3 History’s Most Twisted Science Experiments

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First published: 8 April 2022 @ 6:00 pm

If you thought the doctor’s office was creepy before, wait until you hear about these twisted science experiments. They have conducted many of these experiments on prisoners and unwilling test subjects to help advance science and technology.

But many times, things go wrong and the people who conduct these experiments pay for their mistakes with their lives. Or other people’s lives.

Read on to learn about some of the creepiest experiments ever conducted.

RELATED: 3 Longest Ongoing Science Experiments

1) Josef Mengele

Josef Mengele was a Nazi doctor who conducted medical experiments on thousands of people at Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II.

Many of his “patients” were children, twins, and the mentally ill or disabled people from around Europe. They were under force to go to Auschwitz for extermination under the Nazi’s “Final Solution” program.

During his time at Auschwitz, Mengele did many horrible things including injecting chemicals into the eyes of children to change their eye color, injecting chemicals into pregnant women to test their effects on fetuses, conducting various surgeries without anesthetic or antiseptics (many patients died as a result), and even killing twins in an attempt to find out if they had identical genetics.

In May 1945, the U.S. army liberated Auschwitz and Mengele fled the camp. He evaded capture for the rest of his life and eventually died in 1979 while swimming off the coast of Brazil.

Mengele is one of the most infamous Nazi war criminals and many believe that they did not bring him to justice for his crimes against humanity.

Photo by jesse orrico on Unsplash.

2) Ishii Shiro

Ishii Shiro was a Japanese microbiologist who did horrific experiments on Chinese prisoners to develop biological weapons for use by the Japanese military during World War II.

In 1931, he began working for a military research facility known as Unit 731 located near Harbin, China (they later moved the facility to Pingfan).

Ishii began conducting experiments on thousands of prisoners using various bacteria, chemical gases, and biological weapons such as plague-infested fleas and plague-infected blankets which soldiers dropped from airplanes onto Chinese villages below.

Ishii even used human beings as test subjects by infecting them with deadly diseases such as anthrax and cholera and then dissecting them while they were still alive to see how long it took them to die from their infections.

In 1942, they appointed Ishii as a major general and placed in charge of all Japanese chemical and biological warfare research.

In 1945, the Japanese government surrendered to the Allies, and Ishii’s unit received order to destroy all evidence of their experiments before the Allied forces could capture them.

Ishii disobeyed this order and fled with over 10,000 slides containing images of his research which he hid in a well near his home. They did not prosecute Ishii for his crimes and he lived out the rest of his life in Japan where he died in 1959 at 67.

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