Playing with Syringes

"Now, what to do with the DNA from his bone matter? I guess there is that Wilson guy..."

V: What they did to me was monstrous.
Evey: And so they created a monster.

— V for Vendetta

A Mad Scientist, Mad Doctor, or Evilutionary Biologist, possibly supported by The Syndicate and/or The Government, will run a series of classified experiments to create something — often without regard to the well-being of the often-living test subjects, and the words "moral", "ethical", or "safe" will not be in the head scientist's vocabulary. These experiments are often done to Disposable Vagrants and Condemned Contestants who are Strapped to an Operating Table, but occasionally you'll see a Professor Guinea Pig who uses himself and/or his family as the test subject(s). Don't expect to see anyone on that operating table of their own free will; most likely they were Kidnapped for Experimentation

Super Soldiers and Super Serums are usually the goal of these experiments, but Mix-and-Match Critters, Bioweapon Beasts, Custom Built Hosts, Genetic Abominations, Phlebotinum Rebels, Psycho Serums, and Secret Project Refugee Families are often the result. They often become Disposable Superhero Makers with No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup and have a great risk of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity or Power Degeneration. Expect a plot to spring up with one of these victims having Escaped from the Lab.

See also They Would Cut You Up, for when people with superhuman powers live under the threat of having this happen to them. When animals are involved, this may be combined with Pounds Are Animal Prisons or Animal Testing.

May overlap with Eye Scream and Cold-Blooded Torture. Often overlaps with Meatgrinder Surgery, because what's another dozen hideous violations of medical ethics between friends? A Super Breeding Program tends to be this on a grander scale. A literal version may involve a Giant Medical Syringe.

Has nothing to do with Playing with a Trope.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In After War Gundam X, it's strongly implied that Tiffa Addil spent the early years of her life as a subject for such experiments, this being the reason for her borderline phobia of people.
• Assassination Classroom: In Koro-sensei's backstory, he was a human who was the world's greatest assassin and killed thousands of people, but was betrayed by his apprentice and kidnapped by the government. Subsequently, they performed experiments on him for the purposes of creating organic antimatter and he was turned into the nigh-invincible superpowered octopus we all know and love.
• Finnian from Black Butler got his Super-Strength from surviving human experiments.
• Mayuri of Bleach has done this. It's why Uryu and his father are (or were thought to be) the last Quincies.
  • Aizen and his cohorts did a lot of this in experiments to break the boundaries between Shinigami and Hollow. One early experiment, the proto-arrancar "White" created with the soul of a dead Shinigami, ultimately created one of the most powerful beings in the series — The Hero Ichigo. "White" is the reason Ichigo's parents met and its remnants were reincarnated as Ichigo's Inner Hollow/Zanpakuto aka the real Zangetsu.
  • Kisuke was believed to have done this after being framed in a Kangaroo Court for supposedly experimenting on his fellow Shinigami and turning them into Humanoid Abominations, resulting in his exile. Aizen was the true culprit, but this wasn't discovered until over a century later, leaving Kisuke's reputation in tatters.
• Two of Okamoto Lynn's works, Brynhildr in the Darkness and Elfen Lied have this as a central premise. In both stories, with government backing, children are rounded up and have horrific experimentation, indistinguishable from Cold-Blooded Torture inflicted upon them, with the man in charge of all of it being an Übermensch who seeks to create a master race by killing off everyone else.
  • In the former, human girls under the age of 10 are grabbed right off the streets (and the police told to not intervene), have an alien slug forced into their necks which then take over as their brain, and spend the next ten years having their "magic" powers unlocked through experimentation. If their powers don't fit The Plan, the slug gets "ejected" and the child dies a horrible death. The scientists involved don't know who to be more scared of, their superiors who often kill them at a whim, the heavily armed soldiers both guarding the lab, and keeping them trapped inside, or the now super-powered teenage girls, many of whom rightfully want them dead.
  • In the latter, children born of normal Homo-sapien parents turn out to have mutated into Homo-Diclonii and are immediately recognizable by their horn-like appendages on their heads. The superpowers are inherent and awaken at the age of 3. While segregating them so that they don't murder their parents during a tantrum is justified, what goes on during their captivity is not. Of the experiments we do see, one of these children gets shot with a cannon, repeatedly, just to gauge the growth of her powers. Other experiments are implied to be far worse. The scientific staff is then baffled as to why the Diclonii have an Omnicidal Maniac psychosis fused to their survival instinct and try to infect and/or kill as many people as they can! It is also strongly implied that the infection transfers genetic memories.
• A Certain Magical Index: Academy City does quite a lot of this behind the scenes. Much of it by the family of psycho scientists, the Kiharas. It would probably be easier to list the powerful espers who haven't been involved in some Academy City secret project at some point or another.
• Tongpu, alias Mad Pierrot, from the Cowboy Bebop episode "Pierrot le Fou" was the fatally botched result of an attempt to create a Super-Soldier that instead created a Psychopathic Manchild with immunity to bullets. The "experiments" that created him are rather graphically shown, as is the body count he leaves in his wake after escaping the lab...
• The bad guys of Eureka Seven rocket past the Moral Event Horizon when they attempt to create new pilots for Type TheEND. As in, young war-orphaned girls strapped to tables with their eyes held open with small hooks, convulsing as insanity-causing chemicals are injected into their necks before their hearts give out, while the head scientist apologizes for the delay. Additionally, they've all been given cosmetic surgery to make them look exactly like Eureka, apparently for no reason other than they suspect TheEND might actually reject a successfully drugged pilot if she looks different. The Sole Survivor of said experiments was... Anemone. It certainly explains a lot about her.
• Expecting to Fall into Ruin, I Aim to Become a Blacksmith: Played for Laughs with the experiments of herbalism prodigy Toto on his Royal Brat academy roommate who serves as The Chew Toy, drugging his tea and making him pass out, which is implied to have continued off-page.
• Fullmetal Alchemist has hidden governmental labs in which mad scientists do horrible things to people through alchemy, including taking convicts, ripping the souls out of their bodies and turning them into sapient armor, taking wounded soldiers and making them into human-animal hybrids, and more generally, just turning people into Human Resources.
• Harry MacDowell in Gungrave takes control of Vulcan's Necrolization Project, which involves reanimating the dead into near-invincible soldiers called "deadmen"/"necrolizers". He uses it as a means to fully control Millenion and its assets. It is also the same technology that brings the series' protagonist, Brandon Heat, back from the dead as Beyond the Grave.
• Lyrical Nanoha:
  • Project F and other related Super-Soldier projects created directly or indirectly by Big Bad Mad Scientist Jail Scaglietti, who was created and funded by the Space-Time Administration Bureau higher-ups.
  • Agito was found barely alive by her unintentional saviors Zest and Lutecia after being experimented on for an untold amount of time. Considering her size, the needles in question were almost as big as her.
• Made in Abyss features Bondrewd the Novel, a Mad Scientist who is apparently quite fond of this. Although most surface dwellers aren't aware of exactly how unethical his experiments are, it's common knowledge that he's a bit of a bastard who takes orphan children down into the Abyss to a level where the ill effects suffered from ascending would almost certainly kill them. At his base in the old sacrificial site of Idofront, several thousand meters below the surface, the reason for this is revealed. Bondrewd has used them to figure out a way to overcome the Curse of the Abyss that results upon ascending from the aptly named Capital of the Unreturned, a few hundred meters lower still. He's accomplished this by forcing them to endure the Curse as guinea pigs for a device meant to shunt the Curse from one person to another, and later by using them to absorb the Curse for himself and his followers once his research has progressed far enough for that sort of device to be practical. Since ascension from that level is almost invariably fatal or worse, the implications are absolutely monstrous.
• Naruto's Orochimaru was exiled for doing this in his quest for immortality. He also conducted experiments on himself, turning himself into a giant white snake made up of smaller snakes.
• Pumpkin Scissors is generally seen as a Spiritual Successor to Fullmetal Alchemist, and also features this. Essentially, some mad scientists, with government approval, came to the conclusion that rather than making weapons or safety devices better, the soldiers needed to be tougher. Thus, you get things like soldiers who can ignore tank fire, and "fireproof" soldiers who achieve this effect by having their nerves numbed and are pretty much living corpses who need to stay in metal suits 24/7 in order to survive.
• Rebuild World: The doctor Yatsubiyashi sets up a Mad Scientist Laboratory-looking clinic in the Disposable Vagrant-filled slums. Whether to vagrants or hunters, his modus operandi experimenting is to make An Offer You Can't Refuse: Charge more than the patient can afford for their treatment or allow him to experiment on them for free treatment. Yatsubiyashi is pursuing Lost Technology generally, and trying to create a Super Serum in particular, which he succeeds wildly at by reprogramming hyper-advanced Nanomachines designed to replace severed limbs, but not before making Tiol into a Tragic Monster. Yatsubiyashi also used his own experimental cybernetics to give himself Super-Strength.
• In Sailor Moon and its anime adaptation, Sailor Moon Crystal, Professor Tomoe, Mad Scientist and Dragon to the third arc's Big Bad, not only implants monster eggs inside of people to possess them after their souls have been extracted (searching for a perfect specimen where most of the results turn out to be "defects"), but also used his own daughter in his experiments, eventually resulting in her being possessed and (temporarily) killed by Mistress 9. He even turns himself into a Daimon before he is destroyed by Sailor Moon.
• A group of human scientists attempted to create a "superior being" from scratch in Shin Megami Tensei IV: Demonic Gene. To absolutely no one familiar with the core franchise's surprise, it went to hell very quickly, creating Hiruko, a Humanoid Abomination who went on to become that world's version of the Black Samurai, from the reject pile, and Gina, who appears to be the project's crowning achievement. Scarily, Tayama has some info on the project...
• The Mew Project in Tokyo Mew Mew is a heroic version, strange as that may seem. Hey, it's either grab Japanese schoolgirls off the streets and turn them into animals or let aliens kill off the whole planet to take it for themselves, you know.
• In The Vision of Escaflowne, the Zaibach Empire kidnapped a sweet little girl named Celina and did various Magitek experiments on her, transforming her into Dilandau, a Blood Knight super-soldier. She is not the first or only person to be experimented on in this way. In the OVA, Dilandau is not a kidnapped little girl, but still underwent horrific experiments that caused him to be Afraid of Doctors.
• A rare voluntary example in Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, this is eventually revealed to be Yubel's origin. When Jaden's preincarnation was deemed to require a guardian who could protect him until he could realise his destiny, his best friend Yubel willingly underwent horrific surgery to attain their monstrous current form. We don't see much, but it's heavily implied to have involved getting all their skin peeled off and replaced with a dragon's hide, unanaesthetised.

Audio Plays

• The eponymous project of The Elysium Project. The project was designed to create a Super Serum that grants people reality-bending powers. As a means to that end, a bunch of teenage test subjects were held against their will, lied to, abused, and experimented on.

Comic Books

• The Avengers: This was the origin of the Cat (better known as Tigra), although her origin involved a triple-cross. Dr. Joanne Tumolo developed a process "for any woman to totally fulfill her physical and mental potential — despite the handicaps that society places upon her." Dr. Tumulo ran out of funds, but Malcolm Donalbain ("world famous sportsman, eccentric, and entrepreneur...") learned about the project and was "such a fanatic on physical conditioning that he agreed to subsidize further work." Donalbain insisted that his employee, Shirlee Bryant, be their test subject. Here's the double-cross: Shirlee stole the scientist's process so Donalbain could build duplicates of her equipment. Shirlee died in a test of her abilities, but Donalbain planned to open a nationwide chain of health clubs that would create an army of Amazons to carry out his commands. Here's the triple-cross: Dr. Tumolo had wanted her assistant, Greer Nelson, to be her first subject. Greer persuaded her mentor to test her secretly. Using her new powers as the Cat, Greer stopped Donalbain's plans.
• Desolation Jones is about an ex-spy who, after being fired for constant drunkenness, "volunteered" to have this done to him. He emerges from it a hallucinating, insomniac, sociopathic albino with a completely withered body.
• Dynamo5: When most of the team is taken into F.L.A.G. custody early on, one of the main questions the government spooks want answered is how they got their powers... because they've tried exposing a ton of test subjects to the radiation that empowered Captain Dynamo, and those guys all just died.
• "Project Rainmaker" from PS238, which performed experiments on a non-combative metahuman in order to find out what caused metahuman powers. Said metahuman then got a power boost when they put a Mad Scientist in charge of the project, and escaped, destroying the lab in the process. The project is later resurrected In Name Only. This time, it's about helping children whose powers fall on the "heart" spectrum find a use for them in the private sector. Unfortunately, no-one told the now grown-up metahuman, so he heads off to break them out.
• Resurrection Man: "The Lab" is a secret private weapons contractor developing Super Serum for the US government, going into war zones and using wounded American personnel as guinea pigs. Their concoctions created the Body Doubles, Director Hooker, and Mitch Shelley, but not the way Shelley wanted.
• Robin (1993): Strader Pharmaceuticals was unable to get FDA approval for human tests in their attempt to create a super soldier serum, so they just started testing it on the downtrodden of Gotham whom they didn't expect anyone to miss. When their experiments started getting attention anyway, they shut down the experiment by killing everyone who might implicate them.
• Scientists sponsored by the United States, Britain, and Germany experimented on hundreds of African Americans to reproduce the Super-Soldier serum that created Captain America after the original formula was lost, as documented in Truth: Red, White & Black.
• V from V for Vendetta was created as a result of a bunch of experiments conducted by The Government.
• Wonder Woman: Dead Earth: After the End, Cheetah was captured and experimented on for no discernible end goal other than humans wanting to take out their anger on someone.
• X-Men: The Weapon-X project, run by Canada of all nations, in the quest to create the perfect biological weapon. We all know how warmongering those damn Canadians are. Horrible, inhumane experiments were performed on minority members ranging from African-Americans to mutants. It's most likely that the writers wanted an "evil government conspiracy" backstory for Wolverine, but they already had Canada locked in as the country. Although the backstory originally had it as a joint U.S.-Canada project. Writers since then haven't done their research and/or slapped on their own patchwork of retcons to fit whatever story they wanted to tell. Probably inspired by the Real Life atrocities committed against native peoples and the mentally ill in Alberta during the mid-20th century, but then, Alberta's always been kind of an odd duck compared with the other provinces. Another possible inspiration: the only semi-intelligent work done on project MK-ULTRA (as far as we know — the CIA attempted to destroy the paper trail, but that didn't work very well) was done by a Canadian citizen in Canada with the tacit cooperation of the Canadian government.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this MonsterVerse fanfiction, Alan Jonah and his closest followers start experimenting on Ghidorah's DNA from San's old severed head, even using human test subjects. This results in the creation of the Many.
• A Flower's Touch: Aerith describes Hojo injecting her with Jenova cells as well as a myriad of other things that run the full spectrum of reactions from her.
  Aerith: One time, it felt like my insides were liquefying. You have no idea how painful that was. Even after I was healed, even with my birth mother's magic, the pain stayed for days....I've been in all kinds of states from what he put into me. Feeling detached from my own body. Delirious out of my mind. Sicker than a dog. Hyperactive to the point of bouncing off a wall, literally. I think being hypersensitive to everything was the worst. My state of mind changed day to day, he put enough chemicals in me to make teenage moodswings seem pleasant in comparison.
• A recurring fear of Green Shield and Fauna in DC Nation. Justified as Shield's ex-boss explicitly told her that's what he planned to do to her, and Fauna is an escapee from one of Luthor's clandestine projects.
• In Doctor Who fanfic Gemini, the military want to create super-soldiers that can fight at the Daleks' level, and they will kidnap as many innocent victims for as many horrifying genetic experiments as it takes to do so.
• In the Turning Red fic The Great Red Panda Rescue, this is basically what the scientists do to Mei. They perform various tests on her, steal her appendix, and attempted to dissect her just to figure out what makes her tick.
• In Human Curiosity, this is the fate that befalls all the nations kidnapped by the HCS
  • This is a recurring theme in Hetalia: Axis Powers fanfiction. Especially to Iceland and/or Sealand for some reason. Usually because of the nation-tans immortality.
• In The Night Unfurls, this is pretty much Shamuhaza's M.O. as an Evil Sorcerer — the Neverborn experiments he conducts include: creating mix-and-match Elite Mooks via subjecting Innocent Bystanders to a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong; directly mutating mooks for them to be upgraded into more Elite Mooks, and; delving into Black Magic and the Eldritch Truth, which may or may not be research from the Healing Church or the School of Mensis.
• In the W.I.T.C.H. fanfic Ripples and its sequel Stirred, Van gains a reputation for this after being appointed Grand Doctor of Phobos' regime. Though to be fair, she's very careful to only perform experiments on test subjects who have freely given their full and educated consent, or criminals who've crossed the Moral Event Horizon (Phobos even complains that she's too selective). Also, she's cured many diseases through her experiments.
• Winter War has Aizen, Mayuri and Szayel all involved in this in varying ways. So far, we have Mayuri's cloning of Nemu and destruction of her zanpakuto, and Aizen's Hollowification experiments. The results are varied, and they are all deeply unsettling.

Film — Animation

• Felidae features a lab that is pure horror, as a scientist has Sanity Slippage and begins doing experiments on stray cats, cutting them open (live) on the examination table in order to test a Healing Factor-inducing serum and create the perfect species of feline. The Big Bad turns out to be Claudandus, a cat who survived the repeated vivisections — because he was the only test subject on whom the serum even worked.
• In FernGully: The Last Rainforest, Batty Koda was a victim of this. It left him unbalanced mentally (unless he was always like that) and with a malfunctioning sonar.
• The film version of The Secret of NIMH goes out of its way to make the lab a bit more nightmarish, with close-ups of abused animals cowering in their cages and rats reacting with agony to their injections.

Film — Live-Action

• In the BBV Productions film The AirZone Solution, a company that claims to have the solution to the increasing problem of air pollution is found to be secretly abducting and experimenting on people. It turns out that their preferred solution to the problem is not to clean up the pollution but to genetically engineer people who aren't bothered by it.
• A fake commercial that airs during C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America promises that anyone who doesn't have the grades for medical school, or the patience for a nursing program, can enroll in the Cartwright Institute for the Study of Freedom Illness. The commercial promises that in several months, graduates will be qualified to diagnose and treat draeptomania (freedom sickness), track and count slaves, become a breeding specialist, and treat any other "slave peculiarities".
• District 9 has experiments done on Wikus for the sake of weapons research.
• Dune (1984): House Harkonnen's minions are all fitted with "heart plugs" — plugs which, when opened, empty the blood from the heart itself, resulting in the victim bleeding to death. There's also a creepy scene with other minions who have their eyes and ears sewn shut. The surgical procedures that resulted in these things are not seen, but one can imagine that they were horrific and certainly not voluntary.
• In Frankenstein Island, Sheila Frankenstein conducts a variety of blood-based experiments, such as transfusing Jason with a mixture of Amazon and animal blood.
• In Jacob's Ladder, Jacob and the rest of his platoon in Vietnam were unknowingly and illegally dosed with the BZ (3-Quinuclidinyl benzilate) hallucinogen, which drove most of them insane with bloodlust and might be the cause of Jacob's nightmares. Although the apparent Government Conspiracy turns out to be a Mockspiracy and the events of the film are a Dying Dream, the drug story may be true — the final card informs that BZ had been used on American troops during the Vietnam War.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Captain America: The First Avenger shows us a rather heartbreaking shot of former cocky, confident ladies' man, Bucky Barnes, strapped to a table, bleeding and mumbling his name, rank, and serial number to himself (that is, what a soldier's supposed to do when he's being tortured for information), apparently unaware of his surroundings. We later find out that Zola was trying to recreate the Super Soldier Serum that made Captain America and the Red Skull who they are. Given that both those procedures involved multiple injections of unknown chemicals and made their subjects howl in pain, it seems safe to assume whatever Zola did to poor Bucky in that lab was ugly, painful, invasive, scarring, and just overall violating to him as a human being.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier: That's not even getting into what was done to Bucky during and before. Yes, that mind wipe scene is horrible, but do you really think they used anesthetic when they cut off the rest of his arm while he was still conscious? God only knows what they did before they perfected that chair of theirs...
  • In the far more lighthearted MCU offering Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), we get the humorously misanthropic comic relief Funny Animal Rocket, whose heartbreaking drunken rant about how he's a freak of nature who achieved sentience during being repeatedly vivisected comes the fuck out of nowhere in the middle of an otherwise funny scene.
• Necronomicon: In "The Cold", Creepy Housekeeper Lena wields literal syringes with sadistic glee as she assists Mad Scientist Dr. Madden in his experiments, which involve extracting spinal fluid from unwilling donors.
• Overlord (2018) centers around a squad of U.S. soldiers who are given the task of blowing up a Nazi radar-jamming tower situated in a church, in the middle of an occupied French village. When they infiltrate the church, they discover a secret lab that has been using German war dead, and unwilling French villagers in experiments meant to find an immortality serum, which so far has some gruesome side effects.
• Soldier: The Soldiers in the Soldier Program are mindless killing machines, given drugs to help them stay that way.
• X-Men Film Series:
  • Weapon XI from X-Men Origins: Wolverine is exactly this — the eleventh of a series of Living Weapon experiments by Stryker, with Wolverine as Weapon X, intended to create the perfect mutant killer by way of Power Copying mutant powers into one being.
  • This is apparently a pastime of Trask, given that he does this to all of the Dropped a Bridge on Him mutants from First Class and intends to do the same to Mystique in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

Literature

• In the light novel and manga versions of Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon, the entire dark-elf race are all mad scientists each obsessed with a particular field of knowledge and trying to learn as much as they can in that field, regardless of the cost of sentient life involved. Most of the victims are humans, of course, since they can't run, hide, or fight back, but members of other races, or even their own, are not exempt. In fact, the female dark elf that was a member of Light's party, and who he wants vengeance against, happily fed the souls of all her fellow researchers to an eldritch horror, just so she can study, analyze, and fully examine what goes into a soul's makeup, and becoming the host of this entity for power, natch.
• Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky gleefully teeters on the fence between invoking this and playing it straight. In the Dénouement, while negotiating over what to do with the human POWs, the Spiders insist on keeping Ritser Brughel, unarguably the worst of the surviving war criminals, to themselves. When the humans concede that it would be fair to give him to the Spiders to be punished, the Spiders' response is something along the lines of, "Punish him? Oh, no. We just need a live experimental subject to help our studies of human physiology. Any 'punishment' would be strictly incidental."
• On Dr. Franklin's Island, Doctor Franklin gives his employees the impression that he's working for the US government, though he really isn't. For a long time, he just spliced human traits into animal subjects, but he really wanted to move on to making transgenic creatures that started as humans — and when a plane crashes off course and authorities can't find the few survivors, it does not matter at all to him that the new, perfect subjects are completely unwilling.
• There's a degree of this in Galaxy of Fear, as might be expected when the Big Bad of the first six books, Borborygmus Gog, is a Mad Scientist. The Empire funded a massive lab on Kiva for him and Mammon Hoole, who studied the nature of life there. Borborygmus sent the Emperor word that the latest experiment looked like it would backfire and create a World-Wrecking Wave that would kill everything on Kiva, and he wanted to go through with it anyway. The Emperor concurred, and after it was done hired Borborygmus to set up a slew of other projects. The very first book has a Villain Opening Scene where Borborygmus vivisects something on an operating table with a hooked blade.
• In the Darker and Edgier sequel to Hidden Talents, Trash is kidnapped by an ex-military organization investigating people with psychic abilities. They fake his death and keep him drugged into complacency for months as they test the limits of his telekinesis, hoping to contract him out to the US military as a weapon. Fortunately, he does eventually escape.
• In the Journey to Chaos series, this typically happens with mana mutation because the subjects are Chaotic Stupid monsters who won't remember a thing (except when they become sapient without their captors realizing it).
  • Eric, as an otherworlder (i.e. someone who came from another dimension) is subjected to a harmless version of this when he first arrives on Threa; basically magical x-rays. Although the Mad Scientist conducting would like to do more, her Morality Chain said no. It later happens when he mana mutates into a Grendel, but it is temporary and doesn't do any permanent harm.
  • Kallen has a history with this trope that she would rather not talk about because it involves being used as a "lap rat" for experimental therapies for mana mutation.
  • Nolien volunteers for this to atone for a major screw-up relating to mana mutation. It involves transforming him into a monster first so they can demonstrate turning him back.
• Max of Maximum Ride, her family, her clone, her nemesis, her half-brother, the mooks of the series, and a surprising amount of other people are the victims of genetic engineering.
• The titular rats from Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Having gained superintelligence and much longer lives, some rats developed a sense of ethics and dissatisfaction with a life of theft, but others used their abilities to thieve on a much higher level than before, which ultimately got them killed.
• Tree of Aeons: Aeon is a diligent and just ruler, who fosters prosperity and keeps his people safe from the demons, but that justice is not mixed with a great deal of mercy. When the highest penalty for crime in his realm is to be "subject to Aeon's mercy", it's a euphemism for capital punishment via destructive experimentation in his soul forge. (In fairness, he's not a sadist, just coldly pragmatic. He's letting criminals do something useful with the last few minutes of their lives, providing valuable medical data that will improve his ability to heal people.)
• Given the Bio Punk world of Twig, there's an unsurprisingly large amount of this. From war beasts to parasite-controlled super soldiers, the Academy does not hold back. Sometimes there's anesthetic, sometimes anesthetic doesn't do a damn thing. The protagonists are the results of one experimental project or another. Later, it's revealed that the Nobles are, as well.
• The Old Arcadia Empire in Undefeated Bahamut Chronicle had a habit of performing such experiments. The only one shown to the reader in any detail involved implanting young girls with seeds of the Puppeteer Parasite Yggdrasil. In almost all cases their bodies couldn't withstand it, the results being described as though something devoured them from the inside. The sole survivor is Philuffy, resulting in her Superpowered Evil Side. Though it's later revealed that even she didn't actually survive, the procedure was simply that lethal. She was instead brought back to life by a third party.
• Taura from Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga is the last survivor of a Super-Soldier project of this sort. Just to twist the knife, she's going to die young because her boosted metabolism burns too fast to sustain long-term.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5:
  • The series has two rather nightmarish scenes involving this trope, both involving a species called the Streib who were a Henchmen Race to the Shadows: the episode "All Alone In the Night" where Sheridan is abducted by them, and the episode "Movements of Fire and Shadow" where Londo is prepped for taking on the Drakh Keeper, both show a similar Nightmare Fuel-inducing whir of surgical implements, needles, drills and such bearing down toward the victim's face, from the point of view of the victim.
  • Something similar is also seen in Carolyn's flashback in "Ship of Tears" — here, it was supposedly how she was prepped for her intended fitting into a battlecrab as its CPU.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Adam is a partially demonic version of Frankenstein's monster who was created this way.
  • Adam turns Forrest into a duplicate of himself.
• Carnival Row: Darius was a victim of this in prison, where the Burgue army were performing tests to see if they could trigger and control his lycanthropy to use him as a weapon. As a result, while his Marrok form is still involuntary, it's triggered by pain (specifically, anything piercing his skin) rather than just the moon (but it is indicated that during full moons, he transforms), and while he's gained enough control over this to use his Marrok form to protect those he cares about, he still can't completely control it and is scared of spreading it to others.
• Max, the main character of Dark Angel, was created as part of an experiment to develop genetically enhanced Super Soldiers. (Among other things, she has cat DNA.)
• The Devil Judge: The purpose of the Dream Home Medical Centre. The government uses a non-existent virus as an excuse to drag people away to the medical centre, then experiment on them.
• River Tam from Firefly was turned into a human weapon through cruel experimentation at the Academy that left her insane.
• Forever: Henry has had some bad experiences in the past when people found out about his immortality, starting with being sent to an asylum and apparently getting worse from there. Adam had it even worse, being experimented on in Auschwitz by Dr. Mengele himself.
  Henry: Abe, this has happened before! I've had every ounce of my blood drained, my organs dissected in the name of science!
• In Fringe, many of the Mad Scientists of the Week love to do this.
• Game of Thrones: Qyburn lost his maester's chain for experimenting on the living.
• Gen V: "The Woods" is a secret medical facility underneath Godolkin University where some Supes are imprisoned for use as lab rats.
• Kamen Rider: The villainous organizations of the '70 to '90 series made their henchmen by kidnapping ordinary people and turning them into brainwashed cyborg monsters. Most Kamen Riders at the time were victims rescued/escaped before their minds were altered. Not much is seen of the operation itself, but it involves replacing organs, bones, and skin with artificial substitutes and the victims are not writhing in pain only if they have passed out already.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: A magical example. After going into hiding, Sauron delved deep into experiments with the Unseen World that involved sacrificing an uncounted number of orcs to uncover dark secrets hidden even from him.
• What was done to the humans in the "live-aboard program" in V (2009).

Music

• The Agency of mind.in.a.box has killed at least 228 test subjects while trying to synchronize with the Dreamweb, which involves pumping a cryogenic compound into the subject's bloodstream.

Podcasts

• On the Threshold: Upper-Class Twit Erasmus and numerous Disposable Vagrants are kidnapped or blackmailed and subjected to neurosurgery in the basement of a hospital. Erasmus considers himself lucky to "only" occasionally slip into fugue states in which he experiences hallucinations (maybe) of alien beings and places, so presumably some of the others had even worse results. The purpose of these experiments is unclear, though apparently the researchers were very interested to document the subjects' visions.

Tabletop Games

• Promethean: The Created: The Second Edition introduces Insatiate Alchemists, humans who've discovered Prometheans and decided to use the alchemical wonders innate in their bodies for experimentation purposes. This, of course, involves imprisoning Prometheans and cutting them up to get at their Vitriol. Sometimes, this also means injecting said Vitriol into themselves, which has... unpredictable results.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Fabius Bile is basically this trope personified. For one thing, he has a syringe gun (getting hit by this basically condemns the victim to a rapid but extremely painful death-by-mutation) and has a backpack (which is actually an extension of his spine) covered in surgical tools... and a lab coat made of human skin. He basically mixes the primordial elements of Chaos into some vague facsimile of medical science and the results are horrifying (and he will happily practice them on you, whether you want him to or not). Bile is generally considered one of the most generally twisted and horrific villains of the setting; for a franchise that immortalized the phrase "GrimDark", that's saying quite a bit.
  • The medical augmentation of one or more subjects on a client's account — often including the clients themselves — is one of the most common services the Dark Eldar Haemonculi are contracted for. The Haemonculi take these jobs with relish, plying their grisly trade with absolutely no regard for morality, ethics, or the safety of their patients as they experiment with agonizing surgical modifications, flesh and organ grafts, chemical injections, and more bizarre procedures to grant their patients physical perfection or turn them into killing machines.
  • Ork Nobs and Warbosses often have their Doks try to "upgrade" them and other Orks. However, given the Doks' Mad Scientist tendencies and their being Orks to start with, this can go disastrously (or hilariously) wrong, with unlucky Orks ending up with anything from non-functional artificial limbs to bombs in their craniums to having their brains swapped with those of animals, depending on what the Dok thought might be interesting to try that day.

Video Games

• As a game set in a very militaristic-driven, dystopian Crapsack World, Akatsuki Blitzkampf has quite a bit of this. Mainly in regards to the Elektrosoldats army made of clones of the local Smug Snake Adler, but also regarding clones of the Big Bad Murakumo that he sent to dominate different groups like the Japanese Army and The Triads and the Tongs]], the creation of the Blitztanks, which were once human, and Akatsuki's past, in which he's all but stated to have gotten his Shock and Awe powers and his capacity to survive being a Human Popsicle for 50 years from experimentation related to the MacGuffin of the game, the Blitz Engine.
• The Sumeragi Group from Azure Striker Gunvolt Series is well versed in this. Performing experiments on both Adepts and non-Adepts; the former to be used as an alternate energy resource, and the latter to implant a septima. Their iX counterpart still retain this practice.
• BioShock is the poster boy of this trope in Video Games. Just think back to how many EVE injections are used throughout the game by the player. And that's without delving into Plasmids and Gene Tonics, or the Little Sisters who literally play with syringes, or the surgical experiments used to turn those girls into Little Sisters in the first place.
• Synapse of City of Heroes is a Hero largely created by Crey Corporate researchers. We're not told exactly how this resulted in electrical powers and superspeed, but it involves being Strapped to an Operating Table with a bunch of rotary saws descending. His sidekick, the Cat Girl Mynx, is another Crey Industries escapee, except she was changed into a Half-Human Hybrid. Interestingly, Synapse's Mirror Universe counterpart Neuron is the one that does this to her, being a Mad Scientist himself. To a degree, many of the Longbow Wardens have powers created in this sort of way, although they at least use consenting subjects and are pretty heroic.
  • Basically, any Science origin character that didn't get their powers from a Freak Lab Accident got them from this.
• The outbreak of space zombies in Dead Space was not an unfortunate accident or bad luck. The Marker that turns people into bloodthirsty zombies is one of several copies of an alien artifact that have been created by the Earth Government over 200 years ago. Then they quickly tried to get rid of it by dumping it on a small remote planet in deep space, never to be found again. But of course, it was.
• In the Fallout series, the pre-War United States government routinely rounded up military prisoners, regular prisoners, and political dissidents and subjected them to horrific scientific experiments that resulted in the creation of such things as the Forced Evolutionary Virus (FEV), whose effects can still be felt over 200 years After the End.
  • The founder of the Brotherhood of Steel, US Army Captain Roger Maxson, found out about the FEV experiments going on at the military base he was posted at, executed the scientists involved, and deserted the Army alongside his unit after he took over the base. No one higher up cared since he mutinied the day before the bombs fell.
  • In the Lonesome Road DLC for Fallout: New Vegas, the general in charge of the launch facility ordered people protesting against nuclear weapons be taken away for experimentation.
  • In the Automatron DLC for Fallout 4, the Mechanist's Lair is located inside a research facility run by the government and RobCo, which created the Robobrain by forcibly extracting prisoners' brains, wiping their memories, and sticking them inside a robotic chassis. Unfortunately, the memory wipe procedure was imperfect at best, and several Robobrains had to be destroyed after the prisoner's brain realized that they had no arms, legs, or eyes and went insane. Even those that remembered nothing still went insane sometimes.
• Both Final Fantasy VI and VII feature experiments to create some sort of Super-Soldier. Both games feature a primary villain going nuts due to these experiments. Kefka simply due to the process being unrefined, Sephiroth does fine until he realizes that he was used as a Guinea Pig.
  • With Sephiroth, it's also that they used cells from an evil alien, causing him to believe himself to not even be human.
  • Additionally, Zack and Cloud were also used as guinea pigs by Professor Hojo, the same Mad Scientist who "created" Sephiroth, for at least five years. And this could have happened to Tifa, Cloud's childhood friend and one of his two love interests, had Zangan not taken her away with him right after the Nibelheim incident. Hojo also turned people into mindless "Sephiroth clones" with the aforementioned alien cells, the same way he attempted to do to Cloud (whom he initially considers a failure but later his only success).
  • In Cloud's flashback it is revealed that when Hojo infuses humans with too much Mako they become monsters. This implies that all of the monsters in this game — or at least some of them — are a result of Hojo's twisted experiments.
  • Near the end of the game, Hojo injects himself with the alien cells to transform into not one but two grotesque One-Winged Angel forms as he fights Cloud and his party.
  • During Dirge of Cerberus there is an entire underground ARMY of people who have either been a victim of this trope or who were born from it.
  • And let's not forget Dr. Lugae in Final Fantasy IV — this seems to be his MO.
• NESTS, the primary villains of the second arc of The King of Fighters, were very prone to subjecting their lab rats to "testing" equivalent to torture in order to create an army of Super Soldiers. Among numerous others, Sylvie would be regularly chained to the ceiling of a Torture Cellar and whipped, whereas Nameless was frequently unable to control his pyrokinesis and nearly killed himself at least 180 times. It was no surprise that one of said lab rats, Isolde, outright died as a result of her abuse, and what did NESTS do? Why, stick her DNA into her boyfriend (the aforementioned Nameless)'s Power Limiter!
• The Mass Effect universe is rife with instances of this trope, and Commander Shepard seems to run afoul of every single one. Dr. Saleon, ExoGeni, Binary Helix... and of course Cerberus, a N.G.O. Superpower that does things like arrange for a platoon of marines to be positioned right on top of a whole nest of thresher maws just to see what happens.
  • Subverted by Mordin Solus. While he did upgrade the Genophage he only did so because he thought it was the best long-term choice and feels immense guilt for this. He also actively despises this trope, seeing it as crude and a waste of life. He despises it so much that he completely flips his lid when he finds out a former protegé of his was playing this trope.
    Mordin Solus: Never experimented on species capable of calculus. Simple rule. Never broke it.
• The "Les Enfants Terribles" project of the Metal Gear games probably counts.
  • If it doesn't, the experiments that made Grey Fox definitely do.
  • Also, Vamp from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is another example. Using an experimental variation of the nanomachines developed by Naomi in Metal Gear Solid, he's practically immortal thanks to his Healing Factor — except if you pump him with nanomachine suppressors — the same kind needed to resist the titular "Guns of the Patriots".
• Murder in the Alps: The chapter Grey Nature deals with the apparent suicide of Dr. Karl Brüner who was trying to create a poliomyelitis vaccine with his partner, Dr. Ralf Sachs. The heroine Anna Myers eventually finds hidden documents proving that they killed three children to test their vaccine and kept it a secret. Dr. Brüner was consumed by guilt and planned to turn himself and his much more self-centered partner in, but he suffered a stroke related to his myocardial infarction. Convinced he hadn't enough time to irrefutably expose Dr. Sachs and put a stop to their illegal experiments, he made his own suicide look suspicious enough to incriminate Dr. Sachs. Though Anna figures out the ruse, Sachs is arrested regardless.
• Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee has Vykkers Labs, run by the titular race. Each and every one of them are colossal sadists and enjoy tormenting the various animals there.
• Path of Exile has Piety, who is a Magitek transhumanist, trying to improve her subjects by infusing them with thaumaturgy and Virtue Gems. Her laboratory in the Lunaris temple, filled with mutilated corpses strapped to operating tables and screaming, deformed things that used to be exiles, says a lot about her research methods.
• In People Playground, you can conduct horrible experiments on characters to your heart's content — using actual syringes, to boot! The syringes will inject certain (often deadly) substances into lifeforms, and include a death syringe, an acid syringe, and a life syringe — the last can heal and resurrect damaged bodies, allowing you to subject them to tortuous experiments again and again.
• The Shadows from Persona 3 were a result of this.
  • It's implied in FES that they've always been there, as they are the mindless fragments of human emotion; the experiment only allowed them to be collected into one place, where they fused to form Death, the 13th Arcana Shadow which summon Nyx.
  • A straighter example from Persona 3 would be Takaya, Jin, and Chidori, artificial Persona-users, created in exactly this fashion.
• Subject 3 of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future had this done to him.
• [PROTOTYPE]: The entire backstory of the game is the result of this sort of stupidity. Blackwatch was originally a bio-weapons research and development unit stationed in Ft. Detrick, which was tasked with creating a virus that would target certain minorities. But in '69, they tried testing their weapon on a little town called Hope, Idaho. The result was a near-apocalypse and the creation of Elizabeth Greene. Fast-forward about fifty years later, and a derivative of one of Greene's viruses got loose in Manhattan. Guess what happens next.
  • They've somehow managed to to outdo themselves by the time [PROTOTYPE 2] rolls around. Blackwatch and GenTek manage to not only turn the now reinfected Manhattan into a testing ground, but they basically run experiments such as the proven "lets-unleash-a-viral monstrosity-on-a-bunch-of-unarmed-civilians-and-see-what-happens" test. Double-blind, surely. Of course, this being Blackwatch/GenTek, that's just one of a whole slew of morally-bankrupt activities they're working on.
• Resident Evil: The Umbrella Corporation practice this so much that they could put a copyright on it. For starters, they have a bad tendency to hire morally bankrupt sociopaths to head up viral weapons projects and then act utterly shocked when they start losing control of them. The viruses themselves would be of questionable effectiveness as biological weapons^note As a rule, bioweapons tend to work best when the people you kill with them stay dead, and to call their security "piss-poor" is an insult to urine. Most of the games can basically be summarized as "the inevitable result of hiring a complete psychopath to inject any living thing he sees with a mutagenic virus" or "let's throw some military types in a box with our escaped mutants and call it 'gathering combat data'".
• In SaGa Frontier, some of the scientists at the Bio Research Lab gush about "a disease-free, immortal body". Others make anguished complaints about how they didn't want to turn out like this. All of them transform into monsters to fight you.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey: Jack's Squad and Mitra, when confronted with live examples of biology they didn't understand, did the reasonable thing: cut them open and see what made them tick. What was a bit more unreasonable was when Jack and his scientists started enslaving demons en masse for organ harvesting and demon fusion (the syringe and scalpel sort of fusion) and Mitra started using humans as test subjects for insanity-inducing serums and other sorts of Body Horror-riffic experiments.
• A cyclical example occurs in the lore of Tales of Maj'Eyal. During the Age of Allure, the halflings of the Nargol nation experimented on humans to create the Higher, a Human Subspecies with keen senses, a longer lifespan, and a natural talent for magic. The Higher eventually founded their own nation, the Conclave, and went to war against the Nargol. During the war one Conclave research project involved transhuman experimentation, implanting runes and potions into humans to create Super Soldiers and laborers. The test subjects eventually became the Ogre race, while those test subjects who had managed to escape founded the Ziguranth. Who in turn, believing in the evil of arcane magic, experimented on Ogre volunteers who wished to escape magic's taint until they created the Krogs through natural infusions.
• Total War: Warhammer II: A gameplay mechanic called "The Forbidden Workshop", useable when playing as Mad Scientist Throt the Unclean of Clan Moulder from The Twisted and the Twilight. Somewhat chance-based, the more mutations you apply to a unit, the more likely they are to become unstable. The more unstable a unit, the lower their maximum health, and if unstable enough, they will become an Action Bomb and explode on contact with the enemy. Though many skaven units even from the base game are a result of Clan Moulder's experiments (such as the aptly named Hellpit Abomination).

Visual Novels

• Perseverance has the Military performing human experiments, with disastrous consequences when one of their test subjects throws up her tracking device and manages to escape.

Webcomics

• In Charby the Vampirate after being abandoned by his parents Zeno was captured, sold to scientists, and vivisected alive. His dreams frequently revisit these memories.
• Grace and her "brothers" from Project Lycanthrope in El Goonish Shive. Big Bad Damien himself was the result of another project. Grace was the result of a sabotaged project to eliminate Damien.
• Draconians in the webcomic Grayscale are subjected to this by Phoenix scientists, evidently not only for medical research and punishment but because of the fact that the Phoenixes view other races, especially Draconians, as little more than animals. Nine, being a recent capture, is still in fairly good health and spirit, while Pai, who has evidently been there a long time, is little more than a skeleton.
• Lighter Than Heir: It is readily apparent to the reader that Dr. Marilyn Villalobos is intentionally and with malice aforethought instigating a world war by experimenting on Volants (semi-supermen who apparently can't survive a spine-ripping) and genetically augmenting supersoldiers en-masse for a faction whose beliefs she does not even pretend to try to uphold. As a direct result of the war, she is given near-unlimited scientific resources to play with, regardless of the ethics or ideology of her faction. The protagonist is so disgusted by what happened to most of the prototypes that she murders as many people as she can in the laboratory, innocent or not.
• Oasis in Sluggy Freelance is stated to be the result of an unknown amount of this trope. Hereti Corp, who funded the projects to create her among other things, is shown to be quite fond of unethical science in general.
• The scientific experiments conducted in Tower of God used to fuse children with powerful energy beings, and the general practice of using children to produce Ignition Weapons.
• Herr Doktor Vernon Glasner from Trying Human does this to The Greys. Officially, his purpose is manufacturing Super Soldiers, but he takes way too much pleasure from creating Half-Human Hybrids...

Web Original

• In Dingo Doodles, the Foreclaimers were completely obsessed with achieving perfection and lacked any form of empathy to limit their experiments. A depiction of their history shows a long string of experiments conducted on their own people, including at least one vivisection. Their research eventually culminated in the creation of the artificial god Xanu, who they proceeded to thoroughly "test" for many years until he slaughtered them as revenge.
• The SCP Foundation routinely conducts experiments along these lines on the SCPs it contains. While this is intended to better understand and contain them, it sometimes makes things worse.
• What the Organisation does in Survival of the Fittest — evolution to induce the superpowers in the students. The Super Serum is a success, although the powers created have varying values of 'super'.
• Not uncommon in the Whateley Universe, but at Superhero School Whateley Academy, the best example now is Jobe, who tried to invent a serum that would turn someone into a drow so he could have his perfect girlfriend. The first person who got injected was... Jobe. Then there's Jobe's serum that turns people into orc-like things: his father uses people transformed with that serum as miners in his kingdom.
• In Worm, Cauldron abducts people against their will to test their Super Serums, which have a high chance of turning the subject into a monster or killing them outright.

Western Animation

• At the end of the first episode of Arcane, Silco and Singed feed their experimental Psycho Serum to a rat before testing it on any humans. The rat's transformation isn't seen on screen, but judging by how it mauls the cat that was chasing it, and how the humans who've taken it end up, it can't have been pretty.
• In Exo Squad, Phaeton had the Neo Megas experiment on other Neosapiens to find a cure for his Automutation Syndrome. Of course, the Neo Megas themselves are the result of Xenobius' research, although this trope is exhibited more in his later creation of the Neo Warriors and Neo Lords.
• Doctor Anton Sevarius from Gargoyles.
• Dr. Emilia from Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts creates a serum that she and her subordinates use to revert Mutes back to normal animals.
• The gem fusion fragments from Steven Universe: gem shards (which are supposed to be dead gems) physically fused together as an attempt at artificial, permanent gem fusion. The results are monsters made of all sorts of random body parts.
• In Street Sharks, this is how "gene slamming" works. The Big Bad Mad Scientist, upon figuring out that the human-sea creature hybrid-making formula he stole would work fine for mutating humans, immediately locks in and mutates his colleague. He then calls up the colleague's sons, tricks them into stopping by, has them Strapped to an Operating Table, and turns them into the shark-human hybrids we have as protagonists for the rest of the series.
• In Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, this is revealed to be the origin of the turtles themselves. Baron Draxum originally created them using a combination of Mutagenic Goo and Lou Jitsu's DNA to make them into Super Soldiers. Lou Jitsu himself vehemently disagreed with that idea, setting the lab on fire and fleeing with the turtles in tow (and later mutating into a rat). Draxum presumed the turtles dead for thirteen years; their crossing paths again kicks off the plot.
• Prometheus Black from Transformers: Animated was initially using "biological" modifications on test subjects to compete with Sumdac System's robotics empire. After he starts secreting Cybertonian-dissolving acid and starts calling himself Meltdown, he becomes obsessed with creating "an organic transformer," which led him to turn his lawyer and stock broker into misshapen beasts. Rather pleasant fellow.

Real Life

• Unit 731. One of the most horrific war crimes of the 20th century. Not only that, they added Karma Houdini to the mix, with many members being pardoned in exchange for handing over their research data to the Americans... who didn't share it with their allies. It wasn't until the 1970s that the US even officially admitted that Unit 731's crimes had occurred at all. On that particular note, there was former Unit 1644 (a sister unit to 731) member Misami Kitaoka, who continued his experiments until after the war, getting a job as a doctor with Japan's National Institute of Health and Sciences, where he injected unwilling patients with rickettsia and typhus.
• On a similar note, Dr. Josef Mengele's experiments on the prisoners of Auschwitz during the course of The Holocaust. Contrary to popular belief, he did not, in fact, make any notable contributions to 20th-century medical knowledge. He was merely a sadist given free rein to indulge his darkest impulses and as such mostly just chopped people up in horrific ways.
• Both the United States and Soviet Union conducted secret tests on unwilling subjects during the Cold War, involving studies on poison gas, torture, biological weapons, and radiation poisoning. North Korea continues to conduct similar tests in modern times.
• After the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, all doctors and medical personnel were liquidated for adhering to "Western capitalist" ideas and beliefs surrounding medical practices. So, in order to replace all the medical personnel they had killed or jailed, they had cadres of untrained teens and children perform gruesome medical experiments on political prisoners in order to re-learn medicine. The results are about what one would expect.
• Advocates of "alternative medicine" often try to cast science-based medicine as being nothing but this, overemphasizing past incidents of unethical experimentation which have since been condemned and repudiated by the medical community, and downplaying the benefits of medical treatments. Ironically, a fair amount of alternative medicine better qualifies, with attempts at "curing" autism by off-label uses of chemical castration, chelation, direct injections into the cerebrospinal fluid, and so on. Of course, some of those herbs aren't good for you either. One plant has leaves that have medicinal properties and inert stems. However, when the stems and leaves are combined, they create a toxic protein that just makes things worse.
• The Tuskegee Syphilis Study was a 40-year government experiment in which Black sharecroppers in Alabama with latent syphilis infections were duped into receiving ineffective treatments to observe the effects of the untreated disease. The study is nowadays held up as a textbook example of unethical human experimentation, and its legacy is cited as a key factor in medical skepticism among Black communities.
• MKUltra, the infamous program conducted by the CIA between the 1950s and the '70s to develop some method of brainwashing. This in fact did involve strapping people to an operating table and playing with syringes (mostly filled with LSD) while a speaker under the bed spoke slogans in a loop. People confirmed to have been experimented on this way include Theodore Kaczynski/the Unabomber, Henery Murray, James "Whitey" Bulger, and others. David Icke claimed to have been a part of it. Many conspiracy theories revolve around this program, and some link Lee Harvey Oswald and Charles Manson to it as well.

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