To experiment is to acknowledge facts and prove them with practical data. All things considered, it can be understood that there were times in the past when the only thing being proven by certain experiments was the lack of humanity in people. Also, these experiments were being done directly or indirectly by the government. Moreover, it was clear that they did not give any importance to people’s physical, mental, or emotional well-being. Here are the 10 most horrifying experiments done by the government!

1 The Japanese Army performed experiments on men, women, children, and infants that involved horrifying surgeries without anesthesia.

Unit 731 was a covert warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army. It was set up in the 1930s by Surgeon General Shiro Ishii. Unit 731 undertook a number of lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) of World War II. Here vivisections were performed on thousands of prisoners of war after infecting them with various diseases. These surgeries were often performed without anesthesia. Researchers used to remove organs and used it to study the effects of disease on the human body. These were often conducted while the patients were alive.  To study syphilis, doctors performed forced sex between infected and non-infected prisoners. Then, they performed vivisection on infected victim. To study blood loss, limbs of the prisoners were amputated and reattached on opposite sides.

Another experiment conducted here was frostbite test in which captives were taken outside and certain limbs of their body were allowed to freeze. Once frozen, the ice was chipped away and the area doused in water. During this, the victim was bludgeoned to determine if any area was still frozen. Unit 371  also used human as a target for weapon testing. People were tied to stakes and then used as the target to test the effect of various bombs and other weapons.(source)

2 The Infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment was a study conducted by the US government. In this experiment, researchers knowingly failed to treat patients appropriately after the 1940s validation of penicillin as an effective cure for syphilis.

The Tuskegee syphilis experiment was done between 1932 and 1972 by the US Public Health Service in Macon County, Alabama. The main purpose of this experiment was to observe the natural progression of untreated syphilis in rural African-American men. This was done under the guise of receiving free health care from the United States government. Of these men, 399 had previously contracted syphilis before the study began. 201 did not have the disease. None of the men infected were ever told they had the disease. Also, none were treated with penicillin even after the antibiotic became proven for the treatment of syphilis.

By the end of the study in 1972, only 74 of the test subjects were alive. From the original 399 men, 28 had died of syphilis. Moreover, 100 were dead of related complications while 40 of their wives had been infected. Even so, the Tuskegee University Legacy Museum has a check issued by the United States government on display for this experiment.(source)

3 The US government conducted a project MKUltra where civilians were tortured in an attempt to figure out if people could be mind-controlled.

MKUltra project was organized through the Scientific Intelligence Division of the CIA. Furthermore, it was coordinated with the Special Operations Division of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Corps. The operation began in early the 1950s and was officially sanctioned in 1953. Experiments performed here were intended to develop drugs that can be used to force confessions through mind control. They attempted to make a perfect truth drug to interrogate spies with during the cold war. Besides this, other mind-controlling drugs were also being worked on. The experimentation was done on people without their knowledge. The Office of Security used LSD in interrogations, but Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist who directed MKUltra, believed that its effects were temporary. Since he realized there was a difference in testing the drug in a laboratory, he initiated a series of experiments where LSD was given to people in “normal” settings without warning.

In 1973, with the government-wide panic caused by Watergate, the CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKUltra files destroyed. Therefore, making a full investigation of MKUltra impossible.(source)

4 During the Second World War, the German Nazis experimented on prisoners in attempts to quickly multiply the German race. 

Human experimentation by the Nazis was done from 1943 to 1944 on prisoners in Auschwitz. The infamous Dr. Josef Mengele wanted to find a way to quickly multiply the German race. So, he experimented on twins in an effort to learn the secrets of multiple births. Experiments performed by Mengele on twins included unnecessary amputation of limbs or intentionally infecting one twin with typhus or other diseases, and transfusing the blood of one twin into the other. Many of the victims died while undergoing these procedures. When twins were of no more use to Mengele, he’d dispatch subjects with an injection of chloroform straight to the heart. He experimented on 1,000 pairs of twins. Roughly 200 survived those experiments.(1,2)

5 Human experimentation was done at Camp 22 in North Korea involving gas chambers. Also, there was an experiment where 50 healthy female prisoners were selected and forced to consume poisoned cabbage leaves.

Camp 22 was founded around 1965. It was located in Hoeryong county, North Hamgyong province, in northeast North Korea. According to Lee Soon-ok, a former prison guard of Camp 22, fifty women were selected for an experiment. All the selected women were required to eat the poisoned cabbage, despite cries of distress from those who had already eaten. Also, refusing to eat the cabbage would allegedly have meant reprisals against them and their families. Consequently, all 50 died after 20 minutes of vomiting blood and anal bleeding.

Additionally, laboratories at camp 22 were equipped with gas chambers for suffocation gas experiments, in which three or four people, normally a family, were the experimental subjects. After undergoing medical checks, the chambers are sealed, and poison is injected through a tube while scientists observe from above through glass.(1,2)