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What are some of the best-known experiments performed on humans?
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When was the first human experiment done?
Numerous experiments which are performed on human test subjects in the United States are considered unethical, because they are performed without the knowledge or informed consent of the test subjects. Such tests have been performed throughout American history, but some of them are ongoing.
- The Smallpox Experiment
- The Tuskegee Experiment
- Henrietta Lacks
- The Milgram Experiment
- The Bystander Effect
- The Stanford Prison Experiment
- Growth Hormone Therapy
The earliest known human experimentation was done in 1796 by English physician Edward Jenner, famous for developing the world’s first vaccine. As a country doctor, Jenner was aware of the fact that milkmaids rarely caught smallpox. However, since they were in frequent contact with cows, they often contracted cowpox. Jenner speculated that cowpox pr...
In 1932, scientists at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama started studying the natural progression of syphilis, a disease that represented a major health problem at the time. Six hundred black men were enrolled in the project that lasted for four decades; two-third of them had the disease. The subjects of the study, officially known as the Tuskegee ...
Henrietta Lacks was a poor and uneducated African American tobacco farmer from Baltimore, Maryland with cervical cancer. In 1951, scientists at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital collected cells from her tissue sample without her knowledge. Henrietta’s cells, nicknamed HeLa cells, soon became invaluable in medical research. These were the first cel...
In 1961, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram carried out what has become one of the best-known studies of obedience in psychology. Milgram conducted a series of experiments to determine to what extent people are willing to obey instructions that involve harming others. Participants in Milgram’s experimentwere asked to be "teachers" to a gr...
When 28-year-old Kitty Genovese was killed outside her apartment in New York City in 1964, it was reported that none of her neighbors stepped in to assist or call the police. A few years later, social psychologists Bibb Latane and John Darley decided to do a series of experiments to demonstrate this psychological phenomenon known as the bystander e...
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo was the author of the infamous 1971 social psychology experimentthat investigated the psychological effects of perceived power. Zimbardo was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to their personality traits or was mostly situational and had to do with the priso...
The human growth hormone (hGH) was originally made available in the late 1950s to treat hormone-deficient children who would otherwise remain extremely short. Until the 1980s, only children lacking the hGH were eligible to receive the treatment. With the rise of genetic engineering, however, the hormone has become more readily available. At the Nat...
- A Class Divided. Study Conducted By: Jane Elliott. Study Conducted in 1968 in an Iowa classroom. Experiment Details: Jane Elliott’s famous experiment was inspired by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
- Asch Conformity Study. Study Conducted by: Dr. Solomon Asch. Study Conducted in 1951 at Swarthmore College. Experiment Details: Dr. Solomon Asch conducted a groundbreaking study that was designed to evaluate a person’s likelihood to conform to a standard when there is pressure to do so.
- Bobo Doll Experiment. Study Conducted by: Dr. Alburt Bandura. Study Conducted between 1961-1963 at Stanford University. Experiment Details: During the early 1960s a great debate began regarding the ways in which genetics, environmental factors, and social learning shaped a child’s development.
- Car Crash Experiment. Study Conducted by: Elizabeth Loftus and John Palmer. Study Conducted in 1974 at The University of California in Irvine. Experiment Details: Loftus and Palmer set out to prove just how deceiving memories can be.
- The Prison Doctor Who Did Testicular Transplants. From 1913 to 1951, eugenicist Leo Stanley was the chief surgeon at San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest correctional institution.
- The Oncologist Who Injected Cancer Cells Into Patients and Prisoners. During the 1950s and 1960s, Sloan-Kettering Institute oncologist Chester Southam conducted research to learn how people’s immune systems would react when exposed to cancer cells.
- The Aptly Named ‘Monster Study’ Pioneering speech pathologist Wendell Johnson suffered from severe stuttering that began early in his childhood. His own experience motivated his focus on finding the cause, and hopefully a cure, for stuttering.
- The Dermatologist Who Used Prisoners As Guinea Pigs. One of the biggest breakthroughs in dermatology was the invention of Retin-A, a cream that can treat sun damage, wrinkles, and other skin conditions.
- Mustard Gas Tested on American Military. Image Source In 1943, the U.S. Navy exposed its own sailors to mustard gas. Officially, the Navy was testing the effectiveness of new clothing and gas masks against the deadly gas that had proven so terrifying in the first World War.
- Radioactive Materials in Pregnant Women. Image Source Shortly after World War II, with the impending Cold War forefront on the minds of Americans, many medical researchers were preoccupied with the idea of radioactivity and chemical warfare.
- Unit 731. Image Source From 1937 to 1945, the imperial Japanese Army developed a covert biological and chemical warfare research experiment called Unit 731.
- Nazi Human Experimentation. Image Source Over the course of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, Nazi Germany conducted a series of medical experiments on Jews, POWs, Romani, and other persecuted groups.
Jan 9, 2019 · Historic examples of human experimentation include wartime atrocities by Nazi doctors that tested the limits of human survival. Another led to the creation of the hepatitis B vaccine prototype....
Unethical human experimentation is human experimentation that violates the principles of medical ethics. Such practices have included denying patients the right to informed consent, using pseudoscientific frameworks such as race science, and torturing people under the guise of research.
