Gene experiments of fascism: chimera or reality. Genetic roulette: What are the dangers of genome experiments?

What was happening in the Dominican village of Salinas became a shocking sensation. There, local girls at the age of twelve sometimes turn into boys. There are many such cases - approximately every 90th person changes gender by adolescence.

Parents are not against it, they raise their children according to the principle: when they grow up, they will decide on their own. In the village they are used to this and celebrate the appearance of a new man in the community with a special holiday.

Scientists from all over the world flocked to unravel the mystery of natural sex change.

That's what Cornell University endocrinologist Dr. Julianne Imperato found out. Science is dealing with a rare genetic disease.

It is triggered due to a lack of the enzyme 5-alpha reductase in the body.

It turns any human embryo that is initially female into a male at 8 weeks of fetal development. But for some reason, for the residents of the village of Salinas, this enzyme can start working at the age of 12 years.

Scientists do not yet know what causes this and what mechanism blocks the action of hormones or enzymes. However, studying Dominican hermaphrodites could have far-reaching implications.

It is obvious that a number of chemicals can trigger any mutations in the human body. And for science this opens up endless possibilities.

Create a person with a given set of qualities. Including using GMO food. Make a creature in a test tube consisting of a set of genes from any animal. Make a weapon that only affects people of a certain race. Eliminate a number of abilities in adults healthy people, as, for example, to obesity and baldness, and to longevity and reproduction. Moreover, such experiments have been ongoing for a long time. And there is even information that they were successful.

The lead singer of the legendary group ABBA, Frida Lyngstad, basked in the rays of success and fame for many years and toured the whole world. After marriage she bears the title of princess. But few people know terrible secret this beautiful and talented woman. She is the victim of a genetic experiment. The artist learned the truth about her origin when she was already famous.

Frida was born in November 1945. A few months after occupied Norway was liberated by Soviet troops. Her Norwegian mother fled to neighboring Sweden because the birth of her daughter made her an outcast in her homeland. 17-year-old Sini Lyngstad was selected to participate in the Lebensborn project, which translates to “Source of Life.”

This Nazi program began on the orders of Hitler and Himmler back in 1938. Its goal was to create a particularly pure Nordic race through selection. An important part of the program was to force German or Aryan-eligible women from occupied territories to bear children with SS soldiers and officers.

Volunteer girls were tested for racial purity. Are there any criminals, Jews, gypsies or mentally ill people in the family? After this, true Aryans were allowed into the body. There were special visiting houses where the Nazis met with those who wanted to have a child from them. The couple may not have even met before this.

If the mother was loyal to the authorities, she was allowed to raise the child herself. Their fathers never saw them. During the war years, about 12 thousand children were born to Norwegian mothers from German soldiers in Lebensborn houses. Frida Lyngstad found out that her father was Wehrmacht captain Alfred Hase. She managed to find him, but this meeting was not warm. They never saw each other again.

Another part of the Lebensborn program was even more inhumane. In the occupied territories, small children - from one to six years old - were selected from among the prisoners, having the external signs of real Aryans: tall stature, blond hair, light eyes. And this is the majority of children of the Slavic and Scandinavian peoples.

The kids were taken away and raised in special orphanages as future soldiers of the Third Reich, who were supposed to replenish the gene pool of Hitler's empire.

They were made to forget native language, parents, homeland. Historians suggest that there are tens of thousands of these children from Belarus, Poland, Russia, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, and Yugoslavia. And after the war they remained in a foreign land, grew up and do not know where their real families were.

Vladimir Mazharov was incredibly lucky. He managed to survive in Lebensborn and return home. The professor, doctor of medical sciences has been living in Krasnoyarsk for many years and enjoys well-deserved respect.

The boy was taken away from his mother when he was one year and three months old. Zinaida Mazharova and her eldest son Slava met the war in the Latvian city of Liepaja. Being on last month pregnancy, she cared for the wounded. Her husband Fedor, a career officer and pilot, was sent to defend the skies over Leningrad. Meanwhile, Latvia was bombed. Zinaida and her children survived and ended up in a German prison.

She went through 4 concentration camps: Salaspils, Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen, Belzig. Every day in anticipation of death. In Belzig, she left the firing squad with one single thought: to find the children.

Both of her sons were selected for deportation to Germany. But the elder later did the impossible. In 1944, when he was 9, he managed to escape from the Nazis and lived alone for a whole year in a Riga apartment that belonged to them before the war. Mother returned home at the end of May 1945. Her eldest son was already waiting for her there.

Three weeks later the doorbell rang - my father returned. The only thing missing was the youngest - Vladimir. They searched for him for two years and found him. Although he was less than one and a half years old, he clearly remembers how children were selected in the concentration camp. High - to improve the gene pool of the fascists. The short ones were destroyed.

Little Volodya ended up in a special orphanage, above which floated a black flag decorated with white runes. This place was located in northern Germany, near the city of Lubeck. There the children were well fed and taken to the sea. But German culture, strict order and ideology were mandatory disciplines in Lebensborn's institution.

"Yes, I would probably have been a good soldier of the Fuhrer, because this German order, scrupulousness, all this was drummed into us in the literal sense of the word, which means that for the slightest deviation from the norms of education, that is, we were taught to order, to perform any order from a senior. And therefore, the older children could make fun of us, the little ones, but we had to endure, because this is how we developed our character, that is, they told us that we had to develop such a character for ourselves."- said Mozharov.

The breeders of the new race selected a mate for especially beautiful and intelligent children from an early age. Although there were more than a hundred boys and only a couple dozen girls in that orphanage, Vladimir got a bride.

The family searched for him after the war, but to no avail. This continued until Latvian Irena Astors returned from Germany in 1947. She worked as a teacher in an orphanage where children taken from the USSR were kept. The woman wrote an open letter to the newspaper "Soviet Latvia" and said that she had a list of all the abducted children. The Germans kept all the names and surnames...

Vladimir was six years old when he saw his family. However, the boy's return turned into a real diplomatic war. At the end of the war, the territory where the shelter was located ended up in the British zone of occupation. Lord Woolton, who headed the British Red Cross, categorically refused to recognize the rights of Soviet parents to their children.

Most of the former children, involuntary participants in the Aryanization program, were transported to orphanages in England and the USA. There, doctors, psychologists and representatives of the special services talked with the failed Aryans.

Only these efforts have moved to the laboratory. By a strange coincidence, it was Great Britain that became the first country in the world to adopt the scandalous “three-parent” law.

On February 24, 2015, the British Parliament captured the world's attention. The heated discussion lasted for more than four hours. Parliamentarians debated whether to allow it or not the new kind biotechnological procedures, namely to create a child in vitro with a set of genes from three people. Father, mother and donor mitochondrial DNA from another woman.

The fact is that many genetic diseases are transmitted through mitochondrial DNA. Replacing this part of the egg will save a person from an unpleasant inheritance - supporters of the law shouted.

However, opponents talk about more dire consequences. The new organism will be considered, scientifically, a biological chimera - an artificial creature. No one knows whether science has discovered all the secrets of nature in order to construct Frankensteins on such a massive scale.

Perhaps they will not be viable at all or they will develop unknown genetic abnormalities. There have never been any experiments where chimeras survived to adulthood. However, the British Parliament eventually allowed the procedure.

Already in 2016, the first children with a mixed set of genes may appear in the UK.

The unprecedented case of American Lydia Fairchild became a sensation in world medicine. After the divorce, she applied for benefits and alimony, and her ex-husband insisted on DNA testing of the paternity of their two children.

The results shocked everyone. The test confirmed paternity, but showed that Lydia herself, who gave birth to the children, was not their mother.

A repeat test was done and samples were taken from Lydia's third child, with whom she was pregnant. And again, the incredible - according to the DNA code, the mother of the unborn child and his brothers was not at all the woman who carried them.

How is this possible? A scandal broke out in the USA, and Lydia was accused of anything.

Her lawyer saved the day. He provided the court with an article from the New England Journal of Medicine, an authoritative scientific publication. It described the story of one woman who was found to have two different sets of DNA. And in the same way, her children were genetically not her own. In science, this phenomenon is called a chimera. Lydia Fairchild discovered that her organs and tissues also contained two different sets of DNA and proved her rights.

How are chimeras created? Scientists were prompted to solve the mystery by the same results of DNA tests. The woman who passed on a different set of chromosomes to her children was a distant relative. Most likely an aunt. This led to an astonishing discovery. It was established that this mother, while still in the womb, had a twin sister. At the stage of just a few cells, the embryos fused together, and no one would have known about it. But already at this stage the embryo has its own unique DNA code.

This is how a person with two sets of genes turned out.

Indeed, there may be many more chimeras among us. In particular, these are people with eyes or hair different color. All these are conjoined twins.

In the Kemerovo region, Pavlik Korchagin was born - a boy with a rare anomaly. He got extra organs from his twin brother. Double circulatory system and another pair of eyes. Alas, all four saw nothing.

Even when the child had an extra pair of eyes removed, he could not see. Then specialists from the All-Russian Center for Eye and Plastic Surgery in Ufa got down to business. They carried out a complex of operations and, with the help unique drug alloplant restored Pavlik’s vision.

In his case, it was most likely due to an inherited mutation. His father served at a nuclear test site and was likely exposed to radiation.

In the animal world, chimerism is much more common. Available REN TV Footage appeared and circulated around the world's news agencies. They show a five-eared cat, a snake with a clawed paw, two-headed and eight-legged mutants.

In Gorodets, Nizhny Novgorod region, they seriously waited for milk from a goat. Irina Nemesh, the owner of a goat named Seryozha, claims that the milk is no worse than from an ordinary goat. A curiosity, but veterinarians know this.

But the goat Seryozha also turned out to be partial to sheep. The strangest thing is that as a result of his love, offspring were allegedly born.

The fruit of the strange union was either kids or lambs. Irina examines the miracle of nature and finds in them the features of both parents. But perhaps the owner simply doesn’t know something about her sheep.

According to scientists, goats and sheep do not interbreed naturally. They have different quantities chromosomes. However, for the first time it was possible to obtain an artificial hybrid of two animals with the help of goat and sheep embryos. Such interspecific chimeras were obtained by scientists from two countries, England and Germany, almost simultaneously, in 1984. Sheep goats were formed by the mechanical union of two embryos at a very early stage.

At that time, scientists were unable to grow a chimeric embryo into a full-fledged organism. However, these experiments did not stop. The experiments were in full swing and were so close to creating real monsters that biology professor Stuart Newman and his colleague Jamie Rivkin decided to take a desperate step.

They patented in the United States all possible but not yet created methods for creating human-animal chimeras. According to them, to prevent inhumane experiments.

This was back in 1998. Colleagues ridiculed Newman-Rivkin's initiative. But it turned out the other way around. There were more than enough scientists from different countries who wanted to create a human-animal hybrid...

Now in the United States, the leaders of any unclassified work on crossing human and animal cells have only two options: pay professors or transfer the experiments to another country.

In the same UK, after noisy debates, the Human Tissue and Embryo Act was adopted in 2007. It allows scientists to create three different types of human and animal embryos. The first type, the classic chimera, is made by injecting animal cells into a human embryo. The second, the so-called transgenic embryo, involves the introduction of animal DNA into a human embryo. The third, known as a cytoplasmic hybrid, is created by transferring the nucleus of human cells into animal eggs from which almost all the genetic material has been removed.

However, the same law prohibits the creation of true hybrids by merging the egg and sperm of a human and an animal.

In addition, chimeric embryos cannot be implanted into a human or animal body and have the right to live only in the laboratory for no more than 14 days. Why are they even needed? It turns out that it is much easier and faster to grow stem cells needed for some operations.

Humanity already has a wealth of experience working with chimeric organisms - in flora. Robert Shapiro is the head of the global chimera factory. For a long time he headed the transnational company Monsanto. This biotech giant is a leader in GMO production. Concerned about its image, the company hired an army of PR people to create a favorable image of the chimera factory. This is how the myth was invented that only GMO agricultural plants can save the planet from hunger. Painting a rosy future, the company's PR specialists want the truth about the dark past of this company to be forgotten forever.

Note that the first chimera plant, genetically modified soybean, was made by Monsanto in 1996. Already at that time, concerns began to arise that the accumulation of glyphosate in edible plants could have a detrimental effect on human health. First of all, provoking cancer.

Lawyers for the producers of chimera plants immediately stated that soy can cause cancer only if the technology is violated, and this happens extremely rarely. But how are genetically modified soybeans actually grown?

Back in the early 2000s, Russian scientists conducted a number of unprecedented experiments. Their goal was to determine whether GMO foods are truly dangerous to human health. For the purity of the experiment, in addition to the rats that completely switched to eating transgenic soybeans, several more control groups of animals were created that were fed natural food.

Almost all the rats died from huge tumors that simply devoured the poor animals from the inside. And in subsequent years, to verify these results, similar experiments were carried out in other countries of the world. And all the scientists got the same thing. However, the main argument of chimera plant defenders was that human body different from a rodent. But Russian specialists managed to prove that transgenic plants can actually cause harm to the human body.

The fact that it was allergists who took up the problem of GMO products was by no means an accident. In the 90s, products with GMOs began to be actively produced all over the world. At the same time, a strange epidemic begins in Russia.

People died from anaphylactic shock. A real epidemic of deaths is already a threat national security. Allergies are especially dangerous for children, which is why it was decided to check baby food for safety. The main goal The study was to find out how allergenic transgenic soybean is.

From the very first steps, scientists encountered unforeseen difficulties. To determine the danger of chimera soybeans, it was first necessary to establish how safe regular soybeans are in terms of allergies. Even though the chimera soybean variety was only cultivated a few years ago, finding pure soybeans has proven incredibly difficult.

While unique research into the safety of transgenic plants was being conducted in Russia, alarming information was coming from all over the world about more and more outbreaks of strange diseases.

Russian scientists not only managed to prove that transgenic soybean is much more dangerous for allergy sufferers than regular soybean. For the first time, it has been determined what exactly turns transgenic soybean into a killer. The gene code is changed by the introduction of a new protein, which turns out to be the strongest allergen. For the first time in world practice, the safety of baby food based on transgenic soybeans was questioned. Unfortunately, not everyone heeded the warning of domestic scientists. And this led to new victims.

The US National Council for Standardization of Organic Products made a unanimous decision back in 1991. The Council ruled that GMOs and food products derived from them should not be sold in the organic food system. This is where the elite of American society buys groceries. Environmentally friendly products without transgenic inserts and chemical additives. Those who cannot get into these stores, according to financial qualifications, are forced to eat cheap food made from green chimeras. According to a number of researchers, the American elite is openly conducting a global genetic experiment on the total sterilization of the poor classes. After all, according to Russian scientists, transgenic food can make a person infertile.

In this case, the human genome turns out to be clogged with an alien code - DNA, which implements own program. A similar situation occurs when a virus gets into the computer - a software failure occurs.

Moreover, the easiest way for new genetic inserts to enter cells associated with human reproduction is sperm and eggs. It leads to complete blocking reproductive apparatus.

According to scientists' forecasts, problems with the reproductive sphere will become one of the most pressing in the 21st century and they will affect not only the so-called developed countries, but also those where there used to be a real birth boom.

Experiments on humans will always be a controversial topic. On the one hand, this approach allows us to obtain more information about the human body, which will be found in the future useful application, on the other hand, there are a number of ethical issues. The best we can do as civilized human beings is to try to find some balance. Ideally, we should conduct experiments that cause as little harm to humans as possible.

However, the cases on our list are the exact opposite of this concept. We can only imagine the pain these people felt - to those who liked to play God, they meant no more than guinea pigs.

Dr. Henry Cotton believed that the underlying causes of insanity were localized infections. After Cotton became head of the Trenton Asylum in 1907, he began practicing a procedure he called surgical bacteriology: Cotton and his team performed thousands surgical operations on patients, often without their consent. Firstly, they removed teeth and tonsils, and if this was not enough, then the “doctors” took the next step - removed internal organs which, in their opinion, is the source of the problem.

Cotton believed in his methods so much that he even used them on himself and his family: for example, he removed some of the teeth of himself, his wife and two sons, one of whom also had part of his large intestine removed. Cotton claimed that his treatment resulted in a high recovery rate for patients, and that he simply became a lightning rod for criticism from those moralists who found his methods appalling. For example, Cotton justified the death of 49 of his patients during colectomy by the fact that they had already suffered from “terminal stage psychosis” before the operation.

A subsequent independent investigation revealed that Cotton had greatly exaggerated. After his death in 1933, such operations were no longer carried out, and Cotton's point of view fell into obscurity. To his credit, critics ruled that he was quite sincere in his attempts to help patients, although he did it in a crazy way.

Jay Marion Sims, revered by many as a pioneer in the field of American gynecology, began extensive research in the field of surgery in 1840. He used several black slave women as experimental subjects. The study, which took three years, focused on the surgical treatment of vesicovaginal fistulas.

Sims believed that the disease occurs when there is an abnormal connection between the bladder and the vagina. But, strangely, he performed the operations without anesthesia. One subject, a woman named Anarcha, endured as many as 30 such operations, ultimately allowing Sims to prove his case. This wasn't the only horrifying research Sims conducted: He also tried to treat slave children suffering from lockjaw - spasms of the chewing muscles - using a shoe awl to break and then realign their skull bones.

Richard Strong, a physician and head of the Biological Laboratory of the Philippine Science Bureau, administered several vaccinations to inmates from a Manila prison in an attempt to find the perfect vaccine against cholera. In one such experiment in 1906, he mistakenly infected prisoners with the bubonic plague virus, which led to the death of 13 people.

A government investigation into the incident then confirmed this fact. It was announced tragic accident: The vaccine bottle was confused with the virus. Strong lay low for a while after his fiasco, but six years later he returned to science and gave prisoners another series of vaccinations, this time in search of a vaccine against beriberi disease. Some participants in the experiment died, and the survivors were compensated for their suffering by giving them several packs of cigarettes.

Strong's notorious experiments were so inhumane and led to such catastrophic consequences that later on Nuremberg trials Nazi defendants cited them as examples in an attempt to justify their own horrific experiments.

This method can be regarded more as torture than treatment. Dr. Walter Jones recommended boiling water as a cure for abdominal pneumonia in the 1840s - he tested his method for several months on numerous slaves suffering from the disease.

Jones described in great detail how one patient, a 25-year-old man, was stripped naked and forced to lie on his stomach on the ground, and then Jones poured about 22 liters of boiling water onto the patient's back. However, this was not the end: the doctor stated that the procedure should be repeated every four hours, and perhaps this would be enough to “restorate capillary circulation.”

Jones later stated that he had cured many patients in this way, and claimed that he had never done anything with his own hands. Nothing surprising.

While the idea of ​​shocking someone for treatment is ridiculous in itself, a Cincinnati doctor named Roberts Bartholow took it to the next level: he sent shocks electric current straight into the brain of one of his patients.

In 1847, Bartholow treated a patient named Mary Rafferty, who suffered from a cranial ulcer - the ulcer had literally eaten through part of the cranial bone, and the woman's brain was visible through this hole.

With the patient's permission, Bartholow inserted electrodes directly into the brain and, passing current discharges through them, began to observe the reaction. He repeated his experiment eight times over four days. Rafferty initially seemed to be doing fine, but later in her treatment she fell into a coma and died a few days later.

The public reaction was so great that Bartholow had to leave and continue his work elsewhere. He later settled in Philadelphia and eventually received an honorary teaching position at medical college Jefferson, proving that even mad scientists can have great luck in life.

Leo Stanley, the medical director of San Quentin Prison from 1913 to 1951, had a crazy theory: he believed that men who committed crimes had low testosterone levels. According to him, increasing testosterone levels in prisoners will lead to a decrease in criminal behavior.

To test his theory, Stanley performed a series of strange operations: he surgically transplanted the testicles of recently executed criminals into still-living prisoners. Due to insufficient quantity testicles for experiments (on average, the prison carried out three executions per year), Stanley soon began to use the testicles of various animals, which he treated with various liquids, and then injected under the skin of prisoners.

Stanley stated that by 1922 he had performed similar operations on 600 subjects. He also claimed that his actions were successful, and described one particular case in which an elderly prisoner of Caucasian origin became cheerful and energetic after receiving the testicles of a young black man.

Lauretta Bender is perhaps best known for creating the psychological Gestalt Bender Test, which evaluates a child's movement and cognitive abilities.

However, Bender also pursued somewhat more controversial research: As a psychiatrist at Bellevue Hospital in the 1940s, she subjected 98 child patients to shock therapy each day in an attempt to cure a condition she had coined called childhood schizophrenia.

She reported that shock therapy was extremely successful and that relapse was subsequently observed in only a few children. As if shock therapy wasn't enough, Bender also injected the children with doses of LSD and psilocybin, a chemical found in magic mushrooms, in doses that would be high for an adult. Children often received one such injection per week.

In 2010, the American public became aware of a highly unethical experiment with syphilis. A professor who studied the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study discovered that the same health organization had also conducted a similar experiment in Guatemala.

The revelation prompted the White House to form an investigative committee, which discovered that government-sponsored researchers had deliberately infected 1,300 Guatemalans with syphilis in 1946. The purpose of the study, which lasted two years, was to find out whether penicillin could be effective means treatment for an already infected patient. Scientists paid prostitutes to infect other people, mainly soldiers, prisoners and the mentally ill.

Of course, the men did not know that they were deliberately trying to infect them with syphilis. A total of 83 people died due to the experiment. These disastrous results prompted President Obama to personally apologize to the President and people of Guatemala.

Dermatologist Albert Kligman tested a comprehensive experimental program on inmates at Holmesburg Prison in the 1960s. One such experiment, sponsored by the US Army, was aimed at increasing the strength of skin.

In theory, hardened skin could protect soldiers from chemical irritants in combat zones. Kligman used various chemical creams and treatments on the prisoners, but the only results were the appearance of numerous scars - and pain.

Pharmaceutical companies also hired Kligman to test their products, paying him to use prisoners as hamsters. Of course, the volunteers were also paid, albeit a little, but they were not fully informed about the possible adverse consequences.

As a result, many chemical mixtures resulted in blisters and burns on the skin. Kligman was a completely ruthless person. He wrote: “When I arrived at the prison for the first time, all I saw in front of me were endless acres of skin.” Ultimately, public outrage and subsequent investigation forced Kligman to stop his experiments and destroy all information about them.

Unfortunately, the former subjects were never compensated for damages, and Kligman later became rich by inventing Retin-A, an acne-fighting product.

A lumbar puncture, sometimes also called a lumbar puncture, is often necessary procedure, especially in neurological diseases and diseases of the spine. But a giant needle stuck directly into the spinal column is sure to bring excruciating pain to the patient.

Ethics scientific research was updated after the end of World War II. In 1947, the Nuremberg Code was developed and adopted, which continues to protect the well-being of research participants. However, previously scientists did not hesitate to experiment on prisoners, slaves, and even members of their own families, violating all human rights. This list contains the most shocking and unethical cases.

10. Stanford Prison Experiment

In 1971, a team of Stanford University scientists led by psychologist Philip Zimbardo conducted a study of human reactions to restrictions on freedom in prison conditions. As part of the experiment, volunteers had to play the roles of guards and prisoners in the basement of the Faculty of Psychology building, equipped as a prison. The volunteers quickly got used to their duties, however, contrary to the predictions of scientists, terrible and dangerous incidents began to occur during the experiment. A third of the “guards” showed pronounced sadistic tendencies, while many “prisoners” were psychologically traumatized. Two of them had to be excluded from the experiment ahead of time. Zimbardo, worried antisocial behavior subjects was forced to stop the study early.

9. Monstrous experiment

In 1939, a graduate student at the University of Iowa, Mary Tudor, under the guidance of psychologist Wendell Johnson, performed an equally shocking experiment on the orphans of the Davenport orphanage. The experiment was devoted to studying the influence of value judgments on children's speech fluency. The subjects were divided into two groups. During the training of one of them, Tudor gave positive assessments and praised her in every possible way. She subjected the speech of children from the second group to severe criticism and ridicule. The experiment ended disastrously, which is why it later got its name. Many healthy children did not recover from the injury and suffered from speech problems throughout their lives. A public apology for the Monstrous Experiment was made by the University of Iowa only in 2001.

8. Project 4.1

The medical study, known as Project 4.1, was carried out by US scientists on residents of the Marshall Islands who became victims of radioactive contamination after the explosion of the American thermonuclear device Castle Bravo in the spring of 1954. In the first 5 years after the disaster on Rongelap Atoll, the number of miscarriages and stillbirths doubled, and developmental disorders appeared in surviving children. Over the next decade, many of them developed cancer. thyroid gland. By 1974, a third had developed neoplasms. As experts later concluded, the purpose of the medical program to help the local residents of the Marshall Islands was to use them as guinea pigs in a “radioactive experiment.”

7. Project MK-ULTRA

The secret CIA program MK-ULTRA to research means of mind manipulation was launched in the 1950s. The essence of the project was to study the influence of various psychotropic substances on human consciousness. The participants in the experiment were doctors, military personnel, prisoners and other representatives of the US population. The subjects, as a rule, did not know that they were being injected with drugs. One of the CIA's secret operations was called "Midnight Climax". In several brothels in San Francisco, male test subjects were selected, injected with LSD into their bloodstreams, and then filmed for study. The project lasted at least until the 1960s. In 1973, the CIA destroyed most of the MK-ULTRA program documents, causing significant difficulties in the subsequent US Congressional investigation into the matter.

6. Project "Aversia"

From the 70s to the 80s of the 20th century, an experiment was conducted in the South African army aimed at changing the gender of soldiers with non-traditional sexual orientation. During the top-secret Operation Aversia, about 900 people were injured. Suspected homosexuals were identified by army doctors with the assistance of priests. In a military psychiatric ward, subjects were subjected to hormone therapy and electric shock. If soldiers could not be “cured” in this way, they faced forced chemical castration or sex reassignment surgery. The "aversion" was led by psychiatrist Aubrey Levin. In the 90s, he immigrated to Canada, not wanting to stand trial for the atrocities he committed.

5. Experiments on people in North Korea

North Korea has repeatedly been accused of conducting research on prisoners that violates human rights, however, the country's government denies all accusations, saying that the state treats them humanely. However, one of the former prisoners told the shocking truth. Before the eyes of the prisoner, a terrible, if not terrifying, experience appeared: 50 women, under the threat of reprisals against their families, were forced to eat poisoned cabbage leaves and died, suffering from bloody vomiting and rectal bleeding to the accompaniment of the screams of other victims of the experiment. There are eyewitness accounts of special laboratories equipped for experiments. Entire families became their targets. After a standard medical examination, the rooms were sealed and filled with asphyxiating gas, and the “researchers” watched through the glass from above as parents tried to save their children, giving them artificial respiration as long as they had strength left.

4. Toxicological laboratory of the USSR special services

A top-secret scientific unit, also known as the "Chamber", under the leadership of Colonel Mayranovsky, was engaged in experiments in the field of toxic substances and poisons such as ricin, digitoxin and mustard gas. Experiments were carried out, as a rule, on prisoners sentenced to to the highest degree punishments. Poisons were served to subjects under the guise of medicine along with food. The main goal of scientists was to find an odorless and tasteless toxin that would not leave traces after the death of the victim. Ultimately, scientists were able to discover the poison they were looking for. According to eyewitness accounts, after taking C-2, the test subject weakened, became quiet, as if he was shrinking, and died within 15 minutes.

3. Tuskegee Syphilis Study

The infamous experiment began in 1932 in the Alabama town of Tuskegee. For 40 years, scientists literally refused to treat patients with syphilis in order to study all stages of the disease. The victims of the experiment were 600 poor African-American sharecroppers. The patients were not informed about their illness. Instead of giving a diagnosis, doctors told people they had “bad blood” and offered free food and treatment in exchange for participating in the program. During the experiment, 28 men died from syphilis, 100 from subsequent complications, 40 infected their wives, and 19 children received a congenital disease.

2. "Unit 731"

Employees special squad Japanese armed forces under the leadership of Shiro Ishii were engaged in experiments in the field of chemical and biological weapons. In addition, they are responsible for the most horrific experiments on people that history knows. The detachment's military doctors dissected living subjects, amputated the limbs of prisoners and sewed them to other parts of the body, and deliberately infected men and women with sexually transmitted diseases through rape in order to subsequently study the consequences. The list of Unit 731 atrocities is enormous, but many of its employees were never punished for their actions.

1. Nazi experiments on people

Medical experiments carried out by the Nazis during World War II claimed a huge number of lives. In concentration camps, scientists carried out the most sophisticated and inhumane experiments. At Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele conducted studies of more than 1,500 pairs of twins. Various chemicals were injected into test subjects' eyes to see if their color would change, and in an attempt to create conjoined twins, test subjects were stitched together. Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe tried to find a way to treat hypothermia by forcing prisoners to lie in icy water for several hours, and at the Ravensbrück camp, researchers deliberately wounded prisoners and infected them with infections in order to test sulfonamides and other drugs.

1. First crossing similar type was successfully carried out in a Shanghai laboratory in 2003. The team of scientists used human and rabbit genetic material. The embryos developed to the stage of formation of stem cells, which is what scientists sought: such material was required in order to grow human organs in the future. This is not the first time that scientists have decided to carry out such experiments. Researchers from the United States tried to conduct a similar experiment much earlier, but their experiment was unsuccessful.

2. Some researchers claim that back in 1967, the Chinese scientists have already conducted experiments to create a frightening hybrid. The purpose of the experiments was to inseminate a female chimpanzee with human sperm. However, the cultural revolution that flared up in China interfered with the scientists’ plans, and the project was suspended. And this is for the best: the potential life of such a creature is doomed to life imprisonment within the walls of experimental laboratories.

3. The Mayo Clinic in Minnesota used human genetic material and successfully created the first hybrid pig. The purpose of the experiment is to study how human and pig cells will interact. As a result, scientists bred a new animal, which, however, was no different in appearance from its fellows. But the blood type was unique: nothing like it had ever existed in nature.

4. In 2009, Russian and Belarusian geneticists collaborated to modify goats to produce breast milk person. In the future, transgenic goats will help create medicines and food products made from new milk, the composition of which is close to human milk. Soon after, a team of Chinese scientists used an entire herd of cattle for similar experiments. The goal was to be able to produce human breast milk on an assembly line. We’ll find out in the near future whether the wonder will appear in supermarkets.

5. One of the biggest ideas in the biotech world today is opportunity. growing animals with human organs, who could be donors for patients around the world. However, in many countries such inhumane treatment of living beings is condemned. Professor Hiromitsu Nakauchi left Japan and moved to the United States to work on similar project. So far, scientists have managed to grow mouse organs in the body of a rat. However, this is progress, and Nakauchi insists that every day the team of scientists is getting closer to their cherished goal.

6. In 2010, the Salk Institute for Biological Research created a mouse with a liver almost identical to a human's. Using this experiment, scientists studied malaria and hepatitis B, C, which can only affect humans and chimpanzees. Experiments on animals related to humans are causing a strong public backlash, and mice with human organs allow scientists to avoid this problem. Scientists believe that their research will lead to new breakthroughs in medicine.

7. In 2007, Yale University conducted therapy using human stem cell transplantation. As a result monkeys with Parkinson's disease, were able to walk, eat and move better than before. However, from an ethical point of view, the experiment raises many difficult questions. Human cells “migrated” into the brains of monkeys, essentially changing the way the brain functions. Such experiments inevitably force scientists to think: where is the line after which intervention in someone else’s body leads to a change in its very essence?

Now genetic scientists around the world are studying the genome of humans, animals and plants. The human genome has long been deciphered; scientists recently provided another decipherment - this time, of corn. Of course, work is now underway to study the role of each gene in the genome. Some experiments prove useful. True, some studies look a little strange - that’s what we’ll talk about today.

City of Twins

Probably, many of our readers have heard about the “Angel of Death,” Dr. Joseph Mengele, who served faithfully to the Nazis. This, if I may say so, doctor, or rather, fanatic, ruined thousands of lives by conducting inhumane medical experiments. One of them is an attempt to increase the incidence of twins. For what? Of course, in order to increase the number of people of the Aryan race, carriers of pure blood.

So, it is this experiment of Mengele, who, by the way, was able to avoid punishment by escaping to Latin America, is now bearing fruit. Surprisingly, it is true that in the Brazilian city of Candido Godoi there are a lot of twins. Not just a lot, but a lot - it seems that there are only twins there.

What does Dr. Mengel have to do with this? Moreover, according to local residents, Dr. Mengel visited the town in the 60s of the last century, providing medical services to the women of the city. Now Brazilians have a problem - every fifth woman who gets pregnant gives birth to twins, and the children are blue-eyed and blond. Why? Scientists don't understand this.

They still can’t clarify anything, and Dr. Mengel is unlikely to tell anything, since he died of natural causes in 1979.

Goat spiders

We all know that the web that spiders produce is a very interesting substance. For example, a cobweb is much stronger than a metal thread of the same thickness. Some spiders produce webs that can even be used for weaving, which some tribes do with success. Spider web is a very valuable material, but extracting it in large quantities is a difficult task.

Scientists decided to solve the problem in an unexpected way - by introducing some genes from the spider genome into the goat genome. As a result, the milk of genetically modified goats contains the protein that makes up the spider's web. The milk of such goats can be drunk, and it is unlikely that anyone will distinguish it from ordinary goat milk. But from this milk, after appropriate processing, a protein is released, which is called spider silk.

Cloning a frozen mouse

Scientists managed to clone a mouse that had been frozen for more than 16 years. No, they couldn’t revive the mouse, and they didn’t even try. After several unsuccessful attempts Scientists still managed to create a clone of this mouse, which is considered a huge achievement of genetic engineering.

A little more - and mammoths and other extinct animals, whose DNA can still be isolated, will begin to roam the Earth. By the way, they are already starting to talk about cloning people who have bequeathed to freeze themselves after death - you have probably heard about this.

Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to revive frozen bodies, but it is possible to clone “polar explorers.”

Genetically modified mosquitoes

In our country, as well as throughout the CIS, people have almost forgotten about such a disease as malaria. But malaria was once a real “scourge of God” for regions with a large number of swamps. In countries like Brazil, malaria still claims many lives.

The carriers of the infection are mosquitoes - blood-sucking insects in whose bodies malaria pathogens thrive. So, scientists have created a species of mosquitoes whose body resists the pathogens of malaria, so that the bite of such a mosquito is “clean”. Scientists who created a new species of mosquito released several of these insects in order to allow them to reproduce in natural conditions. The authors of the study hope that the anti-malaria gene will be dominant, and in ten years the number of malaria cases will begin to decline.

Women and pink

Many people believe that the artificial division of men and women into lovers of blue and pink flowers has no basis. As it turned out, has, and what else.

But... no studies of the human genome were carried out; scientists simply conducted a series of computer tests, where a group of volunteers was asked to choose different geometric figures pink and blue flowers. According to the test results, it turned out that women more often choose figures colored pink, while men choose figures colored blue.

By the way, the research results were presented in several reputable medical publications. But all this looks somewhat strange - after all, color preferences are not necessarily determined by the genome; it may well be that they are developed during life. But, be that as it may, scientists know better.

Growing eyes

Geneticists have been trying for quite some time to understand how the body of a nascent creature “understands” where the eye should be, where the tail should be, and where the paw, well, or hand should be. Amphibians are an excellent object for experiments, on which geneticists conduct their experiments.

Thus, in 2007, scientists managed to understand what substances provoke the appearance of eyes in a given place. It turned out that the indicator, the mark, is specific nitrogen-containing molecules. Scientists even managed to achieve the appearance of a third eye by introducing an additional trigger molecule.

Probably, a similar mechanism operates during the formation of eyes in other animals and humans. Now geneticists have advanced so far that they have managed to get amphibians with eyes on their paws and not even their tail (we are talking about salamanders).

Cows and milk

Dutch scientists have managed to raise cows whose genome contains a gene responsible for the content of lactoferrin in milk. This protein is characteristic of woman's milk, and it performs a protective function - for example, it very well counteracts various pathogens of pulmonary infections.

Now, if tests show the suitability of such milk, then it can be used as a medicinal drug, and very tasty. Of course, there are opponents of such experiments with cows, but there are still more supporters.

Fast growing trees

Scientists have managed to breed a species of tree that can grow up to 27 meters in just six years. These trees are not created for beauty, scientists are trying to find alternative view fuel, which is a renewable resource. Actually, it was possible to do this, the trees really grow at a tremendous speed, so there is a chance for a successful outcome of the experiment.

The trees themselves, of course, will not be used in the form of firewood - no, we are talking about alcohol, which scientists are going to obtain from these trees. More precisely, not from them themselves, but from cellulose, which is the main integral part wood It may well be that ethanol produced from trees will be the fuel of the future.