In recent history, evil scientists have conducted horrific experiments that violated human rights. This is the list of the worst of the worst in science.
Josef Mengele was an evil Nazi physician who conducted murderous experiments at Auschwitz. Mengele performed surgeries without anesthesia on over 3,000 twins. Only 200 people survived his brutal experiments.
Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii led Japan’s notorious Unit 731 during World War II. He’s known for doing lethal human experiments on over 3,000 prisoners in order to create biological weapons. He received immunity from prosecution by trading his research data with American authorities.
CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb directed the MK-ULTRA program, personally dosing unsuspecting Americans with LSD and overseeing brutal human experiments that killed at least one person. He spent his retirement peacefully teaching folk dancing in rural Virginia without a care in the world.
Nazi scientist Hubertus Strughold conducted inhumane high-altitude experiments on concentration camp prisoners. However, he later became NASA’s “Father of Space Medicine” and was given US government protection despite directly contributing to the deaths of 80 innocent victims.
During his career at the Rockefeller Institute, Dr. Cornelius Rhoads conducted unethical cancer experiments on Puerto Rican patients by injecting them with live cancer cells without consent.
Nazi physician Carl Clauberg conducted forced sterilization experiments on thousands of women at Auschwitz, injecting chemicals into their reproductive organs. He lied to his victims, telling them that they were receiving routine medical treatment.
University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert Kligman conducted unethical medical experiments on incarcerated men at Holmesburg Prison from 1951 to 1974. He exposed the prisoners to dangerous substances like dioxin and radioactive isotopes without informed consent.
In Nazi Germany, the physician Sigmund Rascher conducted lethal human experiments on concentration camp prisoners at Dachau. Some of his worst procedures were freezing victims in ice water for up to five hours—documenting their slow deaths.
Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath, while serving as chair of psychiatry at Tulane University in the 1950s-70s, implanted electrodes into gay men’s brains and subjected them to electrical stimulation. He forced them to watch heterosexual pornography—trying to make them straight.
Eduard Wirths, the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz, personally selected over 70,000 people for death in the gas chambers. He paradoxically thought he was giving more humane prisoner medical care. He died in 1945 when faced with his crimes.
Dr. Leo Stanley was the chief surgeon at San Quentin Prison from 1913 to 1951. Stanley oversaw disturbing medical experiments on hundreds of inmates, including transplanting testicles from executed prisoners and animals into living prisoners.
Karl Brandt was Hitler’s personal physician and head of Nazi Germany’s euthanasia program. Brandt greenlit horrific medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners that killed thousands. He was executed by hanging in 1948 for his crimes against humanity.
Japanese bacteriologist Hideyo Noguchi conducted unethical human experiments at the Rockefeller Institute. He deliberately infected 571 human subjects with syphilis without their knowledge.
The Nazi physician Waldemar Hoven murdered hundreds of concentration camp prisoners via lethal injections at Buchenwald. The doctor infected inmates with typhus. After WWII, he was convicted of war crimes and hanged in 1948.
Psychologist John Money pioneered gender identity research at Johns Hopkins University. However, he was a pretty evil dude. He’s known for forcing identical twin boys into a horrific gender experiment in the 1960s that led to both brothers’ eventual deaths.
American psychiatrist Henry Cotton was convinced that infections caused mental illness. He wound up horrifically extracting his patients’ teeth, tonsils, and organs at New Jersey State Hospital in the 1920s—thinking it would cure them. He had a 43% mortality rate among those he operated on.
Neurologist Walter Freeman performed over 3,000 ice-pick lobotomies without formal surgical training. He drove across America in his “lobotomobile” while using only local anesthesia and sometimes performing the procedure in motel rooms.
CIA-funded psychiatrist Ewen Cameron destroyed hundreds of patients’ minds through non-consensual experiments at McGill University. He subjected them to months of drug-induced comas, electroshock therapy, and endless tape recordings in his attempt to “reprogram” human consciousness.
Dr. William Sweet, a respected Harvard Medical School neurosurgeon, conducted evil radiation experiments on terminal cancer patients without consent in the 1950s. Dr. Sweet injected uranium into their brains under the guise of treatment. He did this secretly while working for the US military.
In 1963, cancer researcher Chester Southam injected live cancer cells into 22 elderly patients at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital without their consent, leading to his medical license suspension.