Stuff You Should Know - How Human Experimentation Works

Episode Date: December 31, 2009

Human experimentation is an age-old practice, dating back to 4 BCE. Listen in as Josh and Chuck give you the low-down on the historic, grisly underbelly of science and medicine -- human experimentation. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com Sometimes science goes too far. Dark Matters, twisted but true, Wednesdays at 10 on Science. You know growing up watching the little claymation, happy new year baby thing, the baby new year, remember with the huge ears? Oh, that's what I was just talking about.

That was like the little claymation. Like Rudolph? Yeah, but there was one for new years and it was the baby that had the huge ears when he took his hat off, his ears would pop out and everyone would chastise him. What did it sound like when he took his ears out? Was it like that? It sounded like actually, but I always felt bad because I thought it was a cute little claymation baby.

Yeah, but was that the crux of it that like he just had big ears and everybody laughed at him? Yeah, I can't remember how it ended. He finally found a home or something. I don't know. You're good because there's nothing sadder than a homeless baby on New Year's. Yeah, with big ears. Chuck?

Josh, have you ever heard of Herophilus? I have. Okay. You want to talk a bit about Herophilus? Sure. Journey back to fourth century BC or as you like to say BCE. Yeah. The New B.C.

Right. He was the, he's known as the father of anatomy. Yeah. And one of the ways that he became known as the father of anatomy was by dissecting, vivisecting live human beings. Yes. Live, well, I was about to say a live cadaver, but a cadaver is dead. Sure.

So live human, human patients dissecting for science while they were in pain. They were criminals, right? Many times, yes. So we're talking about human experimentation and we're basing this on an article written by the fine esteemed writer Robert Lamb and he starts out page zero with this account of Herophilus cutting through the eyeball of a guy who is strapped to a table and I guess something stuffed in his mouth to muffle the screams, but his eyeball is being dissected in front of a group of surgeons by Herophilus.

Can I read this one line? Yeah, please do. Once more, the master pot's flesh enters the bloody maze of arteries and muscle. I know. We should have gotten R.L. in here to read it himself. Yeah, that's good stuff. So yeah, apparently this guy that Robert's writing about this victim was one of more than 600 that were vivisected at the hands of Herophilus over the course of his lifetime,

right? Yes. For alive prisoners. So that's kind of sickening, it is horrific. But it was apparently par for the course, right? Yeah, at the time, sure. So all these people, why would you dissect a live person or vivisect a live person? I think it's dissect if it's dead and vivisect if they're alive.

Is it? I believe so. Well, I mean, there's reasons for it. You wouldn't want to justify it, but they were doing that because sometimes you just need a human to perform an experiment on and sometimes a cadaver doesn't do the job and before they were scruples, they would, you know, do it on a live person instead of like an animal test. Right.

Apparently back in Herophilus' age also they thought that air was carried in the circulatory system rather than blood, which is weird because if you vivisect a person, blood comes out. Sure. Although I imagine air does too, since you can't see it, they're like, oh, it's air. This is just something. And this guy's the father of anatomy? He is.

Here's the big ironic twist. All of his writings, all the notes he took, all the scholarly works he created based on the deaths or the intolerable pain experienced by these 600 people were all lost when the library of Alexandria burned in 272 AD. Rapidly devolving to a sound effect show. Yeah. So should we tell people what that is? Sure.

Jerry got us a little gift for Christmas, a little sound machine. And the funny thing is that she asked us to keep it on the DL and we just told 100,000 people. Yeah. Yeah. The other funny thing is she actually said we could use it. I thought she was going to say, well, here, but you can never use this. Right.

Yeah. And she encouraged us to use it as well. Right. So the idea of somebody writhing under the knife while a guy like Herophilus or anybody else with a sharp object cuts his eyeball open to examine the nerves inside is a pretty horrific idea. Indeed. And the problem is, is this kind of thing didn't end in AD 272?

No. It continued on. Apparently, history is littered with human experimentation. Yes, so much so that there were body snatching problems in the 19th century because medical schools needed bodies. Right. You couldn't, in the 19th century, by the 19th century, you couldn't vivisect anybody. You weren't supposed to.

And also because of the puritanical ideals, you couldn't do any kind of dissection on cadavers. You're right. Now, of course you can. Right. Which is a good move. And there was a lot of grave robbing going on to supply the medical schools who still needed this knowledge and wanted it and were willing to pay grave robbers for it.

Yeah, big time. Do you remember back in 1989 when they found some bones, actually 9,800 bones in the basement of Medical College of Georgia? Really? Yeah. Did not know that. Yeah, they dated back to the 19th century and they were linked to robbed graves. Wow.

Yeah. That's crazy. Isn't it? Well, you know, that's if you're dealing with cadavers. There also, if you wanted to experiment on a live living thing, then you would now have to go the route of chimps and rabbits and mice, rats. Right. Which actually, what we've done from what I understand is, with human experimentation,

we've put lower, I'm making air quotes here, lower species in between us and initial discovery. Right? The problem was, back in the day though, they did the same thing, but they considered lower species other humans. Specifically convicts. Yeah, or poor and destitute, diseased. Right. Exactly.

But convicts for sure. Convicts have pretty much always gotten it pretty bad as far as human experimentation goes. But yeah, so these days we do put rabbits and rats and chimps and macaques in between us and not knowing what a drug will do or something like that, but really ultimately it still ends up to humans. And one of the reasons why is because you can't, we don't even know whether or not animals experience happiness.

How could we figure out if they're hallucinating? Yeah, you sure. They can't self-report. Yeah, you gotta ask questions every now and then. Right. And then also, I mean, if you're making a drug for humans, you eventually have to find out exactly what it does to a human. Right.

It's not gonna have the same effect on a rat, although it'll probably be close. Yeah. And we'll get into that in a minute. All right. Should we talk about some of the horrific things that have happened throughout our history, Josh? Well, don't forget the, hold on. There's another, there's another route you could take.

Oh yeah. I know it. Self-experimentation. Yes. Living, you're living self-experimenting on yourself. Which I mean, there have been some famous examples of this. Yes, famously Pierre and Mary Curie earned a Nobel Prize in physics for radiation research. Yeah.

And they did this by taping radium salts to their skin and seeing what happened. Right. So that's one way to do it. Another guy who famously tried his research out on himself is Albert Hoffman. Oh, really? The guy who created LSD. Right. And apparently he had a diary where he writes about his bike ride home after injecting

himself with LSD. And he had no bike. Right. No, he had a bike, but he was like, wow, nothing is real. And I really feel like listening to Pink Floyd right now. Right. Yeah. The yet to be discovered Pink Floyd.

The yet to be born, I think, even. So Chuck, self-experimentation has its own flaws, right? Of course. If you're vivisecting an eyeball and you do it to yourself, you can't do that more than once. No. You probably wouldn't even do it that one time. So really, there is a lot to be gained from vivisecting human beings.

We don't do it. And one of the reasons why is because it's horrific. So yes, let's talk about some of the horrific human experiments that litter history. Jay Marion Sims. Is that a name ring a bell? No. That is considered to be the father of gynecology. Oh, yeah, Jay Marion Sims.

And he even became the president of the AMA in 1876. But he developed experimental surgeries by testing them on African slaves many times without anesthesia. Yeah. Dark side for sure, man. Yeah, I would definitely call that a dark side. Yeah, he gets lauded probably in many circles still today. He does.

Apparently, that was, we think of the Nazis especially, and we'll talk about them in a minute. But the U.S. has a really shady history of human experimentation. A guy named Dr. Leo Stanley injected prisoners at San Quentin with animal testes to slow or reverse aging, which did not work out. Yeah. 1906. Yeah.

Cholera experiments on the Philippines conducted by us. Uh-huh. 1915, Pelagra experiments in Mississippi. Right. And apparently, we were talking about how prisoners have always gotten a bad rap. Up until the 1970s, in the United States, pretty much all pharmaceuticals were tested on convicts. Yeah.

So you did not want to break a law. No. I wonder, you know how people harken back to like the golden age when there was less crime and less violence and all that? Right, sure. I wonder how much of it had to do with the fact that if you went to prison like you would be experimented on. Yeah.

If you did not do that though, it probably wasn't widely reported until you get to prison, then you're like, oh, oops. Yeah, that's, yeah. Had I known. Right. But I imagine recidivism rates, what a, that's a bonehead word. Yeah. Uh, were pretty low.

Yeah, you're probably right. So Chuck, you know, also the United States was huge into compulsory sterilization, right? I did not know that. The eugenics movement. Oh, okay. So, uh, between, I guess the early 1900s, the first decade of the 20th century, up until the 70s, I think maybe even 1981, uh, 64,000 people in the United States were sterilized against their will.

Wow. Like Epileptics, the mentally handicapped, the blind, deaf, mute, um, Schizophrenics, and Native Americans. Right. Against their will sometimes unknowingly. Unbelievable. Yeah. Which you could, that's not necessarily an experiment because you know exactly what's

going to happen. The prison's going to be sterilized. Yeah, true. But, um, if you look at it as eugenics, it is kind of a larger experiment to basically create a great race. Right. And then the eugenics, the popularity, I mean, it was well known this was going on. This was in a secret government program.

Right. Like MKUltra. Right. And there was public support for it until World War II, which remember, uh, actually can you remember to the future? Yes. When we talk about mercenaries. Right, right.

World War II changed everything. It did. The Nazis really led the way when it comes to human experimentation, um, as everyone knows against, uh, the Jews, Gypsies, anyone they felt like targeting, they would do things like freezing them to research hypothermia. And that actually came, that became huge later. Their hypothermia research is like really used though. Yeah.

Well, and we'll get into the ethics of that. Okay. Uh, they put them in a compression chambers to test the effects of high altitude flight. Which it doesn't get much worse than that. And sterilization experiments as well, like the U.S. was doing. They would use a phosphorus, incendiary phosphorus devices to figure out how to treat phosphorus burns. Uh, Japan was another country.

Yeah. Their, uh, unit 731, very famous unit reportedly killed more than 10,000 Chinese, Korean and Russian, uh, POWs to develop biological weapons and test the stuff out on them, basically. Right. Um, so the Nazis in particular, uh, faced the music at Nuremberg, right? Oh yeah. Um, and there was this, uh, part to the Nuremberg trials called the Doctors' Trials. Uh, and I think, uh, a bunch of the guys, like 17 were convicted and most of them I think

were hanged. Really? Yeah. Um, and a lot of these guys' cases were, we didn't break any laws. There's no lawful outline of what to do when you're experimenting on a human. Right. And a lot of this stuff followed the same kind of protocol that, uh, we had before the war.

Right? And it was just horrendous, but in a lot of cases it was actually true, right? Sure. So one of the results of the Nuremberg trial was the Nuremberg Code where the international community said, all right, we need to outline some, some guidelines for human experimentation. Right. And it, I think there's like 10 points to it, 10 large overviews, uh, to human experimentation guidelines.

It focuses on, um, reducing, uh, fear and pain and discomfort in the experiment subjects. They can't be coerced. It has to be willing. They have to be informed. What's this covered by? What's that under? Do you know, like what document or organization that's under? I don't know.

Probably the UN. Okay. I would think the UN would have something to do with that. Yeah, you would think so. But yes, but it's very famous. It's called the Nuremberg Code, right? And it solves like the moral quandary, uh, jealousy, um, extreme measures. Gene Hackman, Hugh Grant.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So you know, like in the, and I think they're in a sewer somehow, Gene Hackman's like, if you had to kill one to save a million, wouldn't you have to do it? And so the Nuremberg Code solves that and the answer, by the way is no, you wouldn't kill one. Yeah.

That's the old, the age old question though. Right. Kill one to save many. Which is a very utilitarian view of, of looking at things like, yes, you kill one person to save a million. Of course you do. But we, uh, as an international collective have decided that you don't do that. One person's life is worth as much as a million people's potential lives.

Right. So that brings us to the real quandary though with human experimentation is what do you do with this information that is gained from these awful, awful experiments? Right. Um, a lot of detractors will say that to use this information supports human experimentation. Right. And another way of looking at it is to propose, like kind of do a thought experiment of, all right, let's say that you are, you walk in on one of these experiments and you say,

your death is inevitable and it's going to be a painful, horrible death, but you can choose whether or not this data that was, that your results from your death is suppressed or used. Right. Which one do you want? Well, yeah. You know, the most people would say, well, if I'm going to die anyway, I would want this data to be used.

That's the argument the other side uses. Yeah. The U.S. cut a little deal though with you, 731. I know. We, we're, it's such, we have such a shady history like we use Nazi scientists to get us to the moon. Well, this was particularly to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. So we thought, hey, rather than give that to the Russians, unit 731, let's cut a deal

where the officer is responsible for this good immunity from prosecution and war crimes and we get the data and we'll even give you a little stipend. Yeah. On the side. That's funny. Yeah. That probably wasn't reported. Way to come up with those biological weapons.

Nicely done. Right. Like we said, the, the Nazi hypothermia experiments, which were pretty brutal, apparently, the, they would put you in an icy vat of water. Right. With a thermometer in your rectum and they found that most people died or went unconscious and died around when their body temperature hit 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Right.

Yeah. It's such useful information, but no, the useful information came in. They were looking for ways to revive people suffering from hypothermia because the Germans were losing so many people on the Eastern front in Germany that they, they actually did figure out ways of quickly reviving people suffering from hypothermia. So hypotherm, post-war hypothermia researchers are like, dude, these people as ghastly as these experiments are, they figured out how to revive people suffering from hypothermia. We need that information.

Right. Like with, with that, I guess that group leading the charge, Nazi data has been used in a lot of ways, but then there, it should be cited, I think, was the compromise that they came up with. Right. Yeah. And it actually worked the other way too. Jewish doctors would later study victims of starvation in the ghetto, in the Warsaw

Ghetto. Right, yeah. And they used that to aid in the study of hunger-associated disease. Right. So they found a way to, to use it at least. Right. And so we were talking also about how the U.S. has a nice long history of horrible stuff, like the Tuskegee experiments.

You want to talk about that? Yes. A 40-year study of a syphilis began in 1932, and they use African-Americans who sought treatment for this disease, and they basically straight up lied and deceived them, thinking they were being treated. Right. They, they actually didn't use any kind of medical intervention because they wanted to watch the progression of syphilis.

Yeah, they wanted to see it gets worse, and so they could chart everything out, and they had no idea. And then I guess finally in 1994, no, 1997, the U.S. issues a public apology for, for this. Right. And there's still some people alive who were experimented on. Unbelievable. Yeah.

And you know, we've, we've documented the LSD experiments that unsuspecting Americans were dosed in the MKUltra project, we did a whole show on that, didn't we? Yeah. That was a good one. Of course. Yeah, it was like our best one. It was one of the best ones. Didn't we?

Did you forget? Well, it was a long time ago, man. Yeah. Well, you were kind of out of it if you remember the beginning of that one. Uh, was I? Yeah. Oh, that's right. Yeah.

We did a role-playing. So Chuck, there was kind of a huge sea change in the way that human experimentation was looked at and carried out when the FDA was established in the 30s. Yeah. All of a sudden there were review boards and panels. The universities kind of stepped in and said, all right, we play a big role in this. We're going to start establishing stricter oversight of human experimentation. And that's kind of the course that we've followed since then, right?

Yeah, they're called drug trials. Drug trials, exactly. You know any human guinea pigs? No, I've never done it. But, um, you know, phase one drug trials is usually where you'll get the most folks because you need healthy, healthy individuals. Right. And they're willing to risk their health for money.

And basically what they're doing in these phase one trials are, you know, when you see these commercials that rattle off a hundred side effects that are positively frightening, they get these from giving these, uh, these medications to people and seeing what happens. Right. Yeah. Robert Lam put it really well. He said that, uh, if your bottle of medication says that it might result in bowel control problems or suicidal thoughts, you can bet that someone received a paycheck for experiencing

them at some point. Yeah, exactly. That's what they know. Yeah. So that's phase one. Phase two deals with dosing and efficiency. And phase three enlists actual patients who need this treatment. Right.

Not, not healthy people. And people who volunteer for phase one clinical trials are, uh, handsomely paid, depending on the risk involved. That's one of the problems. Yeah. And I mean, it's kind of like a vacation you're, you're fed and you're put up maybe in a hotel or the hospital room has, um, like a video game console, you watch movies or whatever. They just shoot you full of something and then come in like every 15 minutes or hour

or whatever and say, you know, like, have you seen that leprechaun you were talking to earlier again, you know, that kind of stuff. But that's one of the problems is that some of these folks bounce from experiment to experiment and you know, kind of make a half ass living off of this. Right. I guess you can. I mean, especially if you're dedicated. And he talks about lamb talks about a, uh, an article in the New Yorker that is about,

it's called guinea pigging, I believe, and it's about the soap culture of clinical drug trial participants who have their own like publications that show like who's, what upcoming drug trials are in the pipeline and how much they're going to pay and that kind of stuff. So there's a concern that like, yeah, these people are kind of hooked on this lifestyle. My thing is, is like to each his own, sure, you know, yeah, I mean, if they're, if there are no laws being broken and they're getting paid and they're willing to do this instead of going to get a job delivering pizzas, then, uh, you know, good on you. Frankly, if they can get my pizza to me and stay safe, not harm other people and deliver

a delicious pizza still, I don't care if they're in the midst of a drug trial right then. Here's another thing I didn't know that I thought was interesting in this article is that they kind of put the, uh, pedal to the metal when it comes to these trials because a US drug patent only lasts for 20 years. And so if you're hung up for a decade and research and testing, which can happen, then they don't start it over once you get it approved. You've got only 10 years left to make, you know, serious money, so they speed these things

along. They do. Now, if you're running it through a university, they generally have, well, universities have a, um, a reputation for being total sticklers when it comes to, um, institutional review boards, right? Right. Um, so as a result, I think that a lot of drug companies have found that if you run it instead through a private organization that does the clinical trials for you, then all

of a sudden you can walk around a lot of these ethical guidelines or, you know, safe conditions and yet again outsourcing to private contractors for money. It's, uh, just, it's the way to get around things. Exactly. It's awful. So that's medical experimentation. There's a, this is a really cool article. It's slightly outside of the how stuff works voice.

Robert Lam put his all in all into it. He put his lamb stamp on it. He did. Yeah. At the very least you got to read page zero and I defy you to just read page zero. Yeah. For those of you out there, page zero is really page one. We just, that's the insider lingo here.

And we still, Chuck and I have worked here for more than two years and we've still never figured out why they call it page zero. I have no idea. So if you want to read page zero of how human experimentation works, you can type in human experimentation in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com and I guess you can say that that leads us to listener mail. Yes Josh, this is about narco states. I remember narco states.

I'm going to call it narco state email. This is from Krister who actually had to write Krister back and say you're a boy or a girl because I'd never heard that name and Krister's a dude. So Krister says, I currently live in Juarez, Mexico. What? Yeah, exactly because we covered Juarez pretty thoroughly. Yeah. It is sad to stand out as a dangerous narco zone rather than being recognized for a decent

achievement but things here are indeed pretty crazy, murders are super high and I've tragically lost some friends throughout the year as if this wasn't enough, even the government is messing with this as I had an experience last July. My parents happened on a clothing shop and we were asked by some federal agents to give out a big amount of money, $250,000 US dollars. Just because of course my family refused to do so, a week later they came with an order to close and empty my parents shop and locked up my dad. We gave a smaller amount just so he was released and we thought it was just in there but to

our surprise a month later we were surrounded by about 20 agents holding an apprehension order to take both of my parents, charging them for supposedly commercializing pirated clothing which was a trumped up charge. Good Lord. I was left alone with my three younger brothers for more than three months until the agent on top agreed to let them out of prison for $50,000 and the case was closed. It's a sick experience and thank God it was finally over. Throughout those three months of grief you guys were right there with me and you were

a nice distraction from my awful situation at a time that was clearly troubling and I want to thank you for that. It probably doesn't mean the same to you guys but it was helpful in some way for me. I no longer want to live in this place and I'm just looking forward to moving to the US as soon as possible. All bet. I know. So we just wanted to share this and say Merry Christmas.

So we had some angry people write in by the way about me saying we should just drop the borders and let anyone in and I just want to say to those folks, think about people like Christa here who are just dying to get to the United States because of stuff like this and the US represents something great to them and we shouldn't forget that. So I'm on my high horse and now I'm getting off of it. Thanks, Joe. Do we have a horse effect now? Let's see.

We've got something close to it and that would be weird. If you have an email about escaping certain death, being extorted by the Mexican military or any kind of unjust story, right, yeah, you can send it in an email to StuffPodcast at wait. Happy New Year, everybody. Yeah. Happy New Year. Be safe.

Christa, are we glad you're alive? Yes. We're glad everybody who made it through 2009 made it through 2009 at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more howstuffworks? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready.

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