knowing what "caused" an apparent injury. Moreover, since until recently the problem of research-related injuries was thought to be a small one, there was considerable resistance to setting up a non-fault compensation system, for fear that it would lead to payment in many cases where such compensation was not deserved. Now, with a further nudge from the NBAC there is renewed interest in developing a formal system to compensate for research injuries. Finally, I have tried to show that our system of local oversight is only partially effective in improving the design of experiments and the consent process in light of "unexpected (adverse) results." As many observers, including the federal General Accounting Office (GAO), have reported, the requirement for "continuing review" of approved research projects is the weak point in the IRB system. The probable solution would be to more strictly apply the requirement that investigators report back any adverse results, de-emphasizing the "screen" introduced by the present language about "unexpected" findings. Yet, despite its weaknesses, there are good aspects to the local basis of our oversight system, and when problems become severe enough, OHRP is likely to evaluate a system and insist on local improvements. Thus, while the U.S. system is far from perfect in responding when research goes wrong, our experience may be useful to others in crafting a system appropriate to their own circumstances. One of the major tasks will be to adequately define what triggers oversight--that is, who reports what to whom and when? The setting of this trigger needs to balance appropriate incentives and penalties. Any system, including our own, will, in my opinion, work much better once an accreditation process is in place, which will offer much more current and detailed information on how each IRB is functioning and what steps are needed to help avoid "experiments going wrong."

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From David Cronenberg's movie The Fly to the Marvel Comic, The Incredible Hulk, the world of fiction is full of science experiments going wrong. But experime...
7 Easy Science Experiments Gone Terribly Wrong
But, generally speaking, the following are good-examples of no-no's when working in a lab (courtesy of adastra.fit.edu): -. Wearing open-toed shoes. Keeping long hair down. Eating or drinking ...
A secret of science: Mistakes boost understanding
Learn how failure can change how you learn and propel you toward success in science. See examples of famous scientists who made mistakes and how they used them to advance their discoveries.
Investigations continue into science experiment gone wrong
Investigations are continuing into a school science experiment on Sydney's northern beaches that left 11 children and their teacher with burns. More From ABC NEWS. We acknowledge Aboriginal and ...
14 Experiments Gone Wrong
Have you heard about the psychologist who decided to raise his baby son alongside a chimpanzee? It didn't go exactly as planned. This episode of The List Sho...
When experiments go wrong: the U.S. perspective
We have seen that experiments can go wrong in several ways. Subjects can be injured--physically, mentally, or by having other interests violated. Investigators can commit fraud in data collection or can abuse subjects. And review mechanisms--such as IRBs--don't always work.
10 Science Experiments Gone HORRIBLY WRONG
These horrific science experiments will shock and disturb you! For this list, we'll be looking at experiments that caused large amounts of harm, went too far...
Worst Science Experiments Gone Wrong
Biographics: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClnDI2sdehVm1zm_LmUHsjQGeographics: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHKRfxkMTqiiv4pF99qGKIwWarographics: https...