All scientific research is not done in a sane atmosphere. In fact, some of the experiments that led to several of the great discoveries weird and shocking in nature. This scenario has produced some truly insane scientists who went far beyond with their scientific methods. It would be interesting to look at some of them.
1. Jack Parsons, the Rocket Scientist with an Occult Twist
Jack Parson (John Whiteside Parsons) was a researcher on rocket propulsion at the prestigious California Institute of Technology. He also has the rare distinction of being the associate founder of the well-known Jet Propulsion Laboratory. However, he has a crazy side to him as he happened to be a true dabbler in the occult.
However, Parson didn't keep his passion for himself. He got some creepy tattoos and conducted orgies occasionally with a line of black candles burning around him in a circle. He followed Thelema a kind of spiritual philosophy governing human life espoused by a person called Aleister Crowley and was the latter's sardent student and even leading a secret occult organization located in California.
As time passed he began to invoke the Greek mythological deity Pan before every rocket was tested as he believed that the half-man half-goat god was characterized by high aptitude in technology.
To thicken the plot, the notorious and publically disgraced Ron Hubbard was Parson's "magical" friend. Together they engaged in a ceremony named Babalon to summon a live goddess, but without success. Soon Hubbard cheated Parsons of a huge sum of cash to publish Dianetics, the bible of the movement called Scientology. Parsons died before he could see the advent of Scientology, as he was killed in a violent blast of unstable chemicals that lay around in his lab.
2. Harry Harlow, the Torturer of Monkeys
An American psychologist named Harry Harlow wanted to find out what is love and to that end, he chose the very strong bond between mother and child. This led him to study babies of rhesus monkeys as well as their mothers, to discover the dynamics of the great emotion, a truly noble effort.
Now, what was this scientist's madness? Harlow equipped his lab with various instruments of torture one of which he chose to call the Rape Rack. Actually, this is a machine that helped in forced mating of monkeys. Ironically, he came to the conclusion that the best way to study the true nature of love was by means of torturing monkeys. He also had another contraption that he used in his experiments; the Iron Maiden.
However, Harlow's most contentious experiment was done using a device that he lovingly called the pit of despair. He placed an infant monkey in a narrow isolated cavity for a year, lacking contact with any other creature, which resulted in the little animals turning psychotic, without any hope of recovery. In this way, he discovered what love is. So in his own words, love means the opposite of the emotion people feel when they have been locked up in a small dark chamber without company for a year.
3. Sidney Gottlieb: The Toxic Scientist
Sidney Gottlieb was a psychiatrist serving the US Army. He had a doctorate in Chemistry from the prestigious California Institute of Technology. He served the CIA at the time of the Cold War, making use of his considerable knowledge in biochemistry to help the US to be one step ahead of the malevolent Russians.
The Madness:
Ironically, Gottlieb used his scientific expertise to amounted to what he called "poison everyone." For instance, it was he who suggested that Fidel Castro's shoes should be soaked with the chemical thallium to make his beard lose all the hair as if the Cuban dictator's beard was what gave him so much power. He also came with the idea of doing away with Castro by poisoning his cigar, fountain pen and wetsuit. Unfortunately, his later 'poisonous' ideas were discarded by the CIA.
In order to show that he had more than mere poisons up his sleeve, he tried to prove he wasn't just a one-note guy, Gottlieb, later on, tried to eliminate the Congolese prime minister and a general from Iraq using neurotoxins which are unlike poison.
Mind Control and LSD:
While he was the director of MKULTRA, a project designed to study ways to control minds with LSD. When the CIA asked him to show if the drug could break the minds of men during the process of interrogation, he with fellow researchers went on a crazy acid trip for the sake of science. Soon he wanted to try his experiment on a lot of people without telling them. Soon Gottlieb was going around his country, sneakily adding LSD in the drinks of people and monitor the effects. In fact, he used junkies and sex workers for these studies because none would believe them if they complained about this mad scientist who randomly drugged US citizens.
4. Giovanni Aldini: Electrocution Man
Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani, the father of galvanism, loves to connect things to batteries. For most of his life, he was working on the medical possibilities of galvanism. The Austrian emperor awarded him the Knight of the Iron Crown, in recognition of his services to the cause of science.
Aldini's Craze
Aldini journeyed around Europe with a weird circus. He combined horror with science to create dramatic spectacles by connecting electrodes to animal carcasses and human corpses, gathering immense crowds. This is because, in the Europe of the 19th century, people didn't have much of violence and horror in their day to day lives.
Later in London, Aldini administered strong electrical shocks to the trunks and heads of various domestic animals using batteries. The onlookers saw the eyes and jaws of the animals moving like they had come alive.
In 1803, Aldini came out with his most infamous experiment. He exhibited the body of a hanged murderer named George Forster. Displaying Forster's body for the public to see, he charged the face of the body with high voltage electricity, and it began to move and twitch, with his eyes and mouth opening, looking as if alive. As if this is not enough, he stuck an electrode in the corpse's anus after which the body began to punch and kick so that people thought he had come alive and shouted to hang him again, to hang a body already dead.
5. Illya Ivanovich Ivanov: The Hybrid Man
Illya Ivanovich Ivanov, the Soviet biologist was well known for creating hybrids of animals. He combined a donkey and zebra and created a zonkey. Then he went on to create a hybrid of a cow and antelope that gave milk and could run fast.
One day Stalin ordered Ivanov to come up with a super race by creating hybrids of man and ape to be turned into a slave army. Stalin's aim was to conquer the whole world for communism, with this hybrid race, according to a Scottish newspaper.
The French too joined in and in 1926, in the African city of Conakry, with the blessing of both governments, Ivanov inseminated three chimpanzees with human sperm. Much to his chagrin, none of the apes became pregnant.
Reversing the Experiment
Ivanov came to the conclusion that his experiment was unsuccessful because he did it the wrong way. So he tried to inseminate a human female with ape semen. In 1929, he gained support from the Society of Materialist Biologists. Soon he got female volunteers who were willing to undergo the experiment. He tried to get help from Rosalia Abreau, a rich Cuban lady who had an extensive chimpanzee menagerie in Havana, for ape semen. Unfortunately, the news of this spread and the Ku Klux Klan intervened and closed down the project.
6. Guy Ben-Ary: Expert in Digital and Biological Imaging
Born in Los Angeles, Guy Ben-Ary is a slash-artist working presently in Australia. His area of specialization is microscopy, engineering, tissue culture, digital and biological imaging as well as artistic visualization of organic data.
Ben-Ary is involved in a program called Tissue Sculpture. It creates partially manufactured products and partially organic objects that removes the boundaries between art and science. He has a team that produced what he calls a Living Screen in which you can watch 'Nano Movies' that are projected on materials such as skin, blood or cornea.
Guy Ben-Ary also works for the MEART project that has created the first perhaps conscious biomechanical being. They cultivated nerve cells in their laboratory and linked these nerve cells with the mechanical arm of a robot. This brain is ever expanding, discovering new things as a real brain does. Recently, it learned the technique of drawing, as also beginning to portray its own imagery that the team is describing as art.
Is this MEART entity really alive, sentient? Now it uses its intelligence to operate a mechanical arm of the robot. Will it begin to control other machines via the internet and if it becomes dangerous how can we destroy it? One shudders just to think of it.
7. Dr. Delgado, the Mad Physiologist
Dr. Delgado was a Spanish physiologist with an MD degree to his credit. He served in the medical corps during the Spanish Civil War as a Republican. In 1946, he left for the US and got a fellowship at the University of Yale where he studied brain stimulation using electricity which is another way of saying mind control.
Delgado invented a device called Stimoceiver or what euphemistically known as the Brain F*** Switch. The Brain F*** Switch was basically a remote brain stimulator and monitor that functioned via a transmitter placed in the 'patient's' head. It sent electrical signals that induced responses in the animal or human brain. He began with cats, then with monkeys and finally human beings, not to mention mental patients.
With his Brain F*** Switch, he could manage behavior and as such could arouse all types of emotions including pleasant sensations, strange feelings as well as visions. One day he traveled to Cordoba, to stand before an angry bull that raced to charge him. In fact, he was clever enough to install a transmitter in the bull's head, in advance. As the bull was about to reach him, he activated his Brain F*** Switch and the vicious creature suddenly stopped in its tracks, calming down, pausing.
Delgado very well could have made the world obey him, for, with his transmitter and a crazy mind, the sky was the limit. The wonder of the matter is that if he had done so, none would have suspected anything untoward.
8. Dr. Bryukhonenko, the Canine Killer
Dr. Sergei Bryukhonenko, a Russian scientist who lived while Stalin was at the helm of the USSR. The doctor had invented the primeval heart-lung machine called the autojektor which was used to do the first ever open heart surgery in the Soviet Union.
Bryukhonenko also headed the Research Institute of Experimental Surgery a Russian experimental surgeon, no less. However, this happened to turn into an unimaginable scenario of abject horror.
In fact, this heart-lung machine was supposed to maintain life by artificial means. This means that this machine could not be used in a dead animal but live ones, this time a lot of poor doggies. So as time passed, Bryukhonenko's research lab became filled with 100s of dead dogs. Then he went on to conduct a host of controversial experiments but severing dogs' organs, connect them to his contraption to sustain them alive out of their bodies.
However, Bryukhonenko's most infamous experiment was recorded in video and titled "Dog's Head." The video shows the freshly cut off head of a dog placed on a table and connected to his heart-lung machine. This brought the dog's severed head back to life.
What else to call this but the height of madness! Warning, the video below is not for the faint-hearted!
9. Dr. Robert J. White, the Crazy American Surgeon
Dr. Robert J. White, the American surgeon was noted for his knowledge in transplantology. He had been engaged in research on the human brain and nervous system for several years. This led to the discovery of the cooling process occurring in the spinal cord.
In 1962, Dr. White became the first ever scientist to be successful in removing a dog's brain and keep it alive, fully separated from its body. The canine brain was connected to a brain wave monitor that showed that it was active still. Not satisfied with this, White transplanted a dog's brain onto the neck of another dog in 1964. However, the doctor was foolish enough to place the brain on the neck and not the skull.
After a decade or so, White transplanted a monkey's head onto another monkey's body. After repeating his experiment, White proved that the transplanted monkey heads were able to survive for an indefinite period in the body of the new host. However, he had to euthanize the poor creatures as they were paralyzed without exception, from neck down. In fact, this more than amply proves that contemporary medicine cannot mend any damage occurred to the nerves as a result of the severing of the spinal cord during the process of transplantation.
