Project MKULTRA
Do you think your mind is impervious? It might be a bit more flexible than you think. Project MKULTRA is a go-to topic for any conspiracy theorist worth his salt, but here’s what we know for sure: CIA psychologists in the 50s decided it would be worthwhile to try to earn complete control over a person’s willpower. You know, because Russia.
Using LSD, electroshock therapy, recorded tapes that were sometimes played over 500,000 times and more, the American government tried its best to induce a “behavioral modification” (read: amnesia and suggestibility) in people.
Experimenters went as far as to dose unsuspecting citizens and even children with LSD. Most of the files on MKULTRA were destroyed in the wake of the Watergate scandal, but its legend lives on as another one of America’s creepy, manipulative foul-ups.
Smiling while he watches you die from a disfiguring disease. Source: National Archives
Tuskegee
The creepy, manipulative foul-up that takes the cake, however, is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. The US Public Health Service studied syphilis by infecting unwilling and unaware black male sharecroppers with the disease.
For forty years.
From 1932 to 1972, the American government infected and subsequently neglected to treat these men, instead lying to them and saying they were receiving “free health care”. In total, hundreds of men died, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis as a result.
A bust displaying the effects of long-term, untreated syphilis. Source: Musee De L’Homme, Paris
Congenital syphilis is a brutal, unfair disease (congenital, in this case, means “at birth”). Children born with it are often deaf, their livers already failing from being too large, their poorly-developed brains afflicted with seizures.
Even in the time of the Tuskegee experiments, the cure for syphilis existed: simple penicillin. Of course, though, the people of Tuskegee received no such treatment.
Essentially, the world of science is a strange, complex, and at times downright unfair place. Here’s more proof: read about the most bizarre ocean creatures in the world and like All That Is Interesting on Facebook! Then, read up on ten fringe sciences that are as fascinating as they are terrifying.
