Shadowing Practice: Truly EVIL Human Experiments That Actually Happened - Learn English Speaking with Video

Les maken...
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Evil human experiments!
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Alright fellas, let's start things off a little easy.
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Back in the 4th century BC, Greek civilization was reaching new heights.
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People were getting more and more curious about the world around us and began asking really important questions.
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What does that do?
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How does that work?
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Should I do a soup or salad?
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How do you magnet work?
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Is this real life?
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Or is this fancy?
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Does the shrimp really fry the rice? Or not?
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All pretty valid questions for people just wishing to learn the workings of the natural world.
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While many focus on the mechanics of the universe, others chose to focus on the inner workings of humans themselves, and not only from a philosophical standpoint.
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Sometimes you just want to know what makes us tick.
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That's what Greek physician Herophilus wanted to find out and document in detail.
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After getting his education at the Hippocratian medical school in Greece, Herophilus turned his bulging eyes towards the city of Alexandria,
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Egypt, with its big throbbing library chock full of scrolls just begging to be read.
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Time to go to Egypt, he said.
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And so he did.
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Doot doot doot.
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After getting himself established and taking on a student, a young physician named Erisistratus, they got to work.
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Together, the two men would begin to carve out a new branch of science, anatomy.
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But in order to do so, you need some bodies to cut open to start slopping their guts around, and what better way to obtain fresh bodies than to use condemned criminals,
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captured and supplied by the Alexandrian rulers.
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Little Hero and Era were like kids in a candy store with a hopeful glimmer in their eyes, excited to begin their wondrous experiments.
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But surely the criminals put under the knife were already past their expiration date, right?
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Nope.
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Instead, Hero and Era performed live human dissections, called vivisections, to broaden their understanding of the human body.
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They even went as far as to perform these surgeries in
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full view of the public for anyone who thought it would be cool and interesting.
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Wow, that's both cool and interesting.
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That's what I'm saying.
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Hierophilus documented their findings in extreme detail, making breakthrough discoveries of the human anatomy.
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In doing so, he inflicted unimaginable suffering to his subjects.
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Since anesthetics weren't really a thing back then, the victims felt every cut and slice, at least until they passed out from the pain or died of blood loss.
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Dissecting intestines, reproductive organs, eyes, or even purposefully damaging the motor nerves to inflict paralysis.
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It was basically a big game of, what does this button do?
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In the end, Hero and Eris findings over 40 years of vivisections were revolutionary for the medical world,
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especially since human dissection would be outlawed shortly after their work was completed.
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It wouldn't be until 1800 years later that performing human dissections would be a medically acceptable practice again,
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but like, you know, on dead people?
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Their work was stored in the renowned Library of Alexandria, but they were lost in the Great Fire a few hundred years later.
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Project 4.1 was actually a side project proposed immediately after the deployment of Castle Bravo,
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a high-yield thermonuclear bomb that was dropped in 1954 by the United States.
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Bravo was part of Operation Castle, a series of other high-yield nuclear tests with the goal of establishing superiority over the Soviet Union.
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The Marshall Islands, a remote Pacific group of islands, served as ground zero for the detonation of the nuclear weapons.
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Castle Bravo was the strongest detonation, and surprisingly produced 2.5 times the expected explosive yield,
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resulting in an explosive force equivalent to 15 megatons of TNT.
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To put that into perspective, that is 1,000 times the explosive force of the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan in the final days of World War II.
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Goddamn.
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To make matters worse, the Marshall Islands were occupied with citizens.
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So, US officials were kinda like...
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Uh, sir, shouldn't we get those people out of the...
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Bless ya.
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Thanks sir.
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My allergies have been bothering me all day.
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Must be the radiation, right?
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No but seriously, are we gonna get those people out of the, uh, out of the radiation zone?
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Yeah, you know, that wasn't my to-do list.
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Well, too late now, so let's just see how things turn out.
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Castle was quickly amended with the addition of Project 4.1.
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This new section aimed to study the human response to significant radiation exposure.
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You know, as if tens of thousands of victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't evidence enough.
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Commander of the US Naval Medical Corps, Eugene Cronkite, was in charge of the project
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and swore everyone involved to absolute secrecy
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because he thought the public wouldn't be too keen on the whole test nuclear radiation on non-consenting people think.
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Overall, 239 Marshallese residents were exposed to significant levels of radiation and began showing signs of radiation poisoning a few days later.
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Symptoms included loss of hair and significant skin damage with weeping wounds, although the wounds did heal rather quickly.
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Immediate observations ceased after 75 days with the conclusion that no long-term effects were likely, but just out of curiosity,
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regular checkups were performed on the residents for years after.
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Women saw increases in miscarriages and stillbirths, and newborns that survived experienced developmental difficulties,
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impaired growth, and a disproportionate development of thyroid cancer.
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In addition, about one-third of those exposed had developed significant tumors by 1974,
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20 years after Operation Castle commenced.
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In the following years, Marshallese representatives spoke out against the United States with accusations
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that the scope of the experiment was premeditated and intentional, to which the US officials responded, Nuh-uh.
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During the early years of the Soviet Union, it wouldn't be uncommon for political opponents to quickly fall ill
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with a strong case of the death at the hands of poison.
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In fact, it was quite an effective and discreet way to silence any
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and all opposition without causing too much of a stir.
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Well, besides the public reacting to mysterious deaths.
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And that is why we must rise up against the- Oh, look at that.
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They got another one.
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So how were the Soviets so good at developing successful poisons?
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Well, you've got to run preliminary trials on living subjects, of course.
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So in 1921, a year before the Soviet Union officially formed, the Kamara was established.
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This was the Soviet Secret Service's poison laboratory.
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Here, new deadly poisons were developed and tested on human subjects.
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Those tested were prisoners from the Gulags, various labor camps built around the country for anyone who even had a fleeting thought that wasn't approved by the Soviet Union.
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Hmm, carry on.
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The ultimate goal of the Kamara was to devise a poison that was not only lethal, but undetectable.
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It would be colorless, tasteless, odorless, and untraceable in an autopsy.
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would be unknowingly administered various test poisons, which were disguised as medication.
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For me, if it isn't an orange flintstone vitamin, I don't trust it.
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The various poisons tested included ricin, which causes severe internal distress and suffering, cyanide, which can cause violent seizures and heart attacks,
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and karari, a potent muscle relaxant that makes you painfully choke to death.
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In the end, the tests were pretty successful.
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For the Soviet Union, not for the prisoners.
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Which led to innovative ways to discreetly dispatch a target, from deploying a cyanide mist to making an assassination look like a heart attack.
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But the blue ribbon winner was the concoction known as C2, carbolamine choline chloride, which was basically liquid depression.
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Exposure to this sucker sparked a very curious reaction.
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Instead of a violent telltale I've been poisoned type death, the victim would simply become weak with a rapid decline in health,
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all while maintaining a calm and silent demeanor.
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Death occurred within 15 minutes.
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Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russian officials have claimed that the Kamara has been disestablished and abandoned.
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Yeah, sure.
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Now you may have heard about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, which was an unethical medical study funded by the United States Public Health Service in 1932,
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which involved the study of nearly 400 African American men who had naturally contracted syphilis.
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The goal was to observe the effects of the disease when left untreated in African-American males.
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Even though penicillin, an antibiotic cure for syphilis, eventually became widely available to the public, the afflicted men were intentionally never cured.
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Fucked up, right?
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Well, the US decided to outdo themselves with the Guatemalan syphilis experiment.
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In 1946 to 1948, more than 5,500 Guatemalan natives including children were involved in the
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experiment against their will with the Guatemalan government granting access to the unwilling patients in hospitals mental institutions
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and even orphanages around 1300 relatively healthy individuals ages 10 to 72 were intentionally infected with syphilis
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and even gonorrhea Transmission was either done by direct bacterial contact into wounds or by sexual transmission with infected native sex workers,
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which were funded by the US government by the way.
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The latter of which proved to be a very effective method of infection.
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The guy in charge of these experiments was Dr. John C.
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Cutler, but you can call him Dr. Dickass.
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He often failed to keep accurate medical records of his experiments and instead would only provide anecdotal evidence in his findings,
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probably because he knew what he was doing was unethical.
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Which very much sounds like something only a dickass would do.
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But all joking aside, the experiments conducted on these people were gruesome.
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Perhaps one of the most notable documented examples of what these people experienced was about a female patient named Berta.
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The following is an excerpt from that document.
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Berta was a female patient in the psychiatric hospital.
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In February 1948, Berta was injected in her left arm with syphilis.
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A month later, she developed scabies.
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Several weeks later, Dr. Cutler noted that she had also developed red bumps where he had injected her arm, lesions on her arms and legs,
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and her skin was beginning to waste away from her body.
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Berta was not treated for syphilis until three months after her injection.
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Soon after, on August 23rd, Dr. Cutler wrote that Berta appeared as if she was going to die, but he did not specify why.
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That same day, he put gonorrheal pus from another male subject into both of Berta's eyes, as well as her private areas.
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He also re-infected her with syphilis.
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Several days later, Berta's eyes were filled with pus from the gonorrhea, and she was bleeding from her private area.
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Three days later, on August 27th, Berta died.
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Told you he was a dickass.
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The overall goal of the study was to determine the effectiveness of penicillin in preventing the STDs.
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Dr. Cutler had allegedly finalized his reports in 1955,
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but no evidence was ever found proving that the reports were submitted for peer review or even published.
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So out of all of that suffering, nothing of medical value was produced.
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Though I will say in some glimmer of fairness, a treatment program was established by the United States and made available to the affected Guatemalan population,
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but only half were reported to actually have received treatments with a questionable quality of care.
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United States President Barack Obama formally apologized to the Guatemalan government in 2010, 62 years after the study was performed.
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Yeah, that last one was quite the doozy, huh?
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Well buckle up cause it's about to get way worse.
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See this right here?
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This is Unit 731.
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It was home to some of the most notorious and truly evil war crimes committed by the Japanese in World War II,
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which are definitely up there with some of the worst in the history of mankind.
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Unit 731 served as a lethal human experimentation and biological weapons laboratory during the Second Sino-Japanese War between China and Japan,
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which ran concurrent to most of the events of World War II.
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This nightmare facility was established in 1935 in the subprovincial Chinese city of Harbin,
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four years after Japanese forces invaded the Chinese region of Manchuria.
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Inside hundreds of thousands of Chinese
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and even some Russian prisoners of war were subjected to some of the most egregious and horrifying human experimentations known to man.
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Experiments performed on men, women, and children.
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Which is everyone.
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Those chosen for experimentation were dehumanized and referred to as maruta
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or logs rather than as people because the cover-up story for Unit 731 was that it was a lumber mill.
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It should be noted that the vast majority of the experiments in the facility were carried out to fulfill morbid curiosity,
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with those performing or overseeing the studies described as merely playing.
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A testimony from a Japanese professor who witnessed the studies was quoted saying
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that some of the experiments had nothing to do with advancing the capability of germ warfare, or of medicine.
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There is such a thing as professional curiosity.
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What would happen if we did such and such?
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What medical purpose was served by performing and studying beheadings?
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None at all.
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That was just playing around.
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Professional people, too, like to play.
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So, basically experiments were like, huh, I wonder what would happen if we just hucked a grenade at a guy.
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Bang.
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Oh look, he exploded.
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Hey, can I go home now?
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Gee, I wonder if this large heavy object will crush this guy.
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Yup.
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Will this guy freeze to death if I freeze him to death?
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Wow, who would have guessed?
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A lot of these experiments were designed to test the absolute limits of the human body.
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Tests included depriving victims of food or water to see how long they could survive, placing victims in low pressure chambers until their eyes popped from their skulls,
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injecting victims with animal blood, hanging victims upside down until death, or even draining victims of blood just to study blood loss limits.
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Some victims were even dehydrated in front of large hot fans to the point of mummification.
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At the time of death, they only weighed 20% of their initial body weight.
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Perhaps one of the worst examples I've read was the forced pregnancy of female victims.
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The mothers were injected with various diseases and drugs just to see how they affected the unborn child,
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sometimes performing a vivisection, cutting the fetus out of the mother for examination.
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There's honestly so many more gruesome experiments that I just can't get into here, so if you are curious, I would encourage you to look them up.
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But it's like legit really bad, so you've been warned.
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By the end of the war, as Soviet forces were closing in, Japanese officials had all remaining prisoners executed
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and the entirety of Unit 731 hastily demolished to destroy any remaining evidence of the program's existence.
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The United States had discovered trace evidence and pressured Japanese officials into spilling the beans,
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under threat that they would be handed over to Soviet officials for trial and punishment if they did not cooperate.
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Once the US learned the full extent of the horrors of Unit 731, all of those involved were swiftly brought to trial and executed for their crimes.
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Except no, they actually weren't.
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In reality, the United States claimed that the data collected from the inhumane atrocities was actually pretty valuable,
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since it is otherwise ethically unobtainable through conventional means.
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As such, many of those involved were granted immunity and freedom in exchange for the data.
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The deal was struck, and the United States kept everything under lock and key.
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The Soviet Union, however, pursued trials against the top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731.
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In the end, only 12 individuals were tried and sentenced to several years in labor camps,
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Although the United States repeatedly denied that Unit 731 ever existed.
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Well that was a bummer.
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Here's something to cheer you up.
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I'll see you over there.

Woordenschat en spreektips bij deze les

Deze spreekles op niveau B1 is gebaseerd op de video “Truly EVIL Human Experiments That Actually Happened”. Deze video bevat 205 zinnen en 2636 woorden om na te spreken. Het gesproken deel duurt 17:12. De spreker praat in een natuurlijk tempo van ongeveer 153 woorden per minuut, dicht bij een alledaags gesprek. Slechts 78% van de woorden hoort bij de 3.000 meest gebruikte Engelse woorden, dus de woordenschat is pittig.

Belangrijke woorden in deze video

De 15 moeilijkste woorden uit de video, met uitspraak en betekenis:

WoordUitspraakBetekenis
poison zelfstandig naamwoord/ˈpɔɪ.zən/gif, vergif
radiation zelfstandig naamwoord/ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/straling
prisoner zelfstandig naamwoord/ˈpɹɪzənə/gevangene
infect werkwoord/ɪnˈfɛkt/infecteren, besmetten
inject werkwoord/ɪnˈd͡ʒɛkt/injecteren, inspuiten
explosive bijvoeglijk naamwoord/ɛkˈspləʊsɪv/explosief
curiosity zelfstandig naamwoord/ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/nieuwsgierigheid
yield werkwoord/jiːld/voortbrengen
wound zelfstandig naamwoord/ˈwund/wonde, verwonding
cyanide zelfstandig naamwoord/ˈsaɪənaɪd/cyanide
gruesome bijvoeglijk naamwoord/ˈɡɹusəm/gruwzaam, afgrijselijk
penicillin zelfstandig naamwoord/ˌpɛn.ɪˈsɪl.ɪn/penicilline
vivisection zelfstandig naamwoord/ˌvɪ.vɪˈsɛk.ʃən/vivisectie
lethal bijvoeglijk naamwoord/ˈliː.θəl/dodelijk, letaal
anatomy zelfstandig naamwoord/əˈnætəmi/anatomie

Phrasal verbs die je zult horen

WoordBetekenis
find out werkwoordontdekken, onderzoeken
turn out werkwoorduitvallen, resulteren

Zinnen om te herhalen

Korte, volledige zinnen uit de video die je in alledaagse gesprekken kunt gebruiken:

  • Alright fellas, let's start things off a little easy.
  • Should I do a soup or salad?
  • How do you magnet work?
  • What would happen if we did such and such?
  • Hey, can I go home now?

Grammatica in deze video

De structuren die de spreker het meest gebruikt, met de exacte woorden uit de video:

StructuurIn de video
Voorwaardelijke zinnen if + zin, will/would + werkwoord — een voorwaarde en het gevolgif this large heavy object will crush · if you are curious, I would encourage
Lijdende vorm be + voltooid deelwoord — het gaat om wat er gebeurt, niet om wie het doetbe read · would be outlawed · was stored
Betrekkelijke bijzinnen who / which + zin — extra informatie over een persoon of dinganyone who thought · anyone who even · poisons, which were
Present perfect have/has + voltooid deelwoord — iets uit het verleden dat nu nog teltI've been poisoned · have claimed · have received

Uitspraak om op te letten

De spreker gebruikt 20 samentrekkingen en verkorte vormen, zoals weren't, wouldn't, I've. Spreek ze kort uit, zoals je ze hoort.

  • De “th”-klanken: unethical /ʌnˈɛθɪkəl/, lethal /ˈliː.θəl/, breakthrough /ˈbɹeɪk.θɹuː/
  • De klanken “sh” en “zh”: radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/, detonation /dɛtəˈneɪʃən/, dissection /dɪˈsɛkʃən/, experimentation /ɪkˌspɛɹ.ə.mənˈteɪ.ʃən/, vivisection /ˌvɪ.vɪˈsɛk.ʃən/
  • Lange woorden — let op de klemtoon: radiation /ˌɹeɪ.diˈeɪ.ʃən/, curiosity /ˌkjʊɹ.iˈɑ.sə.ti/, detonation /dɛtəˈneɪʃən/, experimentation /ɪkˌspɛɹ.ə.mənˈteɪ.ʃən/, penicillin /ˌpɛn.ɪˈsɪl.ɪn/

Klanken die Nederlandstaligen lastig vinden:

  • Stemhebbende eindmedeklinker — /b/, /d/, /g/, /z/, /v/ niet verscherpen: explosive /ɛkˈspləʊsɪv/, yield /jiːld/, wound /ˈwund/, cyanide /ˈsaɪənaɪd/, freeze /ˈfɹiːz/
  • /æ/ — opener dan de Nederlandse “e”: anatomy /əˈnætəmi/, laboratory /ˈlæb(ə)ɹəˌtɔɹi/, transmission /tɹænsˈmɪʃən/, accusation /ˌæk.jʊˈzeɪ.ʃ(ə)n/, mechanic /mɪˈkænɪk/
  • /g/ — een harde plofklank, geen Nederlandse “g”: glimmer /ˈɡlɪmɚ/, gruesome /ˈɡɹusəm/, organ /ˈɔːɡən/, examination /ɪɡˌzæm.ɪˈneɪ.ʃən/

Zo oefen je met deze video

  1. Luister de hele video één keer zonder te spreken en noteer de woorden die je niet kent.
  2. Begin op 0,75× snelheid, spreek zin voor zin na en ga terug naar normale snelheid zodra het makkelijk gaat.
  3. Neem jezelf op en vergelijk met het origineel; let daarbij op woorden als poison, radiation, prisoner.

Wat is de Shadowing-techniek?

Shadowing is een wetenschappelijk onderbouwde taalleermethode die oorspronkelijk is ontwikkeld voor professionele tolkentraining en gepopulariseerd door polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. De methode is eenvoudig maar krachtig: je luistert naar native Engelse audio en herhaalt het onmiddellijk hardop — als een schaduw die de spreker volgt met slechts 1–2 seconden vertraging. In tegenstelling tot passief luisteren of grammaticadrills, dwingt shadowing je hersenen en mondspieren om echte spraakpatronen tegelijkertijd te verwerken en te reproduceren. Onderzoek toont aan dat het de uitspraaknauwkeurigheid, intonatie, ritme, verbonden spraak, luisterbegrip en spreekvaardigheid aanzienlijk verbetert — waardoor het een van de meest effectieve methoden is voor IELTS Speaking-voorbereiding en echte Engelse communicatie.

Shadowing-techniek: lees de volledige stap-voor-stap-gids →