These Scientists Were ABSOLUTE IDIOTS

Kind: captions Language: en Think all scientists are geniuses? Only the ones who actually survived their own crackpot experiments. From failed attempts at human-monkey hybrids to creeps hiding in public bathrooms, here are 25 of the most deranged and idiotic scientists of all time. Number 25, it makes sense to begin with one of the fathers of empiricism, the belief that knowledge should be built from evidence rather than assumption. That man was Francis Bacon, the British Renaissance man who put his mark on everything from writing to philosophy to politics to science [music] to food storage. Would you believe it was a really dumb experiment with that last one that got him killed? One of the most well-known accounts of Bacon's 1626 death saw him making his way through thick snow in Highgate, North London when he suddenly came upon an idea. What if snow and ice could be used to preserve meat? He was then given a plucked hen which he stuffed with snow to see if it could stand the test of time. Sadly, he never found out the answer. He fell deathly ill and died of pneumonia not long after. He was right about the chicken at least if only his sense of self-preservation had been sharp, too. Still, at least his experiments didn't make him seem like a deranged pervert. Number 24, the 20th century was a crazy time for global scientific funding and one of the biggest people to benefit from that was Soviet scientist and veterinary reproductive expert Dr. Ilya Ivanov. He thought he could definitely prove evolution in the creepiest way possible by proving that humans and apes could get each other pregnant. And it only got freakier and more illegal from there. In 1927, Ivanov and his son engaged in the very normal father-son activity of inseminating three female chimps with human semen. They were granted access to a research station in French Guinea to conduct their bizarre experiment. His son was even packing a pistol in case the chimps fought back. But even with cutting-edge insemination technology Ivanov himself had developed, they were unsuccessful. Ivanov wasn't just some random pervert. He received actual funding from the Soviet Union who believed his research could support their Darwinist stance against American Christian fundamentalism. He also gained funding from the French Pasteur [music] Institute. But when all of Ivanov's attempts to inseminate female chimps failed, he realized that he also had another option. Inseminate a human woman with a humanzee baby. To this end in the late 1920s, he purchased a male orangutan named Tarzan to be [music] his donor. And then he went on a search for human women who were happy to take part. He actually did find a few, all of whom seemed to be mentally unstable. However, Tarzan died of a brain hemorrhage before the experiment could ever take place. Dr. Ivanov's twisted dreams would come to an end when Stalin decided that he didn't want any humanzees after all. And then he sent him off to the gulag as part of a scientific purge. So that's a crime against nature. How about we go two for two with another one? Number 23. What if you could be as smart as Albert Einstein and all you'd need to do is eat his brain. This isn't a thought that's often been had out of high security mental hospitals, but the idea of edible memory became the fixation of a bunch of misguided scientists who studied flatworms in the mid-20th century. James McConnell had done experiments to prove that flatworms, some of the simplest life forms to have neurons in the animal kingdom, could successfully form memories. That was when he was just a student in the 1950s. But now as an adult scientist, he was ready to get really weird with it. While other scientists correctly assumed that he had lost his mind, he began stating that his experiments proved that memory wasn't contained within the synapses of the brain, that it was chemically encoded within the RNA molecules inside every cell. Meaning your memories are just as present in your foot as in your brain. And that's when things got terrifying. With his belief that memory was invested in all tissue, he would teach one flatworm a trick and then chop it up and feed the pieces to another flatworm. This would cause, or so he claimed, the intelligence to transfer. Of course, McConnell did stress that memory transfer probably wouldn't survive the acidity of the human digestive system, but at that point he was kind of missing the forest for the trees. None of this made any sense or had any scientific validity. McConnell had sadly gone from a promising scientist to a crank laughing stock, publishing his own semi-satirical scientific magazine, The Worm Runner's Digest, to share his crackpot theories. McConnell didn't really leave a mark on science history. >> [music] >> Our next scientist definitely did, and all it cost was her life. Number 22. It's undeniable that Marie Curie's hands-on attitude to research is why we even know about some radioactive elements like radium and polonium today. It's also undeniable that despite becoming one of the few people in history to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, Marie Curie's groundbreaking research came at a devastating personal cost. The same radioactive materials that made her famous ultimately helped cause her death. She passed away on July 4th, 1934, from a plastic anemia that was directly caused by how much radioactivity she'd been exposed to over the course of her life. The radiation had effectively made her bone marrow unable to produce more blood cells, leading to a painful death. Her radiation exposure was so bad that she had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin for the safety of the land itself and everyone around her. Even over a century after her most famous experiments, a lot of the equipment she used still remains dangerously radioactive today. Scientific advancement sure does claim a lot of martyrs, but like our next scientists, some are so tragically avoidable. Number 21. The research of Soviet scientist Alexander Bogdanov has saved millions of lives, just not his own. It was all thanks to some bizarre and kooky beliefs from one of history's greatest blood transfusion pioneers. Bogdanov was another classic Renaissance man. He was a Bolshevik revolutionary, a part-time writer of science fiction, a doctor, and a philosopher. But, it was his innovations in blood transfusion technology that would both [music] add his name to the pages of history and put him onto a mortuary slab. In 1928, he linked up with a 21-year-old student who was dying of tuberculosis and malaria, and he decided he'd engage in a blood transfusion with a student. It was a win-win, at least according to Bogdanov. The young blood of the student would rejuvenate his aging body, and since Bogdanov, for some reason, believed his blood was immune to tuberculosis, >> [music] >> he believed that his blood, in turn, would cure the student. Obviously, this did not work, and Bogdanov died a completely preventable death in his 50s due to an acute hemolytic transfusion reaction. Ironically, the student made a complete recovery. So, maybe he did have magic blood after all. Just like our next scientist who thought that he had a magic voice. Number 20. Imagine you're at summer camp as a kid, enjoying getting away from it all for a bit, a chance to really let your imagination run wild and have an adventure. There's just one problem. Every night, as you're trying to sleep, a dark, shadowy figure appears in the corner of the cabin and then murmurs the words, "My fingernails taste terribly bitter." Hundreds and hundreds of times. This isn't the opening scene of a horror movie or a description of a really frightening state of sleep paralysis. It is what actually happened to a group of young boys when they were unwittingly put to a scientific experiment by Professor Lawrence LeShan in 1942. They wanted to test the now widely debunked theory of sleep learning, the idea that if you play some kind of educational audio while a person sleeps, their subconscious will still absorb the information. LeShan wanted to see if this could be used to form or break habits. So, he put on a little summer camp with the boys who were all well known to be chronic nail biters. Initially, the plan was to play a phonograph that just repeated the phrase over and over again. But, when that broke, LeShan needed to sneak into the cabin at night, himself and just repeat, "My fingernails taste terribly bitter." for hours on end. He'd later claim that the results proved the theory of sleep learning was correct, but plenty have accused the experimental design of being weird, creepy, and not all that scientific. But hey, at least nobody died, unlike our next case. Number 19, in 1753, Baltic German Russian physicist Georg Wilhelm Richmann both made history and became it. He's a figure so influential in science that he had his own physical law, Richmann's law, named after him. In St. Petersburg, he decided to conduct a study on whether he could capture lightning with a new apparatus he invented, the electrical gnomon. It was connected to a wire that ran from the roof of his house. His colleague, who was helping him at the time, N. M. Sokolov, would later say that the experiment had at [music] least been a success if you look at it from a certain angle. The device did catch the flying electricity, and it produced a stunning instance of ball lightning, pure electricity configured into [music] a dazzling orb shape, which immediately struck Richmann in the head. It conducted down the floor via his foot with such a force that it blew a hole into his shoe and flung him across the room. Both Richmann and the electric gnomon were instantly fried. [music] But there is a certain way to get fried without electricity. Number 18, LSD is one of the most incredible pharmacological discoveries of the 20th century. It gave us the counterculture movement and some of the best and worst Beatles songs. It also is roundly agreed to have incredible therapeutic potential for people suffering from treatment-resistant mental illnesses. But only one study was ever bold enough to ask, "What if we made a circus elephant trip major balls?" That elephant in question was Tusko, a large male Indian elephant in the Oklahoma City Zoo. His fate was forever decided when researchers at the University of Oklahoma tried to give him a truly heroic dose of acid, 297 mg. That's approximately 3,000 times the human recreational dose. Scientists figured it would be enough to get an effect on an animal as large as Tusko. As it turns out, they massively overshot it. They injected that insane amount of LSD into Tusko and then waited to see if he packed his trunk and wandered through the doors of perception. Instead, he collapsed onto the ground in 5 minutes. Less than 2 hours later, Tusko was dead. The only trip the scientists gave him was a trip straight into the afterlife. But idiot scientists don't just go after nature's largest creatures, they're also happy to harass some of the smallest. Number 17, depending on your knowledge base, Dr. John Watson is either the plucky sidekick of famous literary detective Sherlock Holmes or an influential psychologist who conducted some famously weird and creepy experiments. And none were more weird, creepy, or downright dumb than the notorious Little Albert experiment. Watson was known as the father of behaviorism, a school of psychology that argued human behavior is shaped less by an inner consciousness and more by conditioned responses learned throughout life, especially during childhood. Under behaviorism, we are all literally creatures of habit, and based on that, Watson was certain that new habits could be programmed into us, like making a little boy afraid of a white rat that posed no harm to him, for example. In this completely ethically bankrupt classical conditioning study, he introduced a real baby named Little Albert to a white rat and let the two play together. Little Albert didn't show any aversion to the rat, and he was even happy and curious. And then, Watson slammed a hammer against a large piece of metal, making a loud, terrifying noise that made Albert cry. He did this again and again until the mere sight of the rat made the baby test subject cry and shake with fear. Eventually, Albert's mother moved away and withdrew her son from the experiment in the process. Not long after this, Watson was forced to resign after an extramarital affair with his graduate assistant was revealed. So, he decided to get a new job at a place that didn't mind if you didn't have a soul. Madison Avenue branding and advertising. Okay, so maybe our next one, number 16, could a baby chimpanzee be raised into some kind of weird-looking human? Obviously not, as literally any primate scientist will tell you. Anyway, a chimp can be a really dangerous thing when mixed with humans. None of these pretty obvious facts stopped comparative psychologist Winthrop Kellogg from giving it the old college try. He decided to raise a baby chimp called Gua alongside his own human child Donald. In early 1931, the Kellogg family adopted Gua into their home, curious to see what would happen. Would they be able to rear Gua like a child? And would Gua's presence encourage Donald to act more chimp-like? It [music] is completely deranged and incredibly dangerous, but they really did give it a try. They were impressed to find that Gua did achieve some human-like developments. After 9 months of socialization, she was able to recognize some commands and execute them, like picking up a cup and using a spoon. She was able to also recognize humans from their clothes and smell, if not by their faces. It was also true that Donald did take up a lot of chimp-like behavior and mannerisms as a child, just from spending so much time with Gua. But beyond this, development hit a wall. Gua wasn't physiologically capable of picking up and repeating human language, because while chimps are undeniably incredibly intelligent animals, they are still animals. The Kelloggs decided that the whole experiment had gone too far when Donald began repeating the different noises that Gua made, realizing that this experiment actually had way better chances of messing up Donald than it did evolving Gua, as literally any primate expert would have told them on day one. But you'd rather share a table with Gua than our next revolting scientist. Number 15, Stubbins Ffirth was a scientist with a weird name and an even weirder claim to fame. He wanted to prove that yellow fever couldn't pass as an infection from person to person with bodily fluids. His way of showing it was exposing himself to as many of these bodily fluids as possible. A few years after the 1793 yellow fever outbreak ravaged Philadelphia, Firth's experiments began. He began by making surgical incisions into his [music] arms and then pouring yellow fever patient vomit directly into the wounds. [music] When Firth didn't contract yellow fever, he didn't count himself lucky and never do anything like this again. Instead, he decided to double and triple and quadruple down in the vilest ways imaginable. He poured yellow fever puke straight into his eyeballs. He fried the puke and he huffed the fumes. He chugged the vomit undiluted and he still wasn't infected. And when he was certain he'd eliminated vomit from the running as an infection vector, he then rubbed infected blood, urine, saliva all over his body. If anything, he showed that the line between scientist and self-destructive pervert [music] is wafer-thin. But at least he definitively proved that yellow fever can't be contracted via bodily fluids, so it was all worth it. >> [music] >> No, all this was actually completely useless, of course. Yellow fever is a mosquito-borne viral disease and Firth just used [music] late-stage patients whose bodies no longer contained the virus. And we have to wonder if at some point Firth knew that, but he just gotten [music] addicted to yellow fever fluids anyway. God, let's stop talking about this and go somewhere less gross, like the men's bathroom. Number 14, "No, officer, I was just conducting a psychological experiment." might be what you would say if you were caught lurking in a bathroom and watching people doing their business, but [music] you might just get in more trouble if you then told them that the study was called "Personal Space Invasions in the Lavatory: Suggestive Evidence for Arousal." But that was the name of a real study carried out in the 1970s that involved watching a lot of men pee in public bathrooms. The essence of the study was to ask the pretty juvenile question, "Does it take men longer to pee when they feel crowded in a shared bathroom. And to make this happen, they secretly watched while people working for them boxed unknowing participants in at the urinal. They then measured the time it took for each of these people to start peeing at the urinal depending on whether people were close to them or not. The scientific community broadly condemned this study as weird and gross and largely pointless. But if this is a question that's always plagued you, we guess you can sleep at night knowing that yes, it does make it harder to pee when you've got stage fright. Speaking of life's big questions, number 13. >> [music] >> How heavy is your soul? No, that isn't the name of our debut emo throwback album. It's the question that was seriously posed by the physician Duncan MacDougall in 1907. It famously sparked what's since been known as the 21 g experiment. To someone who isn't a career scientist, it might seem to make intuitive sense. He would place dying patients on a specially designed scale and then record their weight at the exact moment of death. If death really was the soul leaving the body, he reasoned, then any consistent drop of weight might reveal the weight of a human soul. Already, that is just a little insane mixing some strange view of science with a completely metaphysical religious topic. But after conducting the experiment, he developed the hypothesis that the weight of a human soul is likely around 21 g or 0.7 oz. However, that is incredibly weird for a huge number of reasons. Number one, the experiment was only performed a few times. Given that a lot of dying people would rather spend their last moments with their family rather than on a doctor's weighing scales. It also had the problem of only having a six-person sample, which is pitifully small for making a claim this big. And if that wasn't bad enough, only one of those six test subjects actually confirmed the hypothesis that MacDougall was testing. So despite the 21 g fact being shared all over the internet by clickbait accounts, it is little more than urban legend based on terrible experiment design. Sometimes idiotic experiments [music] aren't so deep. Sometimes they're just silly as hell. Number 12. What do you think is the dumbest possible thing you could spend thousands of dollars on? A McMansion where you couldn't afford the maintenance cost or property tax? Thousands of Beanie Babies? Cryptocurrency? Or a study that hoped to use chickens with plastic dinosaur tails to figure out how dinosaurs walked? Yes, that was a real study and it won an Ig Nobel Prize, a scientific satirical award for unusual studies. So, what happened here? Scientists reasoned that birds are the descendants of dinosaurs and since chickens are amongst the most widespread two-legged birds on the earth, they made an unusual choice by attaching an artificial dinosaur tail to a chicken. They hoped to see how a dinosaur might have actually walked. Well, that is the stated logic anyway. In case you were curious, the TLDR on the answer is they walk with a heavily crouched, almost horizontal posture as the tail is a counterweight. Worth every penny. Chicken dinosaurs may not reinvent the wheel, but how about a theory that woul