Our Darkest History: Government Experiments On Vulnerable Populations in the Name of Science

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to know that governments operate quietly. Decades later, if even then, we find out about experiments, trials, and top secrets so shocking that they are hard to believe. Here, we've found seven of them.

Experimentation and studies are a lot harder to publish and perform today, but for a good reason. Before you can create and pursue a study, you need to make sure it's ethical. This includes gaining informed consent.

Before these rules were set in stone, people, mainly minorities and marginalized groups, suffered. Many studies used people of color, orphans, and disabled people.

So, what are some weird and shocking government experiments to know? Click through the slideshow to find out. For these experiments, we used sources like the National Institutes of Health, the BBC, Physicians for Human Rights, and official government sites.

We've come a long way since the 1920s and 30s. Now, there are ethical rules you have to follow when creating and doing an experiment. One of these principles is that you need consent. Well, consent wasn't given during the Monster Study of 1939.

In this experiment, Wendell Johnson and Mary Tudor conducted a study on 22 orphan children. However, these children had no idea it was a study. They were then split into groups where they'd get negative or positive feedback on their communication skills. They were divided by who stuttered and who didn't. The study noted that the children who didn't stutter initially, but were criticized and told they had a stutter, were affected very negatively. One child even refused to talk after being scolded for her supposed stutter.

Some of the most horrific experiments happened to prisoners serving time, without their consent. A prime example of this is the Agent Orange Experiments and those that went on in Holmesburg Prison.

For over 20 years, quietly and without repercussions, Dr. Albert Kligman performed experiments on incarcerated men in Pennsylvania's Holmesburg Prison, many of whom were Black men. Hundreds of men from the 1950s joined the experiments and were injected, slathered, and ingested chemicals and products. The Dow Chemical Company even commissioned a test where the inmates were exposed to the poison dioxin, which is used in Agent Orange. Apart from this, Johnson & Johnson also commissioned a test, which led to the test subjects being injected with asbestos.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study wasn't weird, just cruel. This wasn't an experiment done by a mad scientist or a rogue student. Oh, no. It was a joint effort by the United States Public Health Service (PHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Between 1932 and 1972, about 400 African American men were experimented on. Some had syphilis, while the ones that didn't acted as a control group. Well, the study was done to observe what would happen if people weren't treated. As you can imagine, it was painful, complicated, and led to death. The study wasn't going to stop, either. The only reason it did was because a report was leaked that about 128 people had died in the study. On top of this, 40 of the patients' wives were infected, and 19 babies were born with congenital syphilis. Honestly, a whole article or hundreds could be written about this terrible experiment/study. If you have the time, read more into it!

Another ethically messed-up experiment that will leave your jaw on the floor is the Cincinnati Radiation Experiments. From 1960 to 1971, about 90 patients at the Cincinnati General Hospital with advanced cancer were experimented on.

During the experiments, Eugene L. Saenger and his team exposed the cancer patients to heavy amounts of radiation to see how it would affect their bodies. In the first month, 21 patients died. So, what does this have to do with the government? Well, the experiments were funded by the Defense Atomic Support Agency within the Department of Defense. The study was hidden and forgotten until the 1990s, when families of the patients filed a class-action lawsuit.

Have you ever heard of Project Pigeon? Well, get ready to. These experiments were weird, bizarre, and yet interesting.

During World War II, B.F. Skinner attempted to condition and train pigeons - yes, those pigeons - to act as pilots and guide bombs. Pigeons have excellent memories and are very smart, which is why Skinner chose them for the experiments. In the experiments, the pigeons were shown pictures of the target. They would have to peck over and over again to get a small amount of food. Although interesting, the experiments didn't go far as they were cancelled on October 8, 1944.

This was a devastating and damaging experiment by Gregory Pincus and John Rock. In 1955, the two completed birth control experiments in Puerto Rico, targeting young women. Although it sounds alright on paper, the women were never informed of the risks or potential complications, including infertility.

Although the experiment was considered successful, there were women left with longstanding side effects. There were also a lot of ethical questions raised because of the experiments. For instance, why did the two decide on a territory with poor and uneducated residents as opposed to somewhere on the mainland?

This is another experiment that is cruel and bizarre. MKUltra was a super-secret project by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). During this project, from 1953 to 1973, the U.S. experimented on soldiers, giving them different chemicals in hopes of creating a type of truth serum.

The purpose of MKUltra was to identify drugs that could be used to weaken people during interrogations so they would confess. As in most past experiments, none of the subjects consented fully. The subjects were given high dosages of LSD while also being subjected to torture methods like isolation, sexual abuse, electroshock, and hypnosis. In other experiments, subjects were given heroin, morphine, and sodium pentothal.