Tag: human experimentation

NIH Funds Study On Puberty Blockers, Hormones On Youth Despite Risk Of Sterilization

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is funding research on the effects of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormone treatment on youth despite acknowledgment from the grantee that these medical interventions can result in sterility.

A parent or guardian consent form from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA), titled “Pubertal Blockers for Minors in Early Adolescence,” states, “If your child starts puberty blockers in the earliest stages of puberty, and then goes on to gender affirming hormones, they will not develop sperm or eggs. This means that they will not be able to have biological children.”

It goes on to read, “This is an important aspect of blocking puberty and progressing to hormones that you should understand prior to moving forward with puberty suppression.”  It adds that fertility can be maintained if a child takes puberty blockers but does not undergo cross-sex hormone therapy. Two different studies, however, have found that roughly 98% of children who take puberty blockers go on to take cross-sex hormone therapy. 

After the parent/guardian decides to proceed with pubertal blocker medication, the consent form requires the signature of both the parent/guardian and the child (patient).

Dr. Stanley Goldfarb is the director of an advocacy group called Do No Harm, which seeks to “protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology.” He criticized the idea of a minor possibly signing away their ability to reproduce.   

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Washington Post Still Covers Up U.S. War Crimes And Use Of Biological Weapons

The Washington Post is still covering up U.S. war crimes.

Seiichi Morimura, who exposed Japanese atrocities in WWII, dies at 90
His book about Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army, helped force Japan to confront its wartime past

The obituary says:

Seiichi Morimura, a Japanese writer who helped force a reckoning upon his country with his 1981 exposé of Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army that subjected thousands of people in occupied China to sadistic medical experiments during World War II, died July 24 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 90.

Morimura’s book sold astonishingly well even when it was unusual to confronted people in Japan with the imperial crimes of their nation.

Unit 731 was at its time only comparable to some Nazi doctors who widely experimented on humans:

At a time when Japanese textbooks often minimized atrocities committed by Japan during the war, Mr. Morimura interviewed dozens of veterans of Unit 731 and documented in harrowing detail the conduct of the operation, which was established in 1938 near the Chinese city of Harbin by Japanese medical officer Shiro Ishii.

Disguised as an epidemic prevention and water purification department, the unit functioned through the end of the war as a testing ground for agents of biological warfare. Mr. Morimura’s work helped prompt more investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to a court case that further revealed the extent of the atrocities.

The perpetrators included many respected Japanese physicians. Thousands of people — mainly Chinese, but also Koreans, Russians and prisoners of eight total nationalities, according to Mr. Morimura — endured medical experiments that have been compared to those of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

Victims, referred to in Japanese as “marutas,” or wooden logs, were infected with typhus, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and the plague with the goal of perfecting biological weapons. Some prisoners were then vivisected without anesthetic so that researchers could observe the effects of the disease on the human body.

“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped,” one unnamed member of the unit told the New York Times in 1995, recalling a victim who had been infected with the plague. “This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”

Several thousand people, and maybe many more, were experimented to death by the unit.

When the second world war was over Unit 731 members were supposed to be put on trial for the war crimes they had committed. The U.S. military stopped that as it had planned to use what Unit 731 had learned for its own wars:

The same year that Mr. Morimura’s book was released, an American journalist, John W. Powell, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the U.S. government had granted immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for the laboratory records from their research. Mr. Morimura alleged the same. For years, the United States dismissed reports of the unit’s experiments as Cold War propaganda.

There is no further mentioning of this in the rest of the Washington Post obit.

The reader is left hanging without learning if those U.S. government claims of ‘Cold War propaganda’ were true or false.

The U.S. did of course do what had been alleged. Documents were released that proved it. The U.S. had done much more.

The Post also repeats false U.S. claims that the Japanese government had hindered war crime trials against the units members:

However, according to U.S. officials, the Japanese government continued to decline to assist American efforts to place perpetrators on a list of war criminals prohibited from entering the United States. Ishii lived in freedom until he died of throat cancer in 1959. The Times reported that other Unit 731 veterans became governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and chief of the Japanese Olympic Committee.

It was the U.S. government, not the Japanese one, which gave immunity to Unit 731 members. It even paid them high amounts for their knowledge:

The US government offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials who were instrumental in perpetrating crimes against humanity, in exchange of the data about their experiments. Among those was Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731. During the cover-up operation, the U.S. government paid money to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to two declassified U.S. government documents.

The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere between 150,000 yen to 200,000 yen. An amount of 200,000 yen at that time is the equivalent of 20 million yen to 40 million yen today.

40 million yen today are the equivalent of $284,000. Nicer to have than not to have …

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New MKULTRA Files Reveal Terrifying Experiments On Black Americans

In a groundbreaking investigation, renowned anthropologist Orisanmi Burton has blown the lid off a dark chapter in CIA history. Classified Agency files, recently obtained through Freedom of Information laws, expose shocking ties between the infamous MKULTRA program and nightmarish experiments on prisoners of color within the United States.

Burton’s findings expose MKULTRA’s sinister mission to develop psychological warfare and behavioral manipulation tactics specifically aimed at people of color under the guise of “counterinsurgency.” Unbelievably, these barbaric trials were conducted during a turbulent era when numerous U.S. government agencies relentlessly sought to crush the civil rights movement, and prisons brimmed with political radicalism.

This disturbing revelation puts the CIA’s actions into sharp focus, revealing a ruthless bid to quell Black resistance both on the streets and behind bars. But it doesn’t stop there. Burton’s disclosures raise urgent and profound questions about the far-reaching impact of these operations—both in the past and, unsettlingly, even today.

Among the most haunting questions is whether the Agency actively pursued a race-specific mind control weapon—an idea that strikes at the very core of ethical and moral boundaries.

As the nation grapples with this revelation, one thing is certain: Burton’s exposé demands answers and accountability for the harrowing atrocities committed in the name of national security. The truth must be unveiled, and justice served for those who suffered under the relentless grip of MKULTRA’s clandestine horrors.

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Scientists Receive Green Light to Merge Human Brain Cells with Computer Chips

Brain cells merging with computer chips could be the next evolution of artificial intelligence (AI). Scientists in Australia have been awarded funding to grow human brain cells and combine them with silicon chips.

A team led by researchers from Melbourne’s Monash University are receiving more than $405,000 as part of Australia’s National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants Program. The new project, led by Associate Professor Adeel Razi, from the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, in collaboration with Melbourne start-up Cortical Labs, will see scientists grow around 800,000 brain cells in a lab. They will then “teach” these cells to perform goal-directed tasks.

The project’s goal is to create what the team calls the DishBrain system, “to understand the various biological mechanisms that underlie lifelong continual learning.”

Last year, the brain cells made headlines around the globe after displaying their ability to perform simple tasks in a video game, like the tennis-style game, Pong. The team hopes these continual learning capabilities will transform machine learning — a branch of AI. The technology is becoming increasingly relevant in society, playing a role in everything from self-driving cars to intelligent wearable devices.

According to Associate Professor Razi, the research program’s work using lab-grown brain cells embedded onto silicon chips, “merges the fields of artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to create programmable biological computing platforms.”

“This new technology capability in future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware,” Razi says in a university release.

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The Urban Legend of the Government’s Mind-Controlling Arcade Game

IN A SUBURBAN ARCADE NEAR Portland, Oregon, in 1981, a dull, digital glow bounced off the faces of teenagers who clutched joysticks, immersed in the game. Tiny lines and dots danced or exploded with high-pitched beeps across them all, but one game cabinet, Polybius, drew the longest lines.

Gamers who tried it couldn’t stop playing, and began acting oddly: they were nauseous, stressed, had horrific nightmares. Others had seizures or attempted suicide, many felt unable to control their own thoughts. It was only later that they recalled how Polybius was serviced more often than other games. Men in black suits opened the machine every week, recorded its data, and left, with no interest in its coins. Soon after it appeared, the mysterious arcade game vanished without warning—taken by the men in black suits, leaving no record of its existence.

That’s the story, at least. This legend is one of the big unsolved mysteries of the gaming world, though most concede that the game never existed. It’s since become an urban legend on gaming and conspiracy websites and the internet horror wiki Creepypasta, and like all good stories, it is kept alive by its fans.  

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Startup aims to make lab-grown human eggs, transforming options for creating families

On a cloudy day on a gritty side street near the shore of San Francisco Bay, a young man answers the door at a low concrete building.

“I’m Matt Krisiloff. Nice to meet you,” says one of the founders of Conception, a biotech startup that is trying to do something audacious: revolutionize the way humans reproduce. “So let me find them real quick,” says Krisiloff as he turns to look for his co-founders, Pablo Hurtado and Bianka Seres, so they can explain Conception’s mission.

“I personally think what we’re doing will probably change many aspects of society as we know it,” says Hurtado, the company’s chief scientific officer. “It’s really exciting to be working on a technology that can change the lives of millions of humans.”

Conception is trying to accelerate, and eventually commercialize, a field of biomedical research known as in vitro gametogenesis (IVG). “Basically, we’re trying to turn a type of stem cell called an induced pluripotent stem cell into a human egg,” Krisiloff says. “[This] really opens the door, if you can create eggs, to be able to help people have children that otherwise don’t have options right now.”

The experimental technology could help women who have lost their eggs to cancer treatment, women who have never been able to produce healthy eggs and women whose eggs are no longer viable because of their age.

IVG would enable these women to have their own genetically related babies at any age. That’s because induced pluripotent stem cells can be made from just a single cell from anyone’s skin or blood. So these lab-grown eggs would have that person’s DNA.

But the possibilities are even broader.

“My personal biggest interest in it is it could allow same-sex couples to be able to have biological children together as well,” Krisiloff says. “Yeah, I’m gay, and it’s something that got me so personally interested in this in the first place.”

Same goes for Hurtado. “There is something intrinsic about sharing a life that is half me and half my husband. I don’t have that capacity right now.” He adds, “I am devoting my life to trying to change that.”

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Lab Administers A.I.-Designed Drug to First Patient

Hong Kong- and New York-based Insilico Medicine on Tuesday announced a drug for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) designed by generative artificial intelligence (A.I.) has advanced to Phase 2 clinical trials, which means the drug has been administered to its first human patient.

IPF is a chronic lung disease that makes it more difficult to breathe, starving the body of much-needed oxygen. IPF is currently regarded as incurable, but treatable. 

“Generative A.I.” is the level of artificial intelligence that can accept fairly broad commands from a human user and create a complex finished product. Such A.I. systems grow more powerful and useful as they “learn” by accumulating information. DALL-E, the computer art program that can fulfill instructions like “Show me what the Peanuts characters would look like if Picasso drew them” is a popular example.

Creating a new medicine is a daunting task. The design stage includes a great deal of labor-intensive research that could hopefully be completed more quickly by A.I.

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NEW DOCS LINK CIA TO MEDICAL TORTURE OF INDIGENOUS CHILDREN AND BLACK PRISONERS

The documentary record of “mind control” experiments conducted by the United States and other governments during the Cold War is just the tip of the iceberg, and our collective ignorance is by design. In early 1973, as the fallout from the Watergate scandal exposed the need for greater congressional oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ordered the destruction of all documents related to MK Ultra.

Launched in the wake of the Nuremberg Trials, which exposed the extent of Nazi atrocities carried out in the name of science, MK Ultra involved a range of grotesque experiments on unwitting test subjects within and beyond U.S. borders. Newly revealed evidence exposes previously hidden links between MK Ultra experiments on Indigenous children in Canada and imprisoned Black people in the U.S.

On April 20, 2023, a group of Indigenous women known as the Kanien’kehà:ka Kahnistensera (Mohawk Mothers) achieved a milestone in their ongoing lawsuit against several entities, including McGill University, the Canadian government and the Royal Victoria Hospital in Quebec. The parties reached an agreement whereby archeologists and cultural monitors would begin the process of searching for unmarked graves, which the Mohawk Mothers believe are buried on the grounds of the hospital.

Over the preceding two years, approximately 1,300 unmarked graves, most of them containing the remains of Indigenous children, have been discovered on the grounds of five of Canada’s former residential schools. Throughout the 20th century, the residential school system — like the Indian Boarding School system, its U.S. counterpart — separated thousands of Indigenous children from their families, stripped them of their language and subjected them to various forms of abuse amounting to what a truth and reconciliation commission called “cultural genocide.” But as these horrific revelations demonstrate, the harm wasn’t only cultural — a 1907 investigation found that nearly one-fourth of school attendees did not survive graduation.

In October of 2021, new evidence surfaced linking disappeared Indigenous children to MK Ultra experiments conducted by CIA-sponsored researchers. A white Winnipeg resident named Lana Ponting testified in Quebec’s Superior Court that in 1958, when she was 16 years old, doctors from the Allan Memorial Institute, a former psychiatric hospital affiliated with McGill and the Royal Victoria Hospital, held her against her will, drugged her with LSD and other substances, subjected her to electroshock treatments, and exposed her to auditory indoctrination: playing a recording telling Ponting over and over again, that she was either “a bad girl” or “a good girl.”

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Synthetic human embryos are created in the lab with NO egg or sperm: Scientists announce historic breakthrough raising hopes for new treatments for miscarriage and rare genetical disorders – but development poses huge ethical dilemmas

Human embryos made without eggs or sperm have been created in a scientific breakthrough which is bound to raise serious ethical and legal questions.

They were produced in a joint project between Cambridge University and the California Institute of Technology and resemble embryos in the earliest stages of human development.

They do not have the beginnings of a brain or a beating heart, but do include cells which would go on to form the placenta and yolk sac.

Scientists believe that their finding could provide significant insight and aid research into rare genetic disorders and the biological causes of miscarriage.

But the synthetic embryos are not covered by laws in the UK or in most countries around the world, meaning that they come with serious ethical and legal issues regarding the use of human embryos in a lab.

Until this breakthrough, scientists had to adhere to the 14-day rule which meant they were limited to allowing embryos to develop in a lab for a maximum of two weeks.

After this point researchers would have to wait until further along its development to pick up their study, relying on pregnancy scans and embryos donated to research. 

The desire to understand this period of an embryo’s development – which starts at day 14 and ends around day 28 – was the main motivation behind the work to create synthetic human embryos.

Professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz, a fellow at the University of Cambridge, described the work yesterday at the International Society for Stem Cell Research’s annual meeting in Boston: ‘We can create human embryo-like models by the reprogramming of [embryonic stem] cells.’

Before the talk, she told The Guardian: ‘It’s beautiful and created entirely from embryonic stem cells.’

While it is not yet clear if the synthetic embryos could continue developing beyond their early stages, implanting them into a patient’s womb would be illegal and there is no near-term prospect of them being used for medical purposes.

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