10 Scientists Whose Research Led to SHOCKING Crimes

10 Scientists Who Committed Shocking Crimes As Part of their Research_A7I2K1

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re diving into examples of scientists who committed terrible atrocities in the name of science. These are not meant to be ranked in any particular order.

Leo Stanley

Graduating from Cooper Medical College in 1912, Leo Stanley was hired a year later as San Quentin State Prison’s chief surgeon. He was determined to reduce crime rates and “cure” certain mental conditions. Instead of relying on community, support, therapy, or any other modern initiative, he relied on his scalpel and debunked health myths. Stanley performed countless experiments on his inmates that were beyond immoral. He heavily encouraged and implemented racial segregation, eugenics, and sterilization while at San Quentin. The latter were so popular that it’s estimated 600 sterilizations were carried out at the prison by 1940, many being forced sterilizations or targeting LGBTQ+ inmates.

Clarence Gamble

The Procter and Gamble heir’s journey into birth control, contraception, and maternity planning started with a simple $5,000 donation in his mother’s memory in 1929. This led to the opening of the Cincinnati Maternal Health Clinic, one of the few in the country at the time. Over the next decades, Gamble steadily expanded his involvement with the movement, supporting research, education, and clinics across the U.S. and the globe. As a strong eugenics proponent, Gamble frequently conducted mass sterilization experiments, usually on people of color. The cruelty of these experiments drove North Carolina governor Bev Perdue to make a case for financial restitution to the victims in 2011.

Andrew Wakefield

The thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism comes from a 1998 study led by former British physician Andrew Wakefield. Published in the medical journal “The Lancet”, it claimed a link between MMR vaccines, autism, and bowel disease through a condition called autistic enterocolitis. Wakefield allegedly had multiple financial conflicts while conducting the study, and the children participating in it were put through the wringer. The study was officially retracted in 2010 and Wakefield lost his medical license, but the damage was done. To this day, the study and its publicity have been linked to a drop in vaccination rates and numerous infections and deaths.

The Tuskegee Syphilis Study Leaders

In 1932, 600 working class African American men from Alabama were invited to participate in a study by the U.S. Public Health Service in exchange for receiving free medical care. 399 of the men were infected with latent syphilis and 201 were not. The purpose of the study was to observe the natural trajectory of untreated syphilis. To facilitate this, not only were the infected men not told they had syphilis, they were also actively prevented from getting treated for it if they found out they had it. The study lasted for 40 years and was called “arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history”. Unsurprisingly, it bred a great distrust of US public health systems among the African American community.

J. Marion Sims

Physician and surgeon James Marion Sims is credited with pioneering the treatment of vaginal fistulas, the silver wire for surgical sutures, and the invention of the modern speculum. The “father of modern gynecology” opened a practice in Montgomery, Alabama where he frequently treated enslaved women. The catch: those patients, sometimes minors, were brought in by their owners and are believed to have been operated on without consent. If that wasn’t bad enough, some were “treated” multiple times and without anesthesia, partially on the racist belief that African Americans have a higher pain threshold than others. While some justify his methods or call Sims “a product of his time”, his legacy is forever marked by the abysmal experiments he conducted to obtain it.

Walter Freeman

While practically extinct now, lobotomies were highly common in the previous century and their greatest supporter: Neurologist Walter Jackson Freeman. Despite having no prior surgical experience, Freeman traveled the country like an unhinged showman with an ice pick performing lobotomies. Many of these were transorbital lobotomies where the brain is accessed through the eye socket. While lobotomies are now recognized as barbaric, even back then the results were not compelling. About 15 percent of his patients passed away thanks to his operations and another third suffered severe brain damage and mental health complications. Even when psychiatric drugs and other treatments started to become common, Freeman refused to abandon his lobotomies and was banned with performing surgeries in 1967.

Sidney Gottlieb and Donald Ewen Cameron

During the Cold War, the CIA grew obsessed with enhancing psychological interrogation techniques and building highly compliant super soldiers. Under the watchful eye of chemist Sidney Gottlieb, it started to heavily experiment with using drugs like LSD as an interrogation tool or “truth serum”. In MKUltra subproject 68, psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron subjected people to drugs and electroconvulsive therapy. His subjects were left unconscious for days and weeks on end in an attempt to destroy and rebuild their psyche. The subjects of these experiments were often not enemy spies, but US military personnel or unwitting American and Canadian citizens. From a scientific and moral perspective, MKULTRA is an epic failure that left behind nothing but death, mental suffering, and a cruel blueprint for psychological torture.

Carl Clauberg

It’s not exactly breaking news that the Nazis were the epitome of evil. They considered almost everyone else inferior and utilized a number of different strategies in their quest to build a master race, including mass sterilization. Enter Carl Clauberg. The physician and World War I veteran conducted research on female fertility and basically volunteered himself to lead some of these sterilization campaigns during World War II. Needless to say, Clauberg targeted an already vulnerable and persecuted population: Jewish and Romani prisoners at Auschwitz and other concentration camps It is estimated that Clauberg did this to hundreds or thousands of prisoners with the majority tragically perishing or facing long term health consequences.

Shirō Ishii

During World War II, the Japanese military, led by army surgeon Shirō Ishii, was focused on biological and chemical warfare. Ishii was eventually chosen to lead Unit 731, their biological warfare unit. To call the experiments they carried out a nightmare would be an understatement. Patients, usually Chinese civilians or prisoners, were subjected to vivisection, limb amputation, and frostbite or purposely infected with toxins or venereal diseases. The unit also experimented with deploying biological weapons against unsuspecting villages. There were famously no survivors of Unit 731 as all imprisoned test subjects were killed and autopsied after the experiments. In an infuriating, but sadly predictable twist, Ishii was granted immunity by the U.S. in exchange for the knowledge he had gathered through his experiments.

Josef Mengele

You don’t earn a nickname like “The Angel of Death” without being an absolute menace. Locking people in concentration camps is already peak evil on its own, but Mengele turned Auschwitz into his personal scientific playground. Thanks to his anthropology background, he had a fascination with genetics and experimented on individuals with conditions like dwarfism and heterochromia. His greatest focus, however, was experiments on children, especially twins, with reports estimating he experimented on as many as 1,000 sets of twins. In one particularly harrowing account, Mengele reportedly killed 14 twins in a single night by drugging them then injecting them with chloroform.

What other scientists and despicable research should have made the list, let us know in the comments below.