Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately

Scientists these days are generally obliged to abide by high ethical standards, requiring them to prevent harm and conduct experiments morally, for instance, seeking informed consent from experiment participants. But stricter guidelines and ethics boards are a relatively recent development, and were often built in response to ethically dubious and morally abhorrent experiments conducted in the past. 

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Little Albert

The Little Albert experiment – inspired by another horror show, Pavlov's dogs, which first demonstrated "classical conditioning" in canines – would not be conducted today. 

In 1920, American psychologists John B Watson and Rosalie Rayner aimed to show that fear is a learned response that could be instilled into an infant through classical conditioning, in a way similar to how Pavlov's dogs came to salivate when they heard a bell indicating that it was feeding time. 

For the experiment, the two took a healthy and "stolid and unemotional" infant, "reared from birth in a hospital environment", and began experimenting on him from the age of about 9 months. First, they attempted to gauge how fearful he was of various objects, including "a white rat, a rabbit, a dog, a monkey, with masks with and without hair, cotton wool, burning newspapers, etc". 

The team noted that the child, named as Albert B in the paper, showed no fear at all when responding to these objects. 

"No one had ever seen him in a state of fear and rage," the team explained. "The infant practically never cried."

That would soon change, directly thanks to their intervention. The team presented "Albert" with a series of fluffy animals and objects before striking a steel bar with a metal hammer near Albert's head to scare the living hell out of him. 

This, of course, caused distress to the infant immediately. But the team was able to demonstrate that little Albert began to associate the fluffy objects with the distressing noise and developed a fear response to them, which had not been present before.

"The instant the rat was shown the baby began to cry," the team explained. "Almost instantly he turned sharply to the left, fell over on left side, raised himself on all fours and began to crawl away so rapidly that he was caught with difficulty before reaching the edge of the table."

Albert continued to respond normally to non-fluffy objects, but would be fearful of anything fluffy, including rabbits, dogs, cotton wool, fur coats, and a Santa Claus mask.

During the Santa portion of the experiment, he experienced "withdrawal, gurgling, then slapped at [the Santa mask] without touching. When his hand was forced to touch it, he whimpered and cried. His hand was forced to touch it two more times. He whimpered and cried on both tests. He finally cried at the mere visual stimulus of the mask."

As well as potentially causing long-term psychological damage to the child, they had absolutely ruined Santa Claus. 

The Milgram obedience study

The Milgram experiment is an absolute classic in psychology, purportedly demonstrating the lengths that humans will go to just because someone in perceived authority was saying "do it". For the experiment, fairly simple in its design but complicated in ethics, Stanley Milgram got student volunteer participants and convinced them to deliver ever-increasing "electric shocks" to strangers.

For the experiment, the participants were told they would be split into two groups: teachers and learners. The "teachers" would read a list of questions to the "learner", the easiest part of their task. The difficult part (morally, if not physically) was that they would have to administer electric shocks of increasing intensity to them if the learner got the questions wrong.

The electrocution buttons were marked with 15 volts (Slight Shock) to 375 volts (Danger: Severe Shock) to 450 volts (XXX) to remind the participants that electricity is great for lights and toasters, but bad for people who quite like being "pain-free" and "alive".

The learner, unbeknownst to the volunteers, was an actor pretending to be electrocuted. During the experiment, they would scream as the "shocks" were administered, complain of a weak heart, bang on the wall, demand to leave, and finally appear to be unconscious. While you would hope that, under these circumstances, people might consider not electrocuting the "learner" further, for many, that was not the case.

Throughout the experiment, the observing psychologist would prompt the students to administer the shock if it looked like they were hesitant. The phrases they used were:

"Please continue, the experiment requires you to continue, it is absolutely essential that you continue, and you have no other choice but to continue."

Every one of the 40 students Milgram tested went to at least 300 volts, with 65 percent continuing up to 450 volts, long after the learner appeared to be unconscious and unresponsive.

The Tuskegee syphilis study

In 1932, the US Public Health Service and the Tuskegee Institute began an unethical experiment on 600 Black men without their informed consent. Over the next 40 years, it would lead to significant loss of life and unnecessary suffering for the participants, before it was exposed in 1972.

The study – titled Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male – began with 399 men with syphilis, and 201 without. The goal was to “observe the natural history of untreated syphilis” in African Americans, essentially by tracking the men over the course of many years, ensuring that they didn't receive treatment for their disease.

“Free Blood Test; Free Treatment, By County Health Department and Government Doctors,” signs advertising participating in the study read. “YOU MAY FEEL WELL AND STILL HAVE BAD BLOOD. COME AND BRING ALL YOUR FAMILY.”

The volunteers, from Macon County, Alabama, were told that they were being treated for "bad blood", and that the treatment would be paid for by the US government. What they actually needed treatment for was syphilis, but the experimenters did not inform them that they had it. Instead, they were given placebos by local doctors who were in on the experiment, and treatment that was known to be ineffective. As an extra incentive, they were offered free meals and, grimly, free burial insurance.

Already unethical, the experiment took a turn for the worse by 1947, when penicillin had become the standard treatment for syphilis, and the experiment continued on regardless. All volunteers were now treated in the Tuskegee Institute, where the disease's progression was tracked, but never treated. Over the years, the men began to experience the later tertiary phase of syphilis, and the scientists watched as they slowly began to go blind, suffer from organ failure, develop dementia and paralysis, and eventually died. In order to conduct autopsies on their subjects, they began to pay funeral expenses.

Despite opportunities to stop the experiment and treat the men for their condition, no such move was made. In 1965, the researchers argued that it was now too late to offer penicillin to the men involved in the study, as the disease would be too progressed for treatment to be effective. In 1969, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), who had taken over from the US Public Health Service in conducting the service, again opted to continue with the experiment.

The study went on until 1972, when a whistleblower leaked information on the study to the New York Times. When the story came out, people were outraged, and the study was ended shortly afterward.

"To the survivors, to the wives and family members, the children and the grandchildren, I say what you know: No power on Earth can give you back the lives lost, the pain suffered, the years of internal torment and anguish," Years later, in 1997, President Bill Clinton offered this apology on behalf of the United States to participants in the study.

"What was done cannot be undone. But we can end the silence. We can stop turning our heads away. We can look at you in the eye and finally say on behalf of the American people, what the United States government did was shameful, and I am sorry."

By the time the experiment was ended in 1972, 128 patients had died of syphilis, 40 of the men's wives had been infected with the disease, and 19 of their children had had congenital syphilis passed on to them.

The Stanford prison experiment

This one takes the double-title of being ethically dubious and scientifically pretty invalid. Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment has been the inspiration for fiction for years, due to the extraordinary events that took place as the experiment became "out of control". The experiment took 24 volunteers and placed them in a mock prison in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford University. 

The participants, who had been psychologically evaluated to eliminate candidates with psychological problems or a history of violence or drug abuse, were then assigned to be either guards or prisoners.

The prisoners were treated like prisoners, stripped of their possessions by the guards, were referred to only by their prisoner number, and kept in cells for much of the day. Guards, according to the published study at the time, were told to do whatever they deemed necessary to maintain law and order within the "prison". 

Over the course of the experiment, both groups appeared to begin to conform to their new roles a little too well. Guards began to harass and mistreat prisoners, "prisoners" began to act "crazy" (in the words of Zimbardo).

"The situation quickly got out of control. By day two, the volunteers playing the role of guards had begun psychologically torturing their prisoners," Gina Perry, Science historian at the University of Melbourne, explains in a piece for The Conversation.

"Stripped naked, hooded, chained, and denied food and sleep, the prisoners became traumatised, with half suffering nervous breakdowns so that by day six the experiment – planned to last two weeks – was called off."

While for a time the main concern people had for the Zimbardo experiments were for the participants, or that the findings of such a small study could be applied to humanity. But more recently, audio recordings have emerged that the whole experiment was invalid, and that a lot of the actions of the participants were done at the explicit or implied instructions of the experimenters.

One prisoner during the experiment famously broke down and began screaming "I’m burning up inside" in distressing footage. The same participant told author Ben Blum that he was merely acting, as he thought it was what the psychologists wanted.  

“Anybody who is a clinician would know that I was faking,” Douglas Korpi told Blum. “If you listen to the tape, it’s not subtle. I’m not that good at acting. I mean, I think I do a fairly good job, but I’m more hysterical than psychotic.”

Let's all just agree that a little ethical oversight goes a long way.