Controversial research programs, unethical experimentation, and human trials have been part of the medical field for centuries. The more infamous recent examples of wayward science include widespread eugenics sterilization, Nazis Naziing, similar rampant Japanese experimentation during WWII which the U.S. happily let literally everyone off for in exchange for the data, electroshock therapy, ionizing radiation experiments, the CIA program MKULTRA, and the U.S. government sponsored Tuskegee syphilis experiments, which we’ll get to in the Bonus Facts later.

Moving on to cancer, typically when physicians are looking to find potential paths to cure people of various types of cancer, they’ll use tried and true methods proven to help in the aggregate towards this end. Other times, they’ll use new and experimental procedures that may help, or may do nothing, but generally trying to avoid doing harm. In all cases in most of the developed world, they’ll explain what they are going to do, and then ask for consent from their patient or their guardian or the like before administering any treatment regardless of what it is. But this is a relatively modern idea and in the wild west days of medicine that are just barely in our rearview mirror, few things were off the table, whether a given patient consented to something or not. This is the story of the eventual head of the American Cancer Society, Dr. Chester Southam, and his quest to see what would happen if he injected people, from healthy to terminal, with cancer. Along the way we’ll also be looking at whether it’s possible to catch cancer from another human, the cancers in certain animals that are spread directly via contact, even in one odd case to a human, and give yet another reason why mosquitoes should be eradicated from the Earth.

But before all that, our story today begins in 1963 at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, New York. Enter the aforementioned Dr. Chester Southam, who, at the time, was working at the Sloan‐Kettering Institute for Cancer Research and Memorial Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases. While there, for about a decade, Dr. Southam had been experimenting with injecting people with cancer without their informed consent… He had gotten away with it up to this point. But that was about to end thanks to what happened at the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital...

Author: Daven Hiskey
Host: Simon Whistler
Producer: Samuel Avila

0:00 Injecting People with Cancer
7:50 Can Humans Catch Cancer Directly From Others and the Real World Contagious Cancers
16:15 Spreading Cancer By Mosquitoes and the Mosquito Hypothesis for Human Cancer
19:18 One Cell to Rule Them All
21:48 The Past was the Worst.