Shadowing Practice: Truly EVIL Human Experiments That Actually Happened - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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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.
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Learn English with Videos: Exploring a Dark Chapter in History
Ever watched a video that mixes shocking stories with rich language? The video we’re focusing on dives into truly evil human experiments, like ancient Greek vivisections and 1950s nuclear tests. It’s a gripping scenario that uses vivid descriptions and conversational tone—perfect for english speaking practice and IELTS speaking practice. You’ll hear phrases that mirror how people talk in real life, making it easy to pick up natural speech patterns.
Useful Chunks & Collocations to Memorize
- "Carve out a new branch of science" – To create a new area of study. Great for discussing innovation!
- "Inflict unimaginable suffering" – To cause extreme pain. Useful for describing historical or ethical topics.
- "Put that into perspective" – To explain something by comparing it to a familiar idea. Essential for clear communication.
- "Chock full of scrolls" – Filled to the brim. A fun, casual way to say "full of."
- "Pass out from the pain" – To lose consciousness due to hurt. Realistic for storytelling.
Your Shadowing Challenge: Master the Flow
Ready to try shadowspeak (or shadow speech)? Pick a 30-second clip from the video—maybe the part about Herophilus in Alexandria. Play the clip, pause, and repeat it immediately, copying the tone, speed, and pauses. Focus on phrases like "bulging eyes towards the city" and "kids in a candy store"—they’re tricky but sound natural when you nail the rhythm. Do this 5 times, then record yourself. Compare it to the video—you’ll notice how much your fluency improves! This is how you turn watching videos into real english speaking practice.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if this large heavy object will crush · if you are curious, I would encourage |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be read · would be outlawed · was stored |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | anyone who thought · anyone who even · poisons, which were |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've been poisoned · have claimed · have received |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.