Morbid Medicine: Human Experiments
A brain disease caused by a routine treatment, a deadly medical mixup during a medical trial, and a doctor hell bent on proving he can give patients cancer. Today's episode has 3 stories about what happens when you run tests on unsuspecting patients.
Subscribe on Patreon for bonus content and to become a member of our Rogue Detecting Society. Patrons have access to ad-free listening and bonus content. And members of our High Council on Patreon have access to our after show called Footnotes.
Follow on Tik Tok and Instagram for a daily dose of horror.
We have a monthly newsletter now! Be sure to sign up for updates and more.
SOURCES
https://aquila.usm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1242&context=ojhe
https://daily.jstor.org/the-deadly-bilibid-prison-vaccine-trials/
https://opinion.inquirer.net/128605/cholera-killed-100000-in-1902-04
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War
https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/14/resources/7279
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02729-2
TRANSCRIPT
When Jo Jacobsen’s daughter turned 17 she was small. I mean, Jo Jacobsen 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 11th 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 Jo decided it was time to see a doctor
What happened next was tests. A lot of them. The doctor agreed that Jo’s daughter was small enough for it to be concerning. He had seen this happen to other children before, and some of those kids never grew to be taller than 4 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. Jo’s daughter had a pituitary tumor. It sounds scary, but it was 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 the Scripps Institute of California where she’d be able to get a new treatment that wasn’t yet available in Washington. Shots of human growth hormone to stimulate her growth.
Ok, 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 fitness enthusiasts using it for performance purposes, but it does have a medical purpose, and it’s still around. The human growth hormone that we use today, however, comes from a different source than it came from in the 1950’s up until the mid 1980’s. 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 this 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, Jo and her mother did just that. From age11 to 15, the two would head down to california to receive shots of the hormone. 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, it took 120 corpse pituitary glands to treat one child for one year. Jane was on it for 4 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 of different things. And these brains weren’t being screened for prior illness.
But doctors weren’t worried about this. They said the treatment was completely safe. There were only 2 things that worried them. 1. They thought it was a possibility that some children could develop antibodies that attacked the human growth hormone, making it obsolete. And 2. They were worried that too many kids would want it.
By 1984 when corpse growth hormone was being swapped out for Synthetic growth hormone, doctors were getting tons of calls from student athletes who wanted to be bigger and stronger. These kids were rejected from getting the treatment.
Other than that, though, they said there would be nothing to worry about, and When human growth hormone from corpses was being used from the 50’s to mid 80’s, over 1,800 children in the UK were treated with it. Even more were treated in America.
But by the 80’s, concerning things started happening to some of the patients.
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 serious over the next few months as his vision became blurry and he had trouble speaking. His symptoms continued to get worse and worse until he was finally checked out by doctors, and he was told that he had a rare brain disorder called Creutzfeldt-Jakob (KROITS-felt YAH-kobe)disease, or CJD.
The symptoms of CJD are similar to Alzheimers, 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 man didn’t.
But still, it can happen totally randomly, so when he died within a year of finding out he had CJD, no one studying human growth hormone 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 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 treatment 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 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.
It doesn’t end there, though. Maybe you saw the study that came out a few weeks ago, but it’s just been revealed that now multiple adults age 39-55 who received these growth hormone shots as children have been diagnosed with Alzheimers.
This is huge because 1. It shows that Alzheimers can be transferred from person to person, though it’s very difficult. It literally takes their brain being injected into your body. And 2. The doctors had a feeling this would happen. When the brains of the patients with CJD were inspected upon autopsy. Many of them also showed markers associated with early Alzheimers. They were just waiting for the symptoms to finally start, and earlier this year it was confirmed that their worst nightmare came true.
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 use synthetic growth hormone which is much, much safer.
In todays episode, I want to focus on a few more times that people were trying things on patients that were dubious at best. We’re going to hear about medical mixups that had deadly consequences, and the time a man intentionally tried to give people cancer. And then at the end, I’m going to tell Leo about some recent medical experiments that have happened. Basically if you’re a hypochondriac like me, it’s going to be a really good time.
So as always, listener discretion is advised.
Welcome to heart starts pounding, a podcast of horrors, hauntings and mysteries. I’m your host, Kaelyn Moore.
Thank you to our wonderful sponsors, and to 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 popup 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 and check it out if you w ant ad-free listening and more content. You should see the option on the show page, but I’m also linking in the show notes. Thanks to the team at Apple for helping me get that going. If you’re listening on a different platform and you want all that stuff, you can join the Rogue Detecting Society on Patreon. We’ve got some cool stuff coming for the Rogue Detecting Society in the next couple months so stay tuned.
I started thinking about this weeks episode after Chloe, one of our listeners sent me an article about the growth hormone treatments. And 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, 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 dives into older cases where we can go, what the heck were they thinking.
Alright, to start us off, I want to jump into the story of Dr. Richard Strong. A man up to some of the worst medical shenanigans I have ever read about.
It’s November 16, 1906.
Doctor Richard P. Strong strides confidently through a large concrete gate into Bilibid (pronounced ‘billy-bid’) Prison in Manila (Ma-nil-uh like vanilla), Philippines. He thinks he has something that will change Manila, and potentially the world.
See, a few years earlier, a vessel from Hong Kong arrived in Manila carrying the lethal disease cholera, and the pathogen spread like wildfire due to the Filipino American war that was being fought. The war exacerbated the disease’s spread across the country, killing US soldiers and Filipinos alike, and by the end of 1906 over 100 thousand people had died horrible deaths.
But Dr. Strong thinks he has something that could stop the spread. A way to immunize the population against it.
To help combat these diseases, military forces brought in American doctors to explore cures and preventive measures, often conducting trials on inmates at the Bilibid Prison. Dr. Strong arrived that day to perform a medical experiment that would prove his own cholera vaccine was more effective than others.
The way they made cholera immunizations back then was rudimentary. The bacteria was set out long enough for oxygen to weaken it. Then it was injected into people. It wasn’t 100 percent effective, but it had been working on people in other parts of the world. Strong had made his own concoction that he thought would have an even HIGHER protection rate, and he was eager to try it out on not so willing prisoners.
Throughout the course of that day, 24 prisoners were marched to Strong’s makeshift lab in the prison, where he injected a murky brown liquid into the inmates forearms, 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 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 innoculated fell ill with swollen lymph nodes and fever. Hours later, 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. Those symptoms are typically vomiting and diarrhea. If anyone dies of Cholera it’s from dehydration and it takes more than just a few hours.
If the dead men had swollen lymph nodes, perhaps they just caught something nasty in the prison. The strangest part in all of this, though, was their lymph nodes had turned black before they died. That was not common, really, with any modern illnesses.
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 has fallen dangerously ill, and many were dying.
As some of the other men are 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 had figured out what the men died from. You need to sit down, the examiner tells strong.
He reads him the report and Strong feels all of the air get sucked out of the room - The men had died from the bubonic plague. yeah, that same disease that wiped out 50 percent of the European population back in the 14th century. 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 victim within hours or a few short days. By the end, 13 of the 24 patients died.
Strong’s immediate superior Dr. Paul Freer, was not informed of the experiment until after the prisoners started to fall ill, and he called the effort to keep the incident quiet “the hardest blizzard we have ever experienced”. He wrote a confidential letter to a friend attempting to shed light on the serious mix up. In it, Freer recounts that a tube containing the bubonic plague had gone missing from Strong’s lab. Strong ordered a search and they found an empty tube discarded in cleaning solution, and simply…. thought no more of the matter. Perhaps my listeners who work in the medical field can advise, but that doesn’t seem….safe? Somehow, Freer thinks that a visiting doctor got the plague tube mixed up with the cholera vaccine and mixed vials, which is what Strong brought to the prison instead.
Strong was investigated by a general committee appointed by the governor general of the Philippines, and though the US Senate, secretary of war, and President Theodore Roosevelt were made aware of the affair, no mainland investigation was held. The general committee said that 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 buried.
It was a devastating outcome, but if you don’t think this story gets worse, then you haven’t been listening to this podcast long enough. Get this: Six years later, Strong would perform another experiment on Bilibid prisoners, this time, putting them on a rice based diet to see if this would produce the lethal vitamin B1 deficiency disease known as Beriberi (look up pronunciation). 29 prisoners were deprived of all nutrients except for Rice, and two prisoners died. This time it was directly because of the experiment effects, not accidental bubonic plague injection.
The surviving inmates compensation for their “participation” in the 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. Fifteen nameless inmates or likely more, all Philippine natives, paid the highest price, as the rest of the survivors were left to their jail cells and their cigars. All in the name of medical advancement.
This case was cited some 39 years later, as defense for some of the darkest experiments in history - the human experiments conducted by the Nazis.
In their defense at The Nuremberg Trials, the 1945 trials where the allies sought to hold Nazi’s accountable for their war crimes, Nazi physicians cited the Bilibid Prison case amongst others to support their claim that use of prisoners as research, they said, was a universally accepted practice, therefore a way to justify their experimentation.
The Billibid prison trials were horrible, but their legacy would be used to further justify crimes against humanity in the future
More after the Break
In the early 70’s, 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.
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 the strange experiments he wanted to run to test these theories. Let’s start from the beginning.
Perhaps you’ve heard about west nile virus, the mosquito borne illness. Southam was actually responsible for the first cases of the illness in america in the 1950’s, 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 and we’ll see if it helps at all.
Terminally ill patients sometimes have very few options, so a few of them actually agreed to the study. What happened was 11% of 100 patients developed West Nile Encephilitis, inflammation of the brain, a life threatening and incredibly uncomfortable illness. But 3 patients that had lymphoma did see their tumors shrink, so the experiment was deemed a success.
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 really quickly. The woman who the cells were taken from, Henrietta Lacks, was a 31 year old black woman from baltimore who died of her cancer. Many medical tests today are performed on HeLa cancer cells, and she’s saved countless lives, but it’s important to note that they were collected without the patients consent and her family wasn’t made aware of what happened until decades later, which keeps theme with morbid medicine.
Southam worried that dealing with cancer cells as much as he was would cause him to develop cancer himself.
To put this worry to the test, in February 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.
Though hospital administrators claim that informed consent was given orally by each patient, it seemed Southam had a questionable way of putting patients at ease and getting their consent.
His version of consent on the forms he asked them to sign seemed broad and ambiguous. It could be argued the patients didn’t really know what was at stake. It also begged the question, even if they did consent, these people are terminally ill, usually in a lot of psychological and physical pain at the end of their life. Should they have been put in the position to make these kinds of decisions in the first place?
The results showed that the new cancer cells did grow in the cancer patients, but usually disappeared in 4-6 weeks. Two of the patients died 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 the results. With this experiment, Southam argued that cancer patients lacked immunity to cancer cell implants. He wanted to push the experiment farther and see if healthy individuals respond differently.
But Recruiting healthy people to get shot up with cancer cells was, to no one's surprise, very difficult.
Sometimes, researchers used themselves as subjects in their experiments, but Southam wasn’t about to take that risk. He said “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 did not regard the experiment as dangerous. But, let’s face it, there are relatively few skilled cancer researchers, and it seemed stupid to take even the little risk.” Ok sorry, 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?
Instead, Southam did what many other shady doctors, including Richard Strong did. He decided to try it out on prisoners. Mind you, I could do an entire other episode on the dark experiments the US has done on prisoners. research done in 2011 found over 40 ethically dubious US studies conducted on prisoners in the last 80 years. Southam’s being a big one. These experiments were typically “curiosity-satisfying experiments that hurt people and provided no useful results.”
Southam put out a notice in the Ohio Penitentiary News - a prison newspaper distributed throughout US prisons for the subscription price of 50 cents. ‘Cancer Research Volunteers Needed” read the headline. It promised that the study could potentially reveal in its volunteers “hidden” cancer, which they could diagnose early leading to a better chance of survival. Some researchers in previous prison experiments offered rewards to subjects, reduced sentences or, in Richard Strong’s case, cigarettes, but this experiment didn’t promise any of that. It only alluded to maybeeeeee catching your cancer early.
Anyone with TB, syphilis, cardiac disease and several other ailments would be eligible, and 130 prisoners volunteered although the study called for 25. The consent form read “This study, as it has been explained to me, is intended to determine whether or not presumably live cancer cells can be successfully transplanted, indirectly, from one individual to another. I have been told that the cancer cells will be transplanted to my body by means of direct needle injection under my skin….”
For the next decade, Southam continuously injected over 200 prisoners with HeLa cancer cells. And none of them were ever compensated.
At 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 his lab and not worry about contracting cancer. once again, Southam wasn’t satisfied with the results. In 1963, Southam posited a new study for a new 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 no one asked for.
To test this, he recruited 22 terminal patients, all affected by non cancerous ailments, from the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn.
But he remembered how hard it was to get patients to agree to sign up to be injected with cancer cells, well, unless they were incarcerated. Southam thought it was best to avoid the stigma around the quote “phobia and ignorance that surrounds the word cancer” and instead tell patients they were getting human cells growing in test tubes. He completely withheld what the study actually was from them.
Three doctors at the hospital who were asked to assist Southam with his research refused. Doctors Avir Kagan, David Leichter and Perry Fersko. They thought the decision to withhold info from the volunteers was extremely wrong.
Kagan said of the study “There was never a question. I decided I wouldn't do it. I couldn't imagine approaching a patient and asking for his permission to inject him with live cancer cells. I certainly wouldn't consider it unless we got consent. That was the key, informed consent.”
Southam and his team pressured the trio but they held firm. While Southam continued on with the experiment unphased, the doctors took their grievances public, and on Jan 20th, 1964, the New York World Telegram front page headline read “Charge Hospital Shot Live Cancer Cells into Patients.”
The public was horrified. Experiments on prisoners could be overlooked at this time, 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 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 cited as how not to conduct a study.
Southam was never prosecuted and received one measly year of probation from the Board of Regents of 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’s theory was incorrect? What if the patients had gotten cancer or other serious side effects? When asked, Southam nonchalantly replied “What if they had? If they did, we’d just cut it out.”
Ok, we’re going to take a quick break, these stories were dark, and next weeks episode is also very dark, so when we get back we’re going to end on something a little lighter. I’m going to tell Leo about some recent kooky experiments people have done, all with consent of those involved.