Colonial human experiments in Togo, medical trials in Nazi concentration camps, and drug experiments during the Cold War: human experimentation is ethically charged and not just another scientific method among others. In human experiments, the subject and object of knowledge converge, and research interests are often overshadowed by ideologically motivated forms of interaction. This affects the social structures within a laboratory as well as the anthropological assumptions and the popular cultural fantasies that shape the history of human experimentation. The contributions in this volume examine the diverse and often deadly human experiments in medicine, psychology, and social sciences of the 20th century in relation to such cultural contexts and illuminate the fundamental significance that the experimental perspective holds for the concept of humanity.