57: Morbid Medicine: Human Experiments
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When Joe Jacobson's daughter turned 11 in 1968...

She was small. I mean, Jo Jacobson was also small. She measured up to 5'2 on a good day, so she figured she would have a short daughter. But as her daughter, who I'll call Jane, entered the sixth grade, she couldn't help but feel that something was not quite right. The other kids towered over Jane. She looked like an elementary school child comparatively. Jo had been hoping Jane would grow into herself,

but she hadn't made much progress in the last few years. So Joe decided it was time to see a doctor. What happened next was tests, a lot of them. The doctor agreed that Joe's daughter was small enough for it to be concerning. He had seen this happen in other children before, and some of those kids never grew to be taller than four feet. It wasn't life-threatening, but it did sometimes signal that something else was wrong.

After a slew of different tests and exams, the doctor had his answer. Joe's daughter had a pituitary tumor. It sounds scary, but it's fairly common and not lethal. It was, however, responsible for the girl's growth problems. The pituitary gland is a small pea-sized gland at the base of your brain that regulates your hormones, one of those being growth hormone.

The tumor was making it impossible for Jane's pituitary gland to release any. But, the doctor said, there is a treatment for this. He proceeded to recommend that Jo take her daughter down to Scripps Institute of California, where she would be able to get a new treatment that wasn't yet available in Washington where they lived. Shots of human growth hormone to stimulate her growth.

Okay, some of you might be thinking of Arnold Schwarzenegger when I say shots of human growth hormone. The first thing that comes to mind tends to be meatheads and other fitness enthusiasts using it for performance purposes. But

But it does have a medical purpose as well. And it's still used today. The human growth hormone that we use today, however, comes from a very different source than it came from in the 1950s up until the mid-1980s. See, today we use synthetic human growth hormone for children. It's made in a lab. But back then, it seemed to be something dreamed up in Dr. Frankenstein's lab.

It was derived from corpses.

The way it worked was, pituitary glands were collected from people who recently had died and growth hormone was purified and extracted from them. That growth hormone would then be injected into children. And so, Jane and her mother did what the doctor recommended. From age 11 to 15, the two would head down to California to receive shots of the hormone, hoping it would aid in Jane's growth.

By the time Jane was 18, she had reached 5'2", the same height as her mother, and probably how tall she would have grown naturally without the tumor. The shots had worked. To doctors, it was a low-risk, high-reward treatment. Well, that's how it seemed at first.

These treatments were used infrequently, only on children who really needed it. For one, it was very expensive. And also, it took a lot of dead people to make these shots. On average, 120 corpse pituitary glands were used to treat one child for one year. Jane was on it for four years.

That's biological matter from 480 different corpses that was injected into her. Some children were on it for up to 10 years. That's brain matter from over 1,000 different people who died from different things. And these brains weren't being screened for prior illnesses before being used for treatments. By the 1980s,

Some of the former patients started falling sick with a mysterious illness. In 1985, a young man who had received the growth hormone shots started exhibiting some unusual symptoms. It started with memory issues, but then got more and more serious over the next few months as his vision became blurry and he had trouble speaking.

His symptoms continued to get worse until he was finally checked out by doctors, where he was told that he had a rare brain disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, or CJD.

The symptoms of CJD are similar to Alzheimer's, but the patient's condition worsens much quicker. Typically, the patient dies within a year of being diagnosed. CJD usually occurs sporadically and typically happens over the age of 60. Your chances of contracting it are higher if you have a family member who was diagnosed, but this patient did not.

Still, it can totally happen randomly. So when he died within a year of finding out he had CJD, no one studying human growth hormone treatments thought anything of it. But then more patients who had gotten the hormone treatment as children started developing the same strange symptoms.

brain fog, memory loss, blurred vision, and speech problems. They were all told they had CJD and all died within a year of the diagnosis. It was eventually revealed that some of the pituitary glands that were collected and being used for growth hormone treatments were from patients who had died of CJD.

Doctors at the time didn't think that brain disorders could spread between people like that, and CJD can incubate for decades, so it was only now that they were realizing the damage they had done to the kids. As of today, over 200 former patients in the UK have died from CJD due to their childhood growth hormone treatment.

And it gets even worse. Maybe you saw the study that came out a few weeks ago, but it's just been revealed that now multiple adults aged 39 to 55 who received these growth hormone shots as children have been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, another brain illness they developed directly from diseased brain tissue used in injections.

Thousands of children and parents had no idea that the brains being used to treat them were contaminated with deadly illnesses, and many are now standing by to see if symptoms develop.

It's a dark mark in the history of medicine, but we have already course-corrected it. Today, we only use synthetic growth hormone, which is much, much safer. But in this episode, I want to focus on a few more times throughout history that people were trying things on patients that were dubious at best.

We're going to hear about medical mix-ups that had deadly consequences and the time a man intentionally tried to give people cancer. And then if you stick around for the end, I'm going to tell Leo about some of the recent medical experiments that have happened. Basically, if you're a hypochondriac like me, it's going to be a really good time. As always, listener discretion is advised.

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and everything starts to feel wrong. It's the instinct between fight or flight. When your brain is trying to make sense of what it's seeing, it's when your heart starts pounding. It's when your heart starts pounding.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to Heart Starts Pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings, and mysteries. I'm your host, Kaelin Moore. I want to start by thanking our wonderful sponsors and those of you listening to the ad-supported version of the show. If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, you may have noticed a little pop-up message recently for Heart Starts Pounding Premium.

You can now subscribe and listen ad-free, get the monthly bonus episode, and access to archived episodes straight from the app. There's even a free trial, so make sure to check that out. So I started thinking about this week's episode after Chloe, one of our listeners, sent me an article about the growth hormone treatments. I told you, you guys love to send me the darkest stuff I've ever read, and I seriously love it.

But it got me thinking, what are other weird treatments, trials, and experiments we've done that have had disastrous results? I know the opening story is scary because it wasn't that long ago that these treatments were being used. And some of us could have parents or grandparents even that got them. But the next few stories I have for you are meant to be more deep dives into older cases where we can go, okay, what the heck were they thinking?

So to start us off, I want to jump into the story of Dr. Richard Strong, a man who was up to some of the worst medical shenanigans I have ever read about. It's November 16th, 1906.

Dr. Richard P. Strong strides confidently through a large concrete gate into Bilibid Prison in Manila, Philippines. He thinks he has something that will change Manila and potentially the entire world.

See, a few years earlier, a vessel from Hong Kong arrived in Manila carrying a lethal disease, cholera. And the pathogen spread like wildfire due to the Filipino-American war that was being fought. The war exacerbated the diseases spread across the country, killing U.S. soldiers and Filipinos alike. And by the end of 1906, over 100,000 people had died from cholera.

Usually it was from dehydration brought on by vomiting and diarrhea. But Dr. Strong, in this moment, thinks he has something that can stop the spread of this illness, a way to immunize the population against it. To help combat this disease, military forces brought in American doctors to explore cures and preventative measures, often conducting trials on inmates at the Billy Bidd prison.

Dr. Strong had arrived that day to perform a medical experiment that would prove his own cholera vaccine was more effective than others.

Throughout the course of that day, 24 prisoners were marched into Strong's makeshift lab in the prison where he injected a murky brown liquid into the inmates' forearms, all without telling them what was inside of the syringe. Back then, you didn't have to disclose what you were doing to subjects, and certainly not if they were incarcerated. A few prisoners resisted. They were serving time, but they weren't lab rats.

Anyone who tried to get out of the injection though, was met by a prison guard and told to sit back down. Strong left the prison that night confident that the trials would produce hopeful data. Instead, three days after the procedure, two of the inmates who were inoculated fell ill with swollen lymph nodes and fever. Within hours, they were dead.

The two men were immediately sent in for autopsies. Sure, Strong was using the cholera bacteria to make the vaccine, but it didn't seem like the men had been infected with cholera. They didn't have vomiting and diarrhea, and if anyone has cholera, it usually takes more than just a few hours to die from it. If the dead men had swollen lymph nodes, maybe they just caught something nasty in the prison.

The strangest part in all of this though, was that their lymph nodes had turned black before they died. That was not really common with any modern illnesses.

But then, as the autopsies were being conducted, another few men came down with fevers and swollen black lymph nodes, and then more. Soon, almost everyone who participated in the trial had fallen dangerously ill, and many were dying.

As some of the other men start getting sicker and sicker, the medical examiner who did the autopsies on the first two men runs down a long hallway in the prison looking for Dr. Strong. When he finds the doctor, he's winded and looks deathly pale. He figured out what the men died from. "You need to sit down," the examiner tells Strong.

The medical examiner reads the doctor the report and Strong feels all of the air get sucked out of the room. The men had died from the bubonic plague. Strong had accidentally injected the bubonic plague, not the cholera vaccine, into all 24 prisoners.

And similar to what happened in Europe in the 14th century, the men just started dying. The disease works quickly, making your lymph nodes swell and turn black before killing the victims within hours or a few short days. By the end, 13 of the 24 patients had died. And maybe you're like me and you're wondering how Strong could have injected the bubonic plague accidentally. How does that even happen?

Well, in a report filed afterwards by his superior, it was revealed that a tube containing the bubonic plague had gone missing from Strong's lab recently. Strong immediately ordered a search, wanting to find it. But all that was found was an empty tube discarded in cleaning solution. And he didn't really think any more of it.

Perhaps my listeners who work in the medical field can advise, but that doesn't seem safe. If a tube full of a deadly disease goes missing and is just found in a sink spilled, do you just move on with your life? Eventually, it's ruled that a visiting doctor must have gotten the plague tube mixed up with the cholera vaccine and mixed the vials. And that is what Strong brought to the prison instead.

Strong was investigated by a general committee that said Strong was negligent for leaving a visiting physician alone in his lab and for not having locks on the incubators. But Strong was exonerated and the experiment gone wrong was totally buried. It was a devastating outcome. But if you don't think this story gets any worse, then you haven't been listening to this podcast long enough.

Get this: six years later, Strong would perform another experiment on Philibid prisoners, this time putting them on a rice-based diet to see if any of them would get the lethal vitamin B1 deficiency disease known as beriberi. He deprived 29 prisoners of all nutrients except whatever they could get from a rice-based diet, and two of the prisoners died.

This time, it was directly because of his experiment, not accidental bubonic plague poisoning. And the surviving inmates' compensation for their participation in this study? Cigarettes.

Strong went on to have a successful career as a professor of tropical medicine at Harvard and as president of the American Society of Tropical Medicine. He never had to pay for the consequences of his actions. 15 nameless inmates, or likely more, all Philippine natives, paid the highest price. More after the break.

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In the early 1970s, Chester Southam was the president of the American Cancer Society, mostly known for his work in viral or immune therapies of cancer. He was revered in his community, but he had a dark past.

When Southam was elected to be the president of the American Cancer Society, he had actually just gotten his medical license back after it had been suspended due to morally concerning experiments he had been doing on people, mostly terminally ill patients and prisoners.

See, Chester had a few hypotheses that he wanted to test out. One of them being that cancer could spread from person to person. And he found it was easier to get terminally ill patients and prisoners to agree to his strange experiments. But let's start from the beginning.

Perhaps you've heard of the West Nile virus, the mosquito-borne illness. Southam was actually responsible for the first cases of the illness in America in the 1950s, when he injected terminally ill patients with the disease to see if it would shrink their tumors. He had heard that certain viruses had the ability to shrink tumors, so he approached terminally ill patients in New York with a proposition.

Let me inject you with West Nile virus and we'll see if it helps at all. Patients that are terminally ill sometimes have very few options, so a few of them actually agreed to help in the study. What happened was 11% of the 100 patients developed West Nile encephalitis, inflammation of the brain, a life-threatening and incredibly uncomfortable illness.

But three patients that had lymphoma did see their tumors shrink. So the experiment was deemed a success. And now, Southam had a real career in cancer research. He became highly regarded. So a few years later, he was a cancer researcher at Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, working extensively with HeLa cancer cells in his lab in the mid-1950s.

HeLa cells are cancerous cells collected from a woman named Henrietta Lacks that duplicate every 24 hours, meaning the line of cells can survive forever. This line of cells is perfect for experimenting because you can see how cells respond to treatments really quickly. The woman that the cells were taken from, Henrietta Lacks, was a 31-year-old Black woman from Baltimore who died of her cancer a few years prior to Southam's experiments.

Many medical tests today are performed on Gila cancer cells, and she has saved countless lives. But it's important to note that they were collected without Henrietta's consent, and her family wasn't even made aware of what happened until decades later, which is very on theme with morbid medicine. Southam worried that dealing with cancer cells as much as he was would cause him to develop cancer himself.

So to put his worry to the test, in February of 1954, he and a team of researchers decided to run an experiment. They were going to inject HeLa cancer cells into 14 terminal cancer patients at their hospital.

The results of injecting them with cancer showed that new cancer cells did grow in the cancer patients, but typically disappeared in four to six weeks. Two of the patients did die before the new cancer cells regressed, but their deaths were attributed to their previous cancer diagnosis. Four other patients had cancer regrow at the injection site even after the nodule was removed.

Southam wasn't happy with these results, though. With this experiment, Southam argued that cancer patients lacked immunity to cancer cell implants. He wanted to push the experiment even farther and see if healthy individuals responded any differently.

But recruiting healthy people to get shot up with cancer cells was, to no one's surprise, very difficult. So what happens sometimes is researchers will use themselves as subjects in their own experiments. But Southam wasn't about to take that risk. He said, quote,

To me, it seemed like false heroism, like the old question whether the general should march behind or in front of his troops. I do not regard myself as indispensable. If I were not doing this work, someone else would be. And I do not regard the experiment as dangerous. But let's face it, there are relatively few skilled cancer researchers, and it seems stupid to even take the little risk.

Okay, sorry, I have one quick question. If you don't want to do the trial because you're even a little scared you'll get cancer, why are you asking others to do it? So instead, Southam did what many other shady doctors, including Richard Strong from before, did. He decided to try it out on prisoners. Mind you, I could do an entire other episode on dark experiments the U.S. has done on prisoners.

Research done in 2011 showed over 40 ethically dubious U.S. studies conducted on prisoners in the last 80 years, Southam's being a big one. These experiments were typically, quote, "...curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people and provided no useful results."

To get the study started, Southam put out a notice in the Ohio Penitentiary News, a prison newspaper distributed throughout U.S. prisons for the price of 50 cents. It said cancer research volunteers needed, and it promised that the study could potentially reveal in its volunteers, quote, hidden cancer, which they could diagnose early, leading to a better chance of survival.

It wasn't unusual to offer rewards to prisoners for experiments. Sometimes it was reduced sentences or, you know, if you're Richard Strong, it was cigarettes. But this experiment didn't promise any reward. It only alluded to maybe catching their cancer early. At the end of the day, 130 prisoners volunteered, although the study only asked for 25.

And for the next decade, Southam continuously injected these prisoners with HeLa cancer cells, and none of them were ever compensated. By the end of the trial, it was revealed that the prisoners did not catch the cancer. Case closed, right? He should feel pretty good about that. He can go back to work in his lab and not worry about getting cancer. But once again, Southam wasn't satisfied with these results.

In 1963, Southam posited a new study for a hypothesis that chronically ill patients who were not suffering from cancer would be able to reject cancer cells just as fast as healthy patients and faster than those who already had cancer. It was a study that truly no one asked for.

But still, he recruited 22 terminal patients, all affected by non-cancerous ailments, from the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn. And this time, he thought it was best to avoid the stigma around the word cancer. So instead, he only told patients that they would only be injected with human cells grown in a test tube.

He completely withheld what the study was from them. And this did not go over well with three of the other doctors at the hospital who were asked to assist Southam with his research.

Dr. Avira Kagan, David Leichter, and Perry Fersko all refused to help. They thought the decision to withhold information from the volunteers was incredibly irresponsible. And eventually, they took their grievances public. On January 20th, 1964, the New York World Telegram front page headline read, quote, And the public was horrified.

Experiments on prisoners could be overlooked at this time because people just didn't care. But preying on unsuspecting terminal patients proved to be crossing the line. That month's issue of Good Housekeeping's headline read, How Doctors Use Patients as Guinea Pigs. And that's good housekeeping. They talk about gardening. And even they were super upset.

And many subsequent news articles and scientific debates followed in front of the public. Scientists and doctors alike condemned the experiments. Though Southam's theory was proven correct and the research was considered important progress in oncology, the research was eventually cited as how not to conduct a study.

And still, Southam was never prosecuted and received one measly year of probation from the Board of Regents in New York. And then he received a promotion a few years after to president of the American Association for Cancer Research. What would have happened if Southam had successfully implanted cancer into unsuspecting patients?

When asked, Southam nonchalantly replied, what if they had? If they did, we would just cut it out. If only it were that easy. Okay, we're going to take a quick break. These stories were dark and next week's episode is actually also very dark. So when we get back, we're going to end on something just a tad lighter. I'm going to tell Leo about some recent kooky experiments that people have done.

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Live the Chumba life anytime, anywhere. Play for free now at ChumbaCasino.com. Hello, Leo. Hi, Kaylin. So today I'm going to read you some experiments that are, I will say people are consenting to these ones. So it's a lot better than the other ones that are happening in the episode.

So first and foremost, I want to tell you about an experiment that a man decided to do by himself. No one asked for this. So a few years ago, a man named Michael Smith, who is a Cornell University graduate student, he was there studying the evolution and behavior of honeybees. And he had a question that he wanted the answer to. And that question is, where's the most painful place to be stung?

If you're not asked to do an experiment and you just decide to do it, is it really an experiment or is it you just being kind of a freak? I think it's still technically an experiment. He decided to do it on himself. In order to do this, he stung himself 190 times on various body parts.

To get to the bottom of where's the most painful part to be stung. And to do this experiment, so every day for 38 days, Michael Smith would use little forceps, tiny little forceps to pick up a honeybee and he would hold it to whatever part of his body he was trying to have stung and he would leave the stinger in for a full minute.

So he was using a scale one to 10. And in order to decide the true rating of pain before and after he stung himself, he would sting his forearm. So he would sting his forearm, then sting his body part and then sting his forearm again and then rate the

how painful the body part was based on how it related to his forearm sting. I feel like this shouldn't have been an experiment. I feel like he truly could have just guessed and anyone would have been like, no, yeah, you're right. And also those poor little honeybees. I know because they die afterwards. They die. And they were probably so, I'm going to get upset because of the honeybees. I know. They were probably so scared and confused. Like what the hell is going on? So he stung himself in 25 different body parts.

And that ranged from everything, his toes, his face, his head, his fingers, everything. Where do you think the most painful place to be stung by a honeybee is? So I have stepped on a bee before multiple times, unfortunately. And you got stung on the lip famously. Famously. On the one field trip you took kindergarten year. That did not hurt as bad as getting stung on the foot.

because my entire foot swelled up and that hurt. - Interesting. - But of your whole, think about your entire body. I mean, you have tattoos. I imagine where tattoos hurt is maybe similar to where bee stings hurt. - Yeah, I mean, maybe your bicep 'cause that really hurts or like your rib cage. I have a thought about where the most painful spot could be. I don't know if I'm allowed to say it on the podcast. - It's actually not where you're thinking.

It is your nose, according to this man. He said his nose hurt worse than anywhere else on his body. I can see that because it's really close to the brain. And what does that have to do? You know how they say, like, if something's closer to the brain, the more it hurts. Is that true? Who says that? Them. I've got my ears pierced. That doesn't hurt as much as like.

Evolution, baby. So by what you're saying, your feet shouldn't have hurt at all. Those are the farthest from your brain. You really can't go around telling people that. OK, this next one. So in 2019, NASA put out an ad asking for people to participate in a study. Again, all consensual. They were going to pay eighteen thousand dollars for someone to lie in bed for two months.

It was called the Artificial Gravity Bedrest Study, and it was based in Cologne, Germany, and they were looking specifically for women between the ages of 24 and 55, also who spoke German for the study, who would lay in bed for two straight months.

And if you break it down hourly, it ended up being like $13 an hour. It wasn't a great, I mean, $18,000 for two months to just lay in bed sounds really good. But then when you break it down. 24-7. Yeah, 24-7. You can't even get up to go waz. Can't get up to use the bathroom. Can't get up to bathe. Can't stand up at all. They bring you bedpans to use for the bathroom. So you have to sit or lie down. You have to be lying down. Oh, so you can't even sit up. You can't even sit up.

Lying down for 60 days. Were there limits to the mobility that you could do? Because you could still do some stretches. Well, in 2015, this man named Andrew did the same study, but he did 70 days and he cataloged what it was like. Same thing. $18,000, 70 days. And he said it was insane.

He said for about the first month, the researchers would come in and check on him a lot. So he was still getting some stimulation from being social. He was talking to them. But then a month in, once you're in laying down position, that's kind of where you're going to be all day. He said they let him play video games, but he still had to use a bedpan to go to the bathroom.

bath in bed, like could not get up for anything. At the four week mark had a total shift in his mentality. He said his psychology like broke at that point. Yeah. And he just felt so isolated and alone and got really depressed. He said his girlfriend was allowed to visit him after that, except she wasn't really allowed to touch him and she couldn't touch the bed because that would have broken protocol. She was able to sit next to him and they could talk, but

They weren't allowed to really interact beyond that. He said it was miserable. What do you think that does to your body after that long just laying down 70 days, 24 hours atrophy? If you're in a coma, they have to keep your muscles moving so that they don't lock up and like, yeah, disintegrate essentially. Yeah. Or whatever. I'm guessing.

When you wake up, you can't just get up and go like your body has to adjust. So I imagine, first of all, you're going to lose a bunch of weight. You're going to lose all your muscle mass and your bones are probably going to get like locked up and you're going to have to do.

some stretches to fit. Yeah. So he said one of the first things they noticed when they did tests on him was that he had lost 20 percent of his total blood volume. Blood volume. Yeah. His body stopped making as much blood. Interesting. Interesting. Basically, they sent him to a hospital to get out of bed. He wasn't allowed to stand up in the facility. They had to send him to a hospital to stand up because they didn't really know what was going to happen.

Mind you, all of this is for testing like astronauts in space that don't move around. So he said when he stood up immediately, his heart rate skyrocketed to 150 beats per minute. His skin became itchy. He was covered in sweat and blood was rushing into his legs, expanding the veins that had become inflamed.

increasingly elastic throughout the past several months of bed rest. He said around the eight minute mark of standing, he felt like he was going to pass out and he started blacking out like he started losing his vision and they immediately let him sit back down in the bed and lay down and kind of not be so woozy. And then the woman running the study said that no one ever lasted a full 15 minutes standing after laying down for 70 days.

So like he couldn't stand up. He couldn't stand up for that long. And that ever again? No, I mean, eventually he went back to normal. But after laying down for that long, the first time you stand up, all of the blood rushes and you feel like you're going to pass out. So, yeah, there was that one. It kind of sounds like, I mean, they did one in 2015. They did one in 2019. If you ever want to make a few dollars and lay down for a while. I am confused.

Going to pass for right now. Okay. To be honest. Fair. That's the point of these studies. Is they ask for human consent.

In the episode, we talk about studies that there was no consent involved. And so these ones at least are letting people know what's going on and saying like, hey, this one sucks. But honestly, at the beginning of the pandemic, if you had asked me, I would have been like, absolutely sign my name on the dotted line. I'll do anything. I'm so bored. I'll do anything. Yeah, that's fair. That's a good point. Totally. 70 days lying down and get money. Yeah. Someone brings me anything I need. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'll do that.

Thanks so much for closing out the episode with me, Leo. Thanks for having me on again. You've been keeping me in the basement. It's been... I know. It's good to see you out in the sunlight. I finally get to stretch my toes. Now back to the basement. This has been Heart Starts Pounding, written and produced by me, Kayla Moore. Additional producing by Matt Brown. Sound design and mix by Peachtree Sound. Special thanks to Travis Dunlap, Grayson Jernigan, the team at WME, and Ben Jaffe.

And another thanks to our new Patreon members. You will be thanked in the monthly newsletter, which you can sign up for on our website. Have a heart-pounding story or a case request? You can also submit those through our website as well. Until next time, stay curious.

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