Kidnapped for Experimentation

"Previous test subjects who have come here have had many questions for us. We answered them with science, fire, and termination."

— Dr. Dala, Fallout: New Vegas

Mad Scientists usually require test subjects for their unusual experiments. Or maybe they want to learn about a specific species or individual. Or maybe a person has seen too much and the scientist doesn't want them telling anyone.

Whatever the reason, the scientist knows that they can't get their test subject through any ethical means, so they resort to kidnapping them. Their methods (Kidnapped While Sleeping, Bag of Kidnapping, Creepy Stalker Van) rely heavily on the scientist, as do their reasons. Maybe the kidnapper is your garden-variety Mad Scientist who's doing weird science For the Evulz. Maybe they believe that their experiments are for the subject's own good and that they'll thank them for it someday. Maybe the scientist could have chosen any test subject but specifically chose to kidnap someone the hero loves just to get back at them.

If the victim isn't saved in time, expect this trope to be a part of the hero's motivation, and part of their Dark and Troubled Past. Not to mention that the victim themselves may be a source of Body Horror. If the kidnapper doesn't go for the loved one of the hero or a big-name celebrity, then they'll most likely target someone that no one is likely to miss.

If the hero or one of the main characters is something that a Mad Scientist would take an interest in (alien, robot, alien robot, dragon, fae, superhuman, mutant, intelligent potato, etc), then they may fear this trope happening (especially if the Mad Scientist in question has the government on their side).

Compare with They Would Cut You Up, Strapped to an Operating Table, and Playing with Syringes, as all three of which are likely what the scientist plans to do with their victim. Contrast with (and is an inversion of) the Kidnapped Scientist trope, where a scientist is kidnapped by the Big Bad (or occasionally the heroes) to build/do something for him. Also contrasts with Killing for a Tissue Sample, where the scientist instead kills their victim to obtain something that they could've easily lived without, and Professor Guinea Pig, where the scientist opts to conduct an experiment on themselves. A Sub-Trope of Kidnapped by the Call, especially if being kidnapped by the scientist is what starts the story. If the kidnappers are from space, see Alien Abduction. If the scientist thinks what they're doing is for the greater good, or are actually trying to help the person they kidnapped but couldn't get to them through any legal means, then see The Kindnapper and/or Kidnapped by an Ally ^note  Although the latter one really depends on the situation . May lead to We Can Rebuild Him if the scientists decide to heal a dying/injured person while also studying/experimenting on them. If a villain kidnapped someone to turn them into a Mook, then this trope becomes Reforged into a Minion.

May overlap with Superhuman Trafficking, when the experimental subject is specifically chosen because they possess superhuman traits (e.g., extraterrestrials, Mutants, vampires, The Fair Folk, etc.).

See also For Science!, Mad Scientist (the one most likely to pull this trope), Evilutionary Biologist (the other person most likely to pull this), Emperor Scientist (who might use this trope on the inhabitants of their kingdom), Utopia Justifies the Means, and Science Is Bad.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• AKIRA: After a near-fatal motorcycle accident with an escaped test subject, Tetsuo Shima is taken in by the Japanese government and used as a guinea pig for their research into psychic powers. Tetsuo comes in as a juvenile delinquent and escapes as a homicidal psionic demigod. Then things get really, really bad.
• The premise of Cyborg 009 is that Black Ghost kidnapped people from around the world to convert them into living weapons for war. The first nine cyborgs escaped, but the experiments continued.
• Dr. Müller's backstory in EDENS ZERO involved him doing this to rebuild himself as an O-Tech after losing his body parts in a prison escape gone wrong. Among his victims were Kris and Kleene Rutherford, the young children of financial backers whom he murdered for pulling their funding. Said experiments involved cutting off Kris's limbs with a chainsaw and rebuilding him as an O-Tech, and forcing Kleene to watch the entire time, leaving the girl an emotionally destroyed wreck.
• In Elfen Lied, this is the fate of all the Diclonii who weren't outright euthanized shortly after birth. As newborns, they are taken from their parents at hospitals (who are told their children died shortly after birth) and sent to a top-secret government research facility, where they are only referred to by numbers and experimented on. Lucy, being the very first Diclonii and the origin of all the others, grew up outside of the lab before being tracked down and taken into custody.
• In One Piece, government scientist Caesar Clown had children from various islands "escorted" to his base, Punk Hazard, for medical treatment, claiming each child has an incurable disease. In reality, these kids are healthy and really test subjects for his giantification formula (to turn humans into giants). And if or when this group of kids dies, he would just go on and kidnap another set to continue his work.

Comic Books

• Femforce: A go-go dancer in Florida, Synn was abducted and sold to a Mad Scientist who used her as test subject for his experiments. His experimentation on Silva produced highly unusual results. Silvia, a frequent acid user, had retained some LSD in her body chemistry. Under the impact of a high voltage, the acid triggered a reaction in her brain. Her mind expanded to god-like levels and her body became effectively immortal and immune to aging and disease.
• In Justice Society of America (2022), this is the origin of the Boom, Jay Garrick's long-lost daughter. She was kidnapped by a Mad Scientist and forced to undergo a reenactment of the accident that gave her father his powers so that the scientist could figure out how to give himself powers.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics): Before hijacking and reprogramming Charles Hedgehog's Roboticizer, Dr. Robotnik took his first stab at Unwilling Roboticisation by kidnapping a village of Mobian monkeys and infusing them with neural implants that would turn them into mindless cyborgs. Ken, later known as Monkey Khan, was the Sole Survivor, while the rest of the monkeys all ended up being killed by Robotnik's implants.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): It is implied that Surge and Kit were kidnapped by Dr. Starline as part of his experiments to create his own counterparts to Sonic and Tails. However, with their memories wiped and Starline himself being apathetic to the pair beyond their usefulness to the point that he doesn't bother to keep any records of them before the start of the experiments, it's unclear exactly how they came into his employ.
• WE 3: 1, 2, and 3 (Bandit the dog, Tinker the cat, and Pirate the bunny) were once family pets before The Government abducted and turned them into cyborgs to work on covert military operations. As a reminder, between each issue, we see Missing posters of each of them.
• Weapon X (1991): Logan is abducted by a group of heavies who manage to knock him out and deliver him to the Weapon X program's labs. Once there, he's forced to undergo the adamantium bonding process, which is so nightmarish and painful that he becomes completely animalistic for a good portion of the story. The project's backer knew that Logan was a mutant with a healing factor, and targeted him specifically because they knew that he was probably the only being on Earth who could survive the procedure.
  • Weapon X are also the people who created other mutant characters in the Marvel universe, with the most well-known (other than Wolverine) being Deadpool. This came back to bite them, though, as the first thing Deadpool did once he escaped their custody was break out all of their "rejects" and future test subjects.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon):
  • Alan Jonah's cronies eventually start quietly "disappearing" the disposable vagrants that they've been using as manual labor up to this point so that they can use them as test subjects for experimentation with Ghidorah's DNA. A few of the female kidnappees are impregnated with hybridized offspring. The rest are turned into Monstrous Humanoid zombies by the experiments done to them with Ghidorah's unrefined DNA samples.
  • This trope also occurred in Ghidorah's backstory from Abraxas: Empty Fullness. Before they were the Destroyer of Worlds; Ichi, Ni and San were kidnapped from their original home in an alien world's wilderness by Abusive Precursors who performed inhumane experiments which gave Ghidorah the world-ending powers that it now possesses, in an effort to make a Bioweapon Beast of mass destruction for themselves.
• Discussed/implied, but ultimately averted in Ben 10: Unlimited. Hamilton desperately wants to see the Ultimatrix and learn how it works. Seeing as how Ben never takes it off, he and Waller realize that they would have to bring Ben himself in to learn about it, meaning either kidnapping or recruiting him. Seeing as how Ben has enough powerful alien forms to reduce CADMUS HQ to dust if he so desired, they know that kidnapping isn't an option. Thus Waller tries to simply recruit him instead.
• Experimenting Fear: On the day he's supposed to start his journey as a Pokémon trainer, Nando gets kidnapped by a Mad Scientist who experiments on people to see their reaction to their worst fears. Since the boy loves music and is afraid of losing his hearing, the scientist chooses to torture him with high-pitched sound frequencies then renders him deaf by firing a gun next to his head.
• The Great Red Panda Rescue: What Mei was ultimately kidnapped for. The story goes into detail about what she went through during her ordeal, and it is not good...
• If Wishes Were Ponies: Because of Harry's distrust of humanity, he warns Twilight and the Mane 6 about humans pulling this trope should the ponies reveal themselves on Earth without taking careful precautions. The ponies take Harry's warnings seriously, and manage to take precautions that ultimately make the first interactions between the Equestrian and English governments easier for everyone.
• The Last Seidr: Once SHIELD is made aware that twelve-year-old Harry can do magic, the Avengers fear agents swooping in and taking the kid against his will for testing (as SHIELD just learned that they have a serious disadvantage when it comes to magic and are all but desperate for a way to even the odds). As such, Tony houses everyone who needs shelter at his father's mansion, which is private property and can't be legally stormed by SHIELD agents unless they get a warrant or Tony's permission.
• In The Loud Awakening Lord Tetherby kidnaps Lincoln after the family kicks him out of the house and then later captures his sisters so he can experiment on them with several magical orbs as part of an "EVO Project."
• Null: The inciting incident of the fic's plot is that Jaune, his mother, and all his sisters are kidnapped by a malignant Atlesian conspiracy and inhumanely experimented on with the aim of replicating Jaune's Power Nullifier Semblance, then disposing of him and his relatives once they're no longer useful. It's also made clear that the conspiracy has already inflicted the same fate on hundreds of other innocent people who had Semblances that caught their interest.
• Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: True Colours: An early event in the fic has Ziggy seemingly get lost in the city after Sparks leaves him alone to take care of an injured Monferno. However, a later chapter reveals that he was actually kidnapped by Dr. Hilo, who used the opportunity to take Ziggy's blood and some photos of him before wiping his memories and returning him to an ally. In looking for answers to this, the team is captured by Dr. Hilo again, who explains that he needed Ziggy's blood to engineer a cure for being a Shiny Pokemon, which he believes are freaks, so took him off the street to do so.
• In the fic Spiderhead, Spider-Man tells Batman that this trope is prevalent in the MCU. Any enhanced human or mutant without a powerful figure behind them could be kidnapped and experimented on by any government or lab in the country. He admits that the only reason why he wasn't targeted more often was because everyone knew Spidey was Iron Man's mentee. Batman is visibly furious over metas receiving such treatment, and calmy asks Spidey where he's from so the Bat can go... talk to them.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Two Fandom Specific Plots in Turtles fanfics include one or more Turtles being kidnapped by scientists, necessitating the other Turtles to try and rescue them (how dark it gets depends on the writer), or April being kidnapped by the Kraang for this purpose (this is especially common in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) fics).
  • Once Upon a December Night: April and her parents were kidnapped when April was six to be experimented on by the Kraang. April managed to escape (thanks to Splinter finding and saving her), but her parents weren't as lucky.
  • Invoked and averted in the crossover fic Spider-Ninja. After he learns about the existence of the Turtles, Doctor Octopus kidnaps Donatello. The turtle thinks this trope is in play until Doc Ock reveals that he actually wants Donnie's help building a weapon to use on Norman Osborn.
  • In Turtle Kittens, the Kraang attempt this on August O'Neil a few times.

Film — Animated

• Isle of Dogs: A Bad People Abuse Animals example. To create the Dog Flu virus that got dogs banned from the city, Mayor Kobayashi authorized the capture of hundreds of dogs to be experimented on until the virus was created. As Spots' pack shows, many of the poor dogs who escaped the facility were treated with nightmarish medical experimentation, with many of them (including Spots' wife, Peppermint) having scars as a result.
• In "The Mad Doctor", the titular doctor kidnaps Pluto in the middle of the night so he can use him for a really weird experiment (it involves a chicken, bioengineering, and a brief musical number).
• Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders: The gang comes upon a town that's been reporting alien sightings, with one resident claiming that he's been kidnapped for this purpose. The same thing later happens to Shaggy and Scooby. Subverted; the abductors were actually a bunch of people who'd found gold under the town, and were using the alien abductions (which they made their victims believe were real) to scare away anyone who got too close). The real aliens, Crystal and Amber, are actually benevolent and leave Earth peacefully at the end of the film.
• Halfway through Zootopia, it's revealed that all of the missing mammals had gone savage (which they later learn was due to exposure from Night Howler serum). The Mayor had used city funds to kidnap them and have them brought to the abandoned (and secretly refurbished) Cliffside Asylum so that they could be treated without causing a panic. This plan backfires when Judy and Nick discover the place and bust the Mayor.

Film — Live-Action

• Gremlins 2: The New Batch: The plot kicks off when two scientists find Gizmo after his home gets torn down, bring him to their lab, and try to learn what makes him tick.
• Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco: The main villains of the film are evil dog catchers Jack and Ralph, who drive "the Blood Red Van" and collect strays (and, it's implied, any lost dog even if they have homes) to sell for animal experimentation. When they briefly seize Chance, Jack (who's the crueler of the two) mocks him: "We're taking you to the lab, my friend. They're gonna wire you up like a Christmas tree."
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Captain America: The First Avenger: Bucky Barnes is taken prisoner by HYDRA and has to be rescued by Steve. While what the Nazis do to him is never shown, by the time Steve gets there, he's Strapped to an Operating Table and repeating his name, rank, and serial number in a daze, implying this trope.
  • Captain America: The Winter Soldier: After being presumed KIA, a barely alive Bucky was found by Soviet troops. He was kidnapped and given to HYDRA (again), who turned him into the Winter Soldier.
  • Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3: The High Evolutionary gets his test subjects by taking animals from Earth and making them into Uplifted Animals during his attempt to create the perfect species.
  • A recurring plot throughout the films is that enhanced people (superhumans, mutants, etc) are regularly targeted by the government and corporations due to fascination, fear, or both. The idea to force all superhumans to register with the government (introduced in Captain America: Civil War) is recognized as a threat to enhanced people, as it means that it'll be much easier for them to be targeted for this trope.
• The Signal (2014): The end of the film reveals that everything that's happened to Nic and his friends since their abduction has been one big experiment conducted by Damon/Nomad, with the teens as the test subjects. It's heavily implied that every other human they see is also a test subject, which explains why so many of them seem mentally unstable.
• X-Men:
  • It's heavily implied (via a quote from the Professor) that many mutants have been subjected to this trope before, as the world they live in doesn't care about mutants.
  • The Brotherhood kidnaps Senator Robert Kelly to test out their device that can turn normal humans into mutants. They targeted the senator specifically because he was the loudest voice in the talks to oppress mutants, and they felt that turning him into the one of the people he hated and attacked was a delicious form of karmic justice.

Gamebooks

• In the Choose Your Own Adventure book You Are a Monster, you're kidnapped and turned into a sort of ape/bear hybrid by a Mad Scientist.
• Space Assassin: Cyrus the despot is an Evilutionary Biologist ruling a Planet Spaceship called the Vandervacken, from where he'll send robotic minions to abduct entire populations of various planets as test subjects of his experiments, and your mission is to put a stop to Cyrus' actions and apprehend him before he wipes out your home planet.

Literature

• A Budding Scientist In A Fantasy World: The Society of Starry Eyes is an illegal society because they kidnap people as slaves/test subjects, among other unethical activities.
• In Dr. Franklin's Island, the titular doctor had started work on animals native to the island or brought from somewhere nearby but had wanted to begin human trials. When an off-course plane crashes nearby and some teenagers survive, he doesn't immediately capture them because rescuers might get close enough to wonder where they are. After a month he's decided they won't be missed, and conveniently that's when they discover his Island Base. One of the girls, made miserable by the Slow Transformation and the prospect of being a monster, reflects that she can't really blame the doctor's staff for not helping her - they live with their families on this island, and their own children might become test subjects instead.
• I Did NOT Give That Spider Superhuman Intelligence!: The Bad Doctor regularly has his people and contractors kidnap people for his resurrection, intelligence-boosting, and animal/human hybridization experiments. The two people seen kidnapped and changed are Bluejay, who was turned into a vampiric being, and Robin James, who was turned into Mish-Mosh.
• The Island of Doctor Moreau has an interesting example: the animal people that the doctor created were all once normal animals that he bought and sent to his island, where he experimented on them for days or weeks on end until they were animal-people (this is as horrific as it sounds; the animal-people call the doctor's lab "the house of pain"). The main character, though he was technically rescued from a shipwreck, fears that this has happened to him now that he's Dr. Moreau's "guest" and he's seen the doctor's unholy work.
• In the third book of The Maze Runner series, the surviving Gladers are on the run from WICKED, who want to bring them back and finish their testing (which, Thomas eventually learns, involves removing and dissecting their brains).
• Out of the Silent Planet: The three men who make the journey to a new planet are a xenophobic scientist who wants to spread humanity's greatness throughout the stars, a greedy gold digger who wants to exploit the riches of whatever planet they land on, and a linguist who knocked on their door at exactly the wrong moment (as they had just come to the realization that they could use a Human Sacrifice to appease whatever aliens they find). He ends up drugged and dragged along.
• In PartnerShip, Alpha's focus in university was researching ways to treat Ganglicide exposure - the trouble is, she needed a steady influx of subjects that had been exposed in the first place to work on, and found keeping rabbits smelly and annoying, and if people thought she had pets they would want to talk about them! So she started kidnapping Disposable Vagrants, claiming they weren't doing society any good as they were. This was discovered and should have led to serious consequences, but because of her connections it was hushed up, she was denied her license, and then Alpha was sent to work in a clinic in a distant system. She landed on her feet and didn't kidnap people while working there... because she was in charge of the charity ward and had all the subjects she wanted right there.
• Whateley Universe: This has happened to more than a few kids (whether by scientists or mages), usually either to give the kids powers, in preparation for working on volunteers or because the experiment is supposed to make them pliable.

Live-Action TV

• In ALF, the titular character fears this trope, mostly because he knows that it would lead to something really bad, hence the need for the Masquerade.
• The Barrier: One of the plotlines involves children getting kidnapped, sometimes after being made Legally Dead during a hospital stay, by a scientific institute that is trying to Find the Cure! for The Plague.
• In the Doctor Who episode "Rise of the Cybermen", homeless citizens of Pete's World are lured into trucks with the promise of food. Little do they know they're volunteering to join this world's first generation of Cybermen.
• The Goosebumps (1995) episode "How I Got My Shrunken Head" shows that the Hawlings kidnapped the locals they'd hired for their research trip and used them as test subjects to try and activate the Jungle Magic Benna discovered. Instead, it reduced them to mindless zombies.
• Haven features a Troubled Person of the Week in the episode "Harmony" whose affliction cures catatonia but drives healthy individuals to psychosis. A doctor who got the latter effect ends up kidnapping the Troubled individual with intentions to dissect his brain and figure out how he's curing people.
• The evil organizations of Kamen Rider usually gather their monster of the week fodder this way.
  • Both Takeshi Hongo and Hayato Ichimonji were kidnapped by Shocker to be turned into cyborg soldiers to help them take over the world, but both avoid the brainwashing process and become Phlebotinum Rebels in the process.
  • Shigeru Jo became Kamen Rider Stronger by invoking this trope.
  • Ryo Murasame was kidnapped by the Badan Empire to be turned into a super soldier. While he does not avoid brainwashing like his predecessors, he eventually regains his memory and ends up fighting against Badan anyway.
  • Sento Kiryu doesn't remember anything else from his past but being experimented on by Faust, a terrorist organization of Mad Scientists that tested the effects of Nebula Gas on random people For Science! Most of the subjects became Smash and were released to rampage in Touto. Ryuga Banjo escaped without turning into a Smash and Sento took him in for the potential clues he might have and also to protect him.
• A strange inversion happened in Disney Channel's Lab Rats: The father of the Rats, Douglas Davenport, originally created them to be Super Soldiers who could be hired out or used for criminal activity. His brother, Donald Davenport, saw that the Rats, despite their incredible powers, were still children and couldn't let his brother go through with his plans (which would likely end in the kids being subjected to further testing and possible termination if Douglas didn't like what he saw). So he took the kids from his brother and raised them as his own in secret, taking the family business from Douglas at the same time (while Douglas faked his death and went underground). The Rats learn about this in the season one finale. In a way, they were kidnapped to escape experimentation.
• Leverage: In "The Experimental Job", several homeless veterans are abducted and subjected to psychological torture by college students who are working for the CIA.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: The entire plot of the show (both the original and the Netflix reboot) is that a Mad Scientist wants to take over the world by showing its people bad movies until everyone is rendered insane. To figure out which movies are the worst ones, they kidnap someone (first it was Joel Robinson, then Mike Nelson, then Jonah Heston), imprison them on the Satellite of Love, and force them to watch cheesy movies while they record data. Naturally, this doesn't work the way they want it to, as the test subject keeps their spirits up by building robot friends (although Joel had the most success with that) and riffing the movies for all they're worth.
• Power Rangers RPM: After the apocalypse, the robotic minions of Venjix caught many of the remaining human survivors and worked them to death in the robot factories or made them into cyborg Manchurian Agents.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  • In "Allegiance", Captain Picard is kidnapped from the Enterprise by a race of aliens with superior technology and no concept of individual identity or leadership. Seeing as how he's an authority figure, they picked Picard in order to study authority. He's less than pleased about this.
  • In "The Mind's Eye", Geordi is kidnapped by Romulans for a brainwashing experiment (having picked him because his VISOR hides all evidence of their brainwashing technique). They test their brainwashing abilities by having Geordi act as an assassin to start a conspiracy between Federation and the Klingons. It almost worked, but thankfully Data saved the day (although the ending implies Geordi was heavily traumatized by the incident).
  • In "Schisms", a race of aliens from another dimension are stealing crewmen off the Enterprise via temporary wormholes and running experiments/tests on them. While most of these tests are done so cleanly that the crewmen don't even notice that something is wrong, one crewman's blood is turned into a polymer as a result of their experiments. The Enterprise crew only barely escapes them, and said aliens are never seen or discussed again.
• Walker, Texas Ranger:
  • In Season 6's "Forgotten People", Alzheimer's patients are being admitted into a nursing home, whose director is a mad scientist who is using her patients as guinea pigs to put variations of an illegal Alzheimer's drug on the market to profit from. The experiments result in the deaths of nine patients, and CD, a retired Ranger, is sent in undercover to find evidence proving it.
  • Another Season 6 episode, "Warriors", has the Rangers' old friend, Dr. Susan Lee, and later her son, being kidnapped by a supremacist group bent on world domination to use her research and his DNA to create genetically enhanced super soldiers.

Multimedia Franchises

• Many Marvel and DC superheroes and supervillains have been captured or kidnapped over the decades (in the comic books, movies, TV shows, video games, etc) so scientists or terrorists (or both) can attempt to replicate their powers and weaponize them. Weapon X from the Marvel multiverse has done this several times, with varying results (sometimes they got a super soldier, sometimes they ended up with a chimichanga-loving unkillable nutcase who freed all of their test subjects, killed half of their doctors, and went on to become the definition of a chaotic neutral vigilante).
• Many series in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise usually involve at least one scientist/Man in Black who wants to know how the Turtles mutated and/or steal their DNA for experimentation, and is willing to use this trope to do it. Done most prominently in the most recent movie. Because so many characters in the franchise are mutated humans, this trope pops up when normal humans are kidnapped by the Foot Clan or the Kraang for mutation experiments. Because April is so often used as a Damsel in Distress (although that's been used a lot less in recent adaptations), expect her to be kidnapped by the Kraang, Foot or Dragons at least once (especially if she's an Intrepid Reporter).
• Transformers: While made a lot harder because of the fact that Cybertronians are giant robots who turn into cars, there have been times across the franchise (cartoons, comics, films, video games, etc) when the government, a Monster of the Week, or even a Big Bad has managed to kidnap a Transformer from either side of the war in the pursuit of science. Cybertronians aren't completely innocent of this trope, either, as it's been stated (both through Word of God and canon) that Shockwave has kidnapped Cybertronians for experiments before.

Radio

• In the UK children's radio play Deadly Echo, children with special powers are "recruited" into a secret scientific project to develop an organic microchip. Meanwhile, the families are told that the children are dead.

Tabletop Games

• BattleTech: The Society is a secretive group of disgruntled Clan scientists that refuse to let anything impede their private projects — especially medical ethics. No points for guessing how they get their test subjects.
• Deviant: The Renegades: The Remade, who are all people that had something very wrong done to them, sometimes have this in their origin story — in game terminology, those that had this trope happen to them are termed "Exomorphs" or "the Unwilling".
• Shadowrun: Thanks to a combination of Corporate Extraterritoriality and the global system of using System Identification Numbers to decide citizenship (SIN) we get a setting where a MegaCorp can make its own rules regarding human experimentation on corporate ground, and their enclaves and laboratories are surrounded on all sides by nation-states where a significant percentage of the population live Off the Grid and have neither a SIN or a legal citizenship. This is so systemic that "local mega or cult has secret laboratory where they do unethical research on Disposable Vagrants they've kidnapped; break in and bring us evidence" is a run most Shadowrunners can expect to do at least once in their career.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • Illuminor Szeras is a Necron obsessed with unlocking the secrets of life itself and will frequently capture mortal slaves to vivisect in unspeakable ways, with special attention given to his Aeldari victims.
  • One of the many horrible fates that await those enslaved by the Drukhari is to be a lab rat for their many Haemonculi covens, where they are subjected to unspeakably horrific experiments for shits and giggles.

Video Games

• Arcanum: The backstory features a conspiracy in which a group of gnomes abducted human women and subjected them to eugenics experiments that involved them being forced to mate with male ogres. The result was a population of half-ogre children - the females were marked for use in future experiments, while the males ended up working for the gnomes as bodyguards and hired muscle.
• Armored Core: Project Phantasma has the player take on a mission request from a kidnapped mercenary, who's been taken by a group called the "Doomsday Organisation" as a test subject for what is implied to be experiments to transfer the human mind to robotic bodies.
• Baldur's Gate II starts with the player's party being captured by a wizard for experimentation.
• Dishonored: The authorities are rounding up civilians in North End to send them to Sokolov as Guinea pigs for his experiments about the rat plague.
• Dragalia Lost: The Syndicate regularly kidnaps innocent people for their own twisted experiments. Their goal is to artificially recreate the Alberian Royal family's ability to shape-shift into dragons. They haven't been successful, and the test subjects often end up as mutant human-dragon hybrids. Aldred, Belina, and Farren are just a few of the Syndicate's unlucky victims.
• Epic Mickey: The plot of the game starts when the Mad Doctor and the Blot kidnap Mickey in an attempt to steal his heart. While he isn't a test subject per se, the fact that he's Strapped to an Operating Table before managing to escape (and the fact that the Mad Doctor is...the Mad Doctor) makes it this trope.
• Fallout:
  • Fallout 2: The Chosen One's tribe is kidnapped en masse by the Enclave to test the modified Forced Evolutionary Virus for their campaign of genocide against "mutants."
  • Fallout 4: The Institute kidnaps Wastelanders to study them in order to better model human behaviour. Once done, these kidnapped persons are murdered or infected with FEV and turned into Super Mutants and then the synths are sent to the Commonwealth to take their places.
  • Fallout: New Vegas:
    • According to journal entries in the Lonesome Road DLC, the United States government would frequently arrest anti-war protesters and use them for whatever horrifying research project that the military had in mind.
    • Anyone unfortunate enough to wander into the Big Mountain Research and Development Center (or "Big MT" for short) is captured, lobotomized, and used for both scientific experimentation and janitorial duty. Only three people were ever able to escape such a fate. Even before the Great War, Big MT ran a concentration camp for Chinese-American prisoners called "Little Yangtze," where they would be subjected to everything from weapons testing to brain transplants.
• Final Fantasy VII: When the party reaches Icicle Inn, they find video recordings of Professor Gast's interviews with Ifalna, the Last Cetra. The videos conclude with the day that Gast's former colleague Professor Hojo tracks them down, kills Gast, and takes Ifalna and their newborn daughter, Aerith, back to Shinra Tower, where they spend the next seven years as his test subjects.
• Fire Emblem: Three Houses: Both Lysithea and Edelgard were held hostage by those who slither in the dark as part of their experiments on giving a person two Crests at the same time, with both of them serving as Sole Survivors of their respective families due to their siblings dying in the process. This gives them the advantages of two Crests and great power, at the cost of turning their hair white and reduced natural lifespans.
• The King of Fighters: Between '97 and '99, Kyo Kusanagi was abducted and his DNA harvested by NESTS to create a Clone Army. By the time he broke out in the latter game, he had spent enough time in captivity for NESTS to obtain enough samples to create at the very least 9999 clones of him.
• One of the key precepts of the DG Cult in the backstory of The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero is their belief that a Pleroma-derived drug called Gnosis can bring them closer to their god. But since they weren't sure of the precise formula of Gnosis, they kidnapped a bunch of kids and used them as guinea pigs to help them figure it out. By the time the police forces of multiple nations, the Bracer's Guild, and the Society of Ouroboros learned what was going on and stepped in to stop them, most of the test subjects were dead. Tio was the only survivor from Altair Lodge, and Renne was the only survivor of Paradise Lodge.
• Maniac Mansion: Doctor Fred kidnaps main character Dave's girlfriend Sandy for an experiment which involves having her "pretty brains" sucked out. The game revolves around Dave and two of his friends breaking into Fred's mansion to save her before this happens.
• Mass Effect: Cerberus does this a lot:
  • In Mass Effect, Cerberus appears multiple times in the side missions. In addition to luring military units into dangerous situations to observe the results, they will also abduct survivors for further experimentation, prominently shown when one of those test subjects starts hunting down the scientists who conducted those tests. Later, they also capture Admiral Kahoku, whose body you find in one of their remote labs, though it's not clear if he was experimented on or simply executed (the text that shows up when examining his body suggests that he committed suicide after being captured rather than let himself be subjected to Cerberus's experiments).
  • In Mass Effect 2, Jack's backstory is that she was kidnapped as an infant and brought to a remote facility run by Cerberus in an effort to create an uber biotic. In the Shadow Broker base, you can actually see a transcript of the event where a doctor with Cerberus connections tells Jack's mother that her baby has died of sudden and gruesome biotic mutations, and then contacts Cerberus to inform them of a biotic potential far beyond anything they've ever seen before. In addition, they also kidnapped multiple other children as a kind of scientific cannon fodder to find ways of enhancing Jack without killing her.
  • In a non-Cerberus example, Mass Effect: Andromeda has the kett, who decide the best way to study aliens is via dissection. Jaal, an angara, tells Ryder his father went out to work one day and never came back, and given the angara have been dealing with the kett for eighty years, there are a lot of similar stories. The end result of their experiments are turning species into more kett, as happens to some krogan scouts.
• Persona 3: In their efforts to harness the power of Shadows, the Kirijo Group took to taking children, both offered up and forcibly taken, in order to forcibly give them Personas. Of the experiment, all but four of the children ended up dying, with the survivors being Mitsuru, Jin, Chidori, and Takaya, the latter three going on to form Strega while Mitsuru became a founding member of S.E.E.S..
• Prayer of the Faithless: The project to create Infused had "too few volunteers", so they went kidnapping, as revealed when Aeyr and Mia meet up again, if a relevant character is talked to.
• Prior to the events of Resident Evil (Remake), Jessica and Lisa Trevor were invited by Oswell E. Spencer to his estate. When they arrived, they were immediately taken away by Spencer's employees and used as test subjects for the Progenitor Virus. Jessica was disposed of by Umbrella for displaying a poor reaction to the Type A virus while Lisa displayed a much more favorable reaction. Over the next twenty years, Lisa Trevor would be used as a test subject by Umbrella. Her usefulness to the company would end when they isolated and extracted the G-virus from her.
• The Game Boy color version of Scooby-Doo! Classic Creep Capers sees Daphne falling into a trap which lands her in the lab of a mad scientist who plans to use her DNA to create a beauty formula.
• Shadowrun Returns: One such lab appears in each of the three main campaigns. In Dead Man's Switch, it's a secret lab in a slum where your objective is to break in and offer a change of career to its head scientist on behalf of Aztechnology. In Dragonfall, it's an Aztechnology lab that does Blood Magic research on vagrants and lab-grown clones. Finally, in Shadows of Hong Kong, it's a Shiawase bioweapons lab located underneath Victoria Harbour that is full of kidnapped SINless.
• The Sims 2: Sims who stargaze at night on the fancier telescope model have a chance of being abducted by a UFO and have all kinds of experiments done on them. If they're adult males, they return pregnant with an alien baby.
• The Reveal of Sukutte is that the monster, Shigeki, used to be a normal schoolgirl until she was abducted by Professor Nakada to be turned into the ultimate bioweapon.

Web Animation

• Chadam: The main villain, Viceroy, is shown kidnapping numerous people to use in his experiments as he's trying to determine why he's so different from everyone else in Vulture. Most of these test subjects become Pallids as a result.

Webcomics

• Unsounded: Prakhuta and at least eleven other inak were captured and brought to Delicieu's workshop so that the immoral wright could experiment on them and study the difference between their sentience and a Kasslynian "soul" using distilled pain and other memories.
• xkcd: Implied in Selection Effect.

Ponytail: Our research shows that compared to the overall population, people who agree to participate in scientific studies are significantly less likely to call the police to rescue them from our lab.

Alt Text: fMRI testing showed that subjects who don't agree to participate are much more likely to escape from the machine mid-scan.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation features D-Class Personnel, death row inmates who have been kidnapped by the Foundation for the purposes of human testing, with the promise of being released once they help run tests. Most of them don't survive a month of testing, between being fed to monsters, being used as sacrifices, being used as cannon fodder for explorations deemed too dangerous for task forces...and the ones that do survive end up either dead anyway or having their memories wiped. Sometimes exceptions are made for D-Class who are disabled, if only because it's harder to find a subject that's a double-amputee vs one who's fully abled.

Web Videos

• Dragon Ball Z Abridged: In episode 46, Bulma mentions that Dr. Gero had kidnapped dozens of orphaned teenagers and was experimenting on them, including Androids 17 and 18. Word of God states that the implication of Gero only numbering his successful projects means that there are a lot of kidnapped orphans he ended up killing in the process. Bulma's father, mad scientist he is in the abridged series, thinks this is an ingenious part on the mad doctor's part.
  Dr. Briefs: Oh, come now, you can't kidnap an orphan, they weren't wanted in the first place! As an aside, that's kind of brilliant.
• Pop Cross Studios: In this video, the alien Bounty Hunter Bustar Terminax casually reveals that he was stolen from his real parents as a boy by a crazy warlord who did experiments on him, presumably to make him a Super-Soldier. Despite the initial trauma, Bustar doesn't really have any bad memories about this, seeing as the warlord proved to be a "pretty great dad overall" who raised him well and gave him plenty of useful bounty-hunting technology (though presumably his upbringing contributed to some of Bustar's, well, unconventional beauty standards).
• Unwanted Houseguest: Doctor Litchfield gets his "patients" this way.

Western Animation

• In one episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog, Muriel is kidnapped by a hair products company because she has a rare blood type that makes her perfect as a test subject for their products.
• One episode of Danny Phantom focuses on Spectra unleashing a horde of ghost mosquitos onto the students of Casper High so she can quarantine them in an Abandoned Hospital and harvest their DNA to make a new body for herself.
• Gargoyles: The mutated gargoyles (with the exception of Talon, aka Elisa Maza's brother) were all normal humans who were kidnapped and subjected to experiments to turn them into chimera-esque beasts similar to gargoyles.
• In the last season of Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, Big Bad Dr. Emilia begins kidnapping Mutes (mutants) to use as test subjects for the "cure" (a serum that reverses the mutation process). The second episode of the season revolves around Kipo and her friends busting out the hostages before they're hurt (or worse).
• The Spectacular Spider-Man: Every villain Spider-Man comes in contact with is someone who is the result of a genetic experiment. Most of them had it done to them willingly (i.e. The Rhino and Kraven), while others had it happen by complete accident (i.e. Dr. Octopus, the Lizard). Flint Marko, however, was basically taken against his will and experimented on without his consent. While he came to love his new powers and identity as the Sandman, it's very clear that he was subjected to a very painful and ultimately failed experiment against his will.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: One story arc involves Cad Bane (hired by Darth Sidious) abducting Force-sensitive babies so Sidious can perform a very unethical, potentially lethal experiment on them that would basically leave them his Dark Side slaves. While Anakin and Ahsoka manage to save the babies before the plan can be carried through, it's implied in the sequel series that Sidious merely continued this plan once there were no more Jedi to stop him (resulting in the Inquisitors).
• Star Wars: The Bad Batch: In the second half of Season 2, it's revealed that this is the Empire's solution for punishing clone troopers who act out against the Empire. Whether it's clones who disobey orders, or commit treasonous acts like killing a superior officer, the fate of such unruly clones is being sent to Dr. Hemlock to be used as test subjects for his experiments.
• Superman: The Animated Series: Averted; Superman willingly works with Star Labs to learn about Kryptonians. This is mutually beneficial to both of them, as anything they learn about Kryptonian physiology is as new to Kal-El as it is to them.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
  • It's revealed in the second season of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) that the Foot Clan had conducted their own mutation experiments in the past, kidnapping humans to do so. Some of the experiments messed people up so badly that they've become completely feral.
  • In the 2012 series, April is regularly targeted by the Kraang for this reason. However, she's not their only target, as they go after every mutant created by their mutagen. The only mutants who effectively avoided capture were Splinter and the Turtles.
• The Transformers cartoons use this trope more often than one might think, especially in the later shows:
  • This happens at least twice in Transformers: Animated. The first time is when Sari is kidnapped by Dr. Prometheus Black (a.k.a. Meltdown) to be used both as a test subject and to get back at Sumdac. The second time is when Blackarachnia has Swoop kidnap Wasp so she can turn him into Waspinator and then reverse-engineer him to figure out how to change herself back.^note They even point out in the show how dumb of a plan this is.
  • In Transformers: Prime, MECH is a threat to the Autobots, the humans, and the Decepticons for most of season one and part of season two. Among other crimes, they kidnap Breakdown (only sparing Bulkhead because they didn't have the means to kidnap two Cybertronians) and almost dissect him alive so they can find out how Cybertronians work. Seriously, who was this show aimed at?
• Ultimate Spider-Man (2012): The main story arc of the first season is about Norman Osborn and Dr. Octopus trying to kidnap Spider-Man and learn what gives him his powers. Because Osborn and Octopus split up and became enemies, this plot line is more or less dropped in later seasons.

Real Life

• During the Second Sino-Japanese War and WWII, the infamous Unit 731 arrested civilians near the Chinese city of Harbin for testing biological weapons. The horrible experiments that went on during that period are comparable to Mengele's experiments on Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz.
• If conspiracy theorists are to be believed, the main reason why aliens abduct us (if such stories are even true) is simply to figure out what makes us tick.

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