6 The Soviet Secret Services tested a number of deadly poisons on prisoners from the Gulag including mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin, curare, cyanide, and many others.
Poison laboratory of the Soviet Secret Services was a covert research and development facility of Soviet secret police agencies. It was established in 1921. Here, the Soviet Secret Services of Russia carried out experiments in attempts to find a tasteless, odorless chemical that could not be detected post-mortem. Deadly poisons were given to the victims, with a meal or drink, as “medication”. To test this chemical, Mairanovsky, the head of this project, brought in people of varied physical condition and ages. This was done in order to have a complete picture about the action of each poison.
Finally, a chemical with the desired properties called C-2 or K-2 (carbylamine-choline-chloride) was developed. When consumed, this chemical changed the victims physically. They became shorter, weakened quickly, became calm and silent, and died within fifteen minutes of consumption.(source)
7 In the US, eighteen people were injected with plutonium as part of the Manhattan Project without their knowledge.
The plutonium experiments were conducted as a part of Manhattan project from April 10, 1945 to July 18, 1947. In this experiment, American citizens who had checked into hospitals for a variety of ailments were secretly injected with doses of plutonium. The doses ranged from 95 to 5,900 nanocuries. The patients were not told about the plutonium injections and most patients thought it was “just another injection”. However, the secret studies left enough radioactive material in many of the patients’ bodies to induce life-threatening conditions.
Numerous other human experiments funded by government agencies have also been performed in the United States. Even in some experiments, orphans were fed with irradiated milk while in others children were injected with radioactive materials.(1,2)
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8 In a military-sponsored research project begun during the Second World War, inmates of the Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois were infected with malaria and treated with experimental drugs that sometimes had vicious side effects.
In the 1940s, Malaria Research Project was conducted on a floor of the prison hospital in the Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois. The study aimed to understand the effect of various antimalarial drugs on the weakening of malaria. Therefore, doctors from the University of Chicago bred Anopheles quadrimaculatus mosquitoes. The doctors infected these mosquitoes with a plasmodium vivax malaria strain. In the study, each patient received bites from 10 infected mosquitoes. 441 inmates volunteered for the study whence one prisoner was reported dead. But researchers insisted that it was an unrelated cause. The experiments gained media attention and were praised. The Malaria research continued at Stateville Penitentiary for 29 years.(source)
9 During the Cold War, the British Government carried out an experiment to determine if mustard gas would inflict greater damage on Indian skin compared to British skin.
During the 1930s and the 1940s, the British Government used the general public as chemical warfare guinea pigs on a large scale. As a matter of fact, they used hundreds of British soldiers and British Indian Army soldiers in injury causing experiments. The scientists sent Indian soldiers wearing shorts and cotton shirts into gas chambers to experience the effects of mustard gas. This was done to determine the appropriate dosage to be used on battlefields. Many of the subjects suffered severe burns from their exposure to the gas and were hospitalized. It is still unclear whether the trial subjects were all volunteers or not.(source)
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10 Project 4.1 was a study that consisted of an experiment called the Bravo test which exposed 239 Marshallese to a significant level of radiation.
The United States conducted a medical study, Project 4.1, for those residents of the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, who were exposed to radiation. The Bravo test exposed 239 Marshallese on Utirik, Rongelap and Ailinginae Atolls to a significant level of radiation. 28 Americans at the Rongerik Atoll were also exposed. They were the most seriously affected, receiving approximately 175 rads of radiation before they were evacuated. Those on Ailinginae received 69 rads, those on Utirik received 14 rads, and the Americans on Rongerik received a dose of 78 rads.
Most of the exposed individuals did not show immediate signs of radiation sickness. But within a few days, hair loss and skin damages such raw weeping lesions started occurring. The results were published in 1955 in professional medical journals such as the Journal of the American Medical Association. The report abstract concluded that “estimates of total body burden indicate that there is no long-term hazard.” In 2010, it was calculated by sub-population that the projected proportion of cancers is 55% among 82 persons exposed in 1954 on Rongelap Atoll and Ailinginae Atoll.(1,2)
