History of experiments in humans and animals

HISTORY OF EXPERIMENTS IN
HUMANS AND ANIMALS
Department of bioethics
By,
Al auf Jalaludeen
CRIMEAN FEDERAL UNIVERSITY NAMED AFTER V.I. VERNADSKY

HISTORY OF ANIMAL TESTING
• The history of animal testing goes back to the writings of
the Greeks in the 4th and 3rd centuries BCE, with Aristotle (384–
322 BCE) and Erasistratus (304–258 BCE) among the first to
perform experiments on living animals. Galen, a physician in 2nd-
century Rome, dissected pigs and goats, and is known as the
"father of vivisection. Avenzoar, an Arabic physician in 12th-
century Moorish Spain who also practiced dissection, introduced
animal testing as an experimental method of testing surgical
procedures before applying them to human patients.

BASIC SCIENCE ADVANCES
• In the 1660s, the physicist Robert Boyle conducted many experiments
with a pump to investigate the effects of rarified air. He listed two
experiments on living animals: "Experiment 40," which tested the ability
of insects to fly under reduced air pressure, and the dramatic
"Experiment 41," which demonstrated the reliance of living creatures on
air for their survival. Boyle conducted numerous trials during which he
placed a large variety of different animals, including birds, mice, eels,
snails and flies, in the vessel of the pump and studied their reactions as
the air was removed.

• In the 18th century, Antoine Lavoisier, used a guinea pig in a calorimeter to prove
that respiration was a form of combustion, and Stephen Hales measured blood pressure in
thehorse.
• In the 1780s, Luigi Galvani demonstrated that electricity applied to a dead, dissected, frog's leg
muscle caused it to twitch, which led to an appreciation for the relationship between electricity
and animation.
• In the 1880s, Louis Pasteur convincingly demonstrated the germ theory of medicine by
giving anthrax to sheep. In the 1890s, Ivan Pavlovfamously used dogs to describe classical
conditioning.
• In 1921 Otto Loewi provided the first strong evidence that neuronal communication with target
cells occurred via chemical synapses. He extracted two hearts from frogs and left them beating
in an ionic bath. He stimulated the attached Vagus nerve of the first heart, and observed its
beating slowed. When the second heart was placed in the ionic bath of the first, it also slowed

MEDICAL ADVANCES
• In the 1880s and 1890s, Emil von Behring isolated the diphtheria toxin and
demonstrated its effects in guinea pigs. He went on to demonstrate immunity
against diphtheria in animals in 1898 by injecting a mix of toxin and antitoxin.
• In 1921, Frederick Banting tied up the pancreatic ducts of dogs, and discovered
that the isolates of pancreatic secretion could be used to keep dogs with diabetes
alive. He followed up these experiments with chemical isolation of insulin in 1922
with John Macleod
• In the 1940s, Jonas Salk used Rhesus monkey cross-contamination studies to
isolate the three forms of the polio virus that affected hundreds of thousands
yearly.

• The non-human primate models of AIDS, using HIV-2, SHIV, and SIV in
macaques, have been used as a complement to ongoing research efforts against
the virus.
• Throughout the 20th century, research that used live animals has led to many
other medical advances and treatments for human diseases, such as: organ
transplant techniques and anti-transplant rejection medications, the heart-lung
machine, antibiotics like penicillin, and whooping cough vaccine.
• Presently, animal experimentation continues to be used in research that aims to
solve medical problems from Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord
injury, and many more conditions in which there is no useful in vitro model
system available.

HISTORY OF HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION
• From surgeries without anesthesia to clinical trials performed overseas, the
history of human experimentation is riddled with stomach-turning moments.
• The path to the modern understanding of medicine was paved with the
misfortune of many people subjected to medical testing without their consent.
• Prisoners, soldiers, the poor, and the mentally ill have historically born the
brunt of misguided medical testing. (Among the worst was live dissection
without anesthesia.)
• While these atrocities did not go unpunished, some led to medical discoveries
that saved thousands of lives.

STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT
• The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study of human
responses to captivity and its behavioral effects on both authorities and
inmates in prison. The experiment was conducted in 1971 by a team of
researchers led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University.
Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of both guards and prisoners
living in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology
building.

THE MONSTER STUDY
• The Monster Study was a stuttering experiment on 22 orphan children in Davenport,
Iowa, in 1939 conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Johnson chose
one of his graduate students, Mary Tudor, to conduct the experiment and he
supervised her research. After placing the children in control and experimental groups,
Tudor gave positive speech therapy to half of the children, praising the fluency of
their speech, and negative speech therapy to the other half, belittling the children for
every speech imperfection and telling them they were stutterers. Many of the normal
speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the experiment suffered
negative psychological effects and some retained speech problems during the course of
their life.

PROJECT 4.1
• Project 4.1 was the designation for a medical study conducted by the United States of
those residents of the Marshall Islands exposed to radioactive fallout from the March
1, 1954 Castle Bravo nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, which had an unexpectedly large yield.
For the first decade after the test, the effects were ambiguous and statistically
difficult to correlate to radiation exposure: miscarriages and stillbirths among exposed
Rongelap women doubled in the first five years after the accident, but then returned
to normal; some developmental difficulties and impaired growth appeared in children,
but in no clear-cut pattern. In the decades that followed, though, the effects were
undeniable. Children began to suffer disproportionately from thyroid cancer (due to
exposure to radioiodines), and almost a third of those exposed developed neoplasms by
1974.

PROJECT MKULTRA
• Project MKULTRA, or MK-ULTRA, was the code name for a CIA mind-control research
program, run by the Office of Scientific Intelligence, that began in the early 1950s
and continued at least through the late 1960s. There is much published evidence that
the project involved the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other
methodologies, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function.
• Experiments included administering LSD to CIA employees, military personnel, doctors,
other government agents, prostitutes, mentally ill patients, and members of the general
public in order to study their reactions. LSD and other drugs were usually administered
without the subject’s knowledge and informed consent, a violation of the Nuremberg
Code that the U.S. agreed to follow after WWII.

THE AVERSION PROJECT
• South Africa’s apartheid army forced white lesbian and gay soldiers to undergo ‘sex-
change’ operations in the 1970′s and the 1980′s, and submitted many to chemical
castration, electric shock, and other unethical medical experiments. Although the
exact number is not known, former apartheid army surgeons estimate that as many as
900 forced ‘sexual reassignment’ operations may have been performed between 1971
and 1989 at military hospitals, as part of a top-secret program to root out
homosexuality from the service.
• Army psychiatrists aided by chaplains aggressively ferreted out suspected
homosexuals from the armed forces, sending them discretely to military psychiatric
units, chiefly ward 22 of 1 Military Hospital at Voortrekkerhoogte, near Pretoria.
Those who could not be ‘cured’ with drugs, aversion shock therapy, hormone treatment,
and other radical ‘psychiatric’ means were chemically castrated or given sex-change
operations.

NORTH KOREAN EXPERIMENTATION
• There have been many reports of North Korean human experimentation. These
reports show human rights abuses similar to those of Nazi and Japanese human
experimentation in World War II. These allegations of human rights abuses are
denied by the North Korean government, who claim that all prisoners in North
Korea are humanely treated.
• One former North Korean woman prisoner tells how 50 healthy women prisoners
were selected and given poisoned cabbage leaves, which all the women had to eat
despite cries of distress from those who had already eaten. All 50 were dead after
20 minutes of vomiting blood and anal bleeding. Refusing to eat would have meant
reprisals against them and their families.

• Kwon Hyok, a former prison Head of Security at Camp 22, described
laboratories equipped respectively for poison gas, suffocation gas and
blood experiments, in which 3 or 4 people, normally a family, are 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. Kwon Hyok claims to have watched
one family of 2 parents, a son and a daughter die from suffocating gas,
with the parents trying to save the children using mouth-to-mouth
resuscitation for as long as they had the strength.

POISON LABORATORY OF THE SOVIETS
• The Poison laboratory of the Soviet secret services, also known as Laboratory 1, Laboratory 12
and “The Chamber”, was a covert poison research and development facility of the Soviet secret
police agencies. The Soviets tested a number of deadly poisons on prisoners from the Gulag
(“enemies of the people”), including mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin and many others. The goal of the
experiments was to find a tasteless, odorless chemical that could not be detected post mortem.
Candidate poisons were given to the victims, with a meal or drink, as “medication”.
• Finally, a preparation with the desired properties called C-2 was developed. According to witness
testimonies, the victim changed physically, became shorter, weakened quickly, became calm and
silent and died within fifteen minutes. Mairanovsky brought to the laboratory people of varied
physical condition and ages in order to have a more complete picture about the action of each
poison.

THE TUSKEGEE SYPHILIS STUDY
• The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male was a clinical study, conducted between
1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama, in which 399 (plus 201 control group without syphilis) poor — and
mostly illiterate — African American sharecroppers were denied treatment for Syphilis.
• This study became notorious because it was conducted without due care to its subjects, and led to
major changes in how patients are protected in clinical studies. Individuals enrolled in the Tuskegee
Syphilis Study did not give informed consent and were not informed of their diagnosis; instead they
were told they had “bad blood” and could receive free medical treatment, rides to the clinic, meals and
burial insurance in case of death in return for participating. In 1932, when the study started, standard
treatments for syphilis were toxic, dangerous, and of questionable effectiveness. Part of the original
goal of the study was to determine if patients were better off not being treated with these toxic
remedies. For many participants, treatment was intentionally denied. Many patients were lied to and
given placebo treatments—in order to observe the fatal progression of the disease.

UNIT 731
• Unit 731 was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the
Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-
Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most
notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel.
• Some of the numerous atrocities committed by the commander Shiro Ishii and others under his
command in Unit 731 include: vivisection of living people (including pregnant women who were
impregnated by the doctors), prisoners had limbs amputated and reattached to other parts of
their body, some prisoners had parts of their bodies frozen and thawed to study the resulting
untreated gangrene. Humans were also used as living test cases for grenades and flame throwers.
Prisoners were injected with strains of diseases, disguised as vaccinations, to study their
effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were
deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea via rape, then studied.

NAZI HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION
• Nazi human experimentation was a series of medical experiments on large numbers of prisoners,
mainly Jews (including Jewish children) from across Europe, but also in some
cases Romani, Sinti, ethnic Poles, Soviet POWs and disabled non-Jewish Germans, by Nazi
Germany in its concentration camps mainly in the early 1940s, during World War II and the
Holocaust.
• Prisoners were coerced into participating; they did not willingly volunteer and there was
never informed consent. Typically, the experiments resulted in death, disfigurement or
permanent disability, and as such are considered as examples of medical torture.
• At Auschwitz and other camps, under the direction of Eduard Wirths, selected inmates were
subjected to various hazardous experiments that were designed to help German military
personnel in combat situations, develop new weapons, aid in the recovery of military personnel
who had been injured, and to advance the racial ideology backed by the Third Reich.

EXPERIMENTS ON TWINS
• Experiments on twin children in concentration camps were created to show the
similarities and differences in the genetics of twins, as well as to see if the
human body can be unnaturally manipulated. The central leader of the
experiments was Josef Mengele, who from 1943 to 1944 performed
experiments on nearly 1,500 sets of imprisoned twins at Auschwitz. About 200
people survived these studies. The twins were arranged by age and sex and
kept in barracks between experiments, which ranged from injection of
different dyes into the eyes of twins to see whether it would change their
color to sewing twins together in attempts to create conjoined twins.

BONE, MUSCLE, AND NERVE TRANSPLANTATION
EXPERIMENTS
• From about September 1942 to about December 1943 experiments were
conducted at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, for the benefit of
the German Armed Forces, to study bone, muscle,
and nerve regeneration, and bone transplantation from one person to
another. Sections of bones, muscles, and nerves were removed from the
subjects without use of anesthesia. As a result of these operations,
many victims suffered intense agony, mutilation, and permanent
disability.

HEAD INJURY EXPERIMENTS
• In mid-1942 in Baranowicze, occupied Poland, experiments were conducted in a
small building behind the private home occupied by a known Nazi SD Security
Service officer, in which "a young boy of eleven or twelve [was] strapped to a
chair so he could not move. Above him was a mechanized hammer that every
few seconds came down upon his head." The boy was driven insane from
the torture.

FREEZING EXPERIMENTS
• Nazi doctors submerged victims in vats of icy water for periods of up
to five hours in an attempt to find ways to treat German pilots forced to
eject into icy ocean water. The victims were either naked or dressed in
aviator suits and submerged in water. Another study placed prisoners
naked in the open air for several hours with temperatures as low as −6 °C
(21 °F). Besides studying the physical effects of cold exposure, the
experimenters also assessed different methods of rewarming
survivors. "One assistant later testified that some victims were thrown
into boiling water for rewarming."

MALARIA EXPERIMENTS
• From about February 1942 to about April 1945, experiments were
conducted at the Dachau concentration camp in order to investigate
immunization for treatment of malaria. Healthy inmates were infected
by mosquitoes or by injections of extracts of the mucous glands of
female mosquitoes. After contracting the disease, the subjects were
treated with various drugs to test their relative efficiency. Over 1,000
people were used in these experiments and more than half died as a
result.

IMMUNIZATION EXPERIMENTS
• At the German concentration camps of Sachsenhausen, Dachau,
Natzweiler, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, scientists tested
immunization compounds and serums for the prevention and treatment of
contagious diseases, including malaria, typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid
fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis.

MUSTARD GAS EXPERIMENTS
• At various times between September 1939 and April 1945, many
experiments were conducted at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, and other
camps to investigate the most effective treatment of wounds caused
by mustard gas. Test subjects were deliberately exposed to mustard gas
and other vesicants (e.g. Lewisite) which inflicted severe chemical burns.
The victims' wounds were then tested to find the most effective
treatment for the mustard gas burns.

SEA WATER EXPERIMENTS
• From about July 1944 to about September 1944, experiments were conducted at the
Dachau concentration camp to study various methods of making sea water drinkable. At
one point, a group of roughly 90 Roma were deprived of food and given nothing but sea
water to drink by Dr. Hans Eppinger, leaving them gravely injured. They were so
dehydrated that others observed them licking freshly mopped floors in an attempt to
get drinkable water. From about July 1944 to about September 1944, experiments
were conducted at the Dachau concentration camp to study various methods of
making sea water drinkable. At one point, a group of roughly 90 Roma were deprived of
food and given nothing but sea water to drink by Dr. Hans Eppinger, leaving them
gravely injured. They were so dehydrated that others observed them licking freshly
mopped floors in an attempt to get drinkable water.

EXPERIMENTS WITH POISON
• Somewhere between December 1943 and October 1944, experiments
were conducted at Buchenwald to investigate the effect of various
poisons. The poisons were secretly administered to experimental
subjects in their food. The victims died as a result of the poison or were
killed immediately in order to permit autopsies. In September 1944,
experimental subjects were shot with poisonous bullets, suffered
torture and often died.

ARTIFICIAL INSEMINATION
• The notorious Heinrich Himmler himself ordered a Nazi doctor to
artificially inseminate concentration camp prisoners though various
experimental methods. Dr. Carl Clauberg artificially inseminated about
300 women at Auschwitz, who were strapped down and taunted
mercilessly. Clauberg told his victims that he had used animal sperm to
create a monster inside of them.

TRANSPLANT EXPERIMENTS
• The Nazis wanted to know if a person’s joints and limbs could be
removed and transplanted into someone else. These cruel experiments
led to scores of concentration camp prisoners having limbs needlessly
amputated. Every attempt to transplant a limb or joint was a failure.
Many were killed, mutilated and exposed to excruciating pain. Sections
of muscle, bone and nerves were also removed in fruitless attempts to
regenerate those body parts.

AFTERMATH
• Many of the subjects died as a result of the experiments conducted by
the Nazis, while many others were executed after the tests were
completed to study the effect post mortem. Those who survived were
often left mutilated, suffering permanent disability, weakened bodies,
and mental distress. On 19 August 1947, the doctors captured by Allied
forces were put on trial in USA vs. Karl Brandt et al., which is commonly
known as the Doctors' Trial. At the trial, several of the doctors argued
in their defense that there was no international law regarding medical
experimentation.

MODERN ETHICAL ISSUES
• The results of the Dachau freezing experiments have been used in some modern
research into the treatment of hypothermia, with at least 45 publications having
referenced the experiments since the Second World War. This, together with the
recent use of data from Nazi research into the effects of phosgene gas, has proven
controversial and presents an ethical dilemma for modern physicians who do not agree
with the methods used to obtain this data. Some object on an ethical basis, and others
have rejected Nazi research purely on scientific grounds, pointing out methodological
inconsistencies. In an often-cited review of the Dachau hypothermia experiments,
Berger states that the study has "all the ingredients of a scientific fraud" and that
the data "cannot advance science or save human lives."

History of experiments in humans and animals

History of experiments in humans and animals

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History of experiments in humans and animals