Over the course of the next 40 years, the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male denied treatment to 399 syphilitic patients, most of them poor, black, illiterate sharecroppers. Even after penicillin emerged as an effective treatment in 1947, these patients, who were not told they had syphilis, but were informed they suffered from “bad blood,” were denied treatment, or given fake placebo treatments. By the end of the study, in 1972, only 74 of the subjects were still alive.

1. Planck Blackbody Radiation Experiment

Planck's passion was thermodynamics. While researching black body radiation. 'Max Planck Formulates Quantum Theory.' ThoughtCo, Mar. CHAPTER 2 BLACKBODY RADIATION 2.1 Introduction. Black body will radiate in the same way as will a small hole pierced in the side of an enclosure.

Twenty eight patients died directly from syphilis, 100 died from complications related to syphilis, 40 of the patients' wives were infected with syphilis, and 19 children were born with congenital syphilis. There, between 1971 and 1989, many victims were submitted to chemical castrations and electric shock treatment, meant to cure them of their homosexual “condition.” As many as 900 homosexuals, mostly 16-24 years old who had been drafted and had not voluntarily joined the military, were subjected to forced “sexual reassignment” surgeries. Men were surgically turned into women against their will, then cast out into the world, the gender reassignment often incomplete, and without the means to pay for expensive hormones to maintain their new sexual identities. Penicillin having emerged as a cure for syphilis in 1947, the government decided to see just how effective it was. The way to do this, the government decided, was to turn syphilitic prostitutes loose on Guatemalan prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers, none of whom consented to be subjects of an experiment. If actual sex didn’t infect the subject, then surreptitious inoculation did the trick.

Once infected, the victim was given penicillin to see if it worked. Non-fiction. Or not given penicillin, just to see what happened, apparently. About a third of the approximately 1,500 victims fell into the latter group. More than 80 “participants” in the experiment died. Prisoners were injected with dioxin (a toxic byproduct of Agent Orange)—468 times the amount the study originally called for. The results were prisoners with volcanic eruptions of chloracne (severe acne combined with blackheads, cysts, pustules, and other really bad stuff) on the face, armpits and groin. Long after the experiments ended, prisoners continued to suffer from the effects of the exposure.

Kligman, apparently very enthusiastic about the study, was quoted as saying, “All I saw before me were acres of skin It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time.” Kligman went on to become the doctor behind Retin-A, a major treatment for acne. From 1960 until 1971, Dr. Eugene Saenger, a radiologist at the University of Cincinnati, led an experiment exposing 88 cancer patients, poor and mostly black, to whole body radiation, even though this sort of treatment had already been pretty well discredited for the types of cancer these patients had. They were not asked to sign consent forms, nor were they told the Pentagon funded the study. They were simply told they would be getting a treatment that might help them. Patients were exposed, in the period of one hour, to the equivalent of about 20,000 x-rays worth of radiation. Nausea, vomiting, severe stomach pain, loss of appetite, and mental confusion were the results.

A report in 1972 indicated that as many as a quarter of the patients died of radiation poisoning. Saenger recently received a gold medal for “career achievements” from the Radiological Society of North America. Because Sims felt the surgery was, “not painful enough to justify the trouble,” as he said in an 1857 lecture, the operations were done without anesthesia. Being slaves, the women had no say as to whether they wanted the procedures or not, and some were subjected to as many as 30 operations. There are many advocates for Dr. Sims, pointing out that the women would have been anxious for any possibility of curing their condition, and that anesthetics were new and unproven at the time.

Nevertheless, it is telling that black slaves and not white women, who presumably would have been just as anxious, were the subjects of the experiments. Back to the Cold War. Prisoners were again the victims, as the Soviet Secret Police conducted poison experiments in Soviet gulags. The Soviets hoped to develop a deadly poison gas that was tasteless and odorless. At the laboratory, known as “The Chamber,' unknowing and unwilling prisoners were given preparations of mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin, and other concoctions, hidden in meals, beverages or given as “medication.” Presumably, many of these prisoners were not happy with their meals, although, being the gulag, records are spotty. The Secret Police apparently did finally come up with their dream poison, called C-2. According to witnesses, it caused actual physical changes (victims became shorter), and victims subsequently weakened and died within 15 minutes.

While evil experiments may have been going on in the U.S. During World War II (Tuskegee, for example), it’s hard to argue that the Nazis and the Japanese are the indisputable kings of evil experimentation. The Germans, of course, conducted their well-known experiments on Jewish prisoners (and, to a much lesser extent, Romany people and homosexuals and Poles, among others) in their concentration/death camps. In 1942, the Luftwaffe submerged naked prisoners in ice water for up to three hours to study the effects of cold temperatures on human beings and to devise ways to rewarm them once subjected. Other prisoners were subjected to streptococcus, tetanus and gas gangrene. Blood vessels were tied off to create artificial “battlefield” wounds. Wood shavings and glass particles were rubbed deep into the wounds to aggravate them.

The goal was to test the effectiveness of sulfonamide, an antibacterial agent. Women were forcibly sterilized.

More gruesomely, one woman had her breasts tied off with string to see how long it took for her breastfeeding child to die. She eventually killed her own child to stop the suffering. And there is the infamous Josef Mengele, whose experimental “expertise” was on twins. He injected various chemicals into twins, and even sewed two together to create conjoined twins. Mengele escaped to South America after the war and lived until his death in Brazil, never answering for his evil experiments. Not to be outdone, the Japanese killed as many as 200,000 people during numerous experimental atrocities in both the Sino-Japanese War and WWII. Some of the experiments put the Nazis to shame.

Planck Blackbody Radiation Experiment

People were cut open and kept alive, without the assistance of anesthesia. Body limbs were amputated and sewn on other parts of the body.

Limbs were frozen and then thawed, resulting in gangrene. Grenades and flame-throwers were tested on living humans. Various bacteria and diseases were purposely injected into prisoners to study the effects. Unit 731, led by Commander Shiro Ishii, conducted these experiments in the name of biological and chemical warfare research. Before Japan surrendered, in 1945, the Unit 731 lab was destroyed and the prisoners all executed.

Ishii himself was never prosecuted for his evil experiments, and in fact was granted immunity by Douglas MacArthur in exchange for the information Ishii gained from the experiments. Add children to the list of vulnerable people subjected to evil experiments. In 1939, Wendell Johnson, University of Iowa speech pathologist, and his grad student Mary Tudor, conducted stuttering experiments on 22 non-stuttering orphan children. The children were split into two groups. One group was given positive speech therapy, praising them for their fluent speech. The unfortunate other group was given negative therapy, harshly criticizing them for any flaw in their speech abilities, labeling them stutterers.

At first the effects were inconclusive. For the first 10 years, miscarriages and stillbirths increased but then returned to normal. Some children had developmental problems or stunted growth, but no conclusive pattern was detectable. After that first decade, though, a pattern did emerge, and it was ugly: Children with thyroid cancer significantly above what would be considered normal. By 1974, almost a third of exposed islanders developed tumors.

A Department of Energy report stated that, “The dual purpose of what is now a DOE medical program has led to a view by the Marshallese that they were being used as ‘guinea pigs’ in a ‘radiation experiment.’”.

The Problem Despite feeling that all was already known in the field of physics, there was still one problem that had plagued physicists for decades - they could not understand the surprising results they continued to get from heating black bodies (a surface that absorbs all frequencies of light that hits it). Try as they might, scientists could not explain the results using classical physics. Max Planck Max Planck was born in Kiel, Germany on April 23, 1858 and was considering becoming a professional pianist before a teacher turned his attention to science.

Planck went on to receive degrees from the University of Berlin and the University of Munich. After spending four years as an associate professor of theoretical physics at Kiel University, Planck moved to the University of Berlin, where he became a full professor in 1892. Planck's passion was thermodynamics.

While researching black body radiation, he too kept running into the same problem as other scientists. The really amazing part of Planck's discovery was that energy, which appears to be emitted in wavelengths, is actually discharged in small packets (quanta). This new theory of energy revolutionized physics and opened the way for. Life for Max Planck After His Discovery At first, the magnitude of Max Planck's discovery was not fully understood. It wasn't until Einstein and others used Planck's theory for even further advancements in physics that the revolutionary nature of his discovery was realized. By 1918, the scientific community was well aware of the discovery's importance and awarded Max Planck the Nobel Prize in Physics. Max Planck continued to research and contribute further to the advancement of physics, but nothing compared to his 1900 findings.

Tragedy in His Personal Life In his personal life, Max Planck suffered greatly. Planck's first wife died in 1909 and then tragedy struck all four of their children. Karl, the oldest, died in. Twin girls, Margarete and Emma, both later died in childbirth. And the youngest son, Erwin, was implicated in the failed to kill and was hanged. In 1911, Planck did remarry and had one son, Hermann. Max Planck made the decision to stay within Germany during.

Using his clout, Planck tried to stand up for Jewish scientists, but with little success. In protest, Planck did resign as president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1937. In 1944, a bomb during an Allied air raid hit his house, destroying his scientific notebooks along with his other possessions.

Max Planck died on October 4, 1947 at the age of 89.