Real-Life Mad Scientists and Their Wacky Experiments

Mad scientists aren’t quite as extreme as the movies portray them, but some exist, giving the world some crazy and interesting discoveries.

Some might think if some of the smartest people to ever live to be also a little odd and crazy. The earl days of research and experimentation certainly would have made some of these scientists seem like mad and crazy people. Imagine Madame Currie and her husband as the discovered radiation, which eventually killed them, but also led to many other discoveries that have helped humankind.

Here are a few real-life mad scientists and their crazy experiments.

Francis Crick (1916-2004)

Francis Crick is one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA and was awarded a Nobel Prize for this work in 1962. This is his greatest accomplishment, but he also came up with an extremely strange theory that would put most people in a mental hospital. His theory was called “directed panspermia,” which suggests that life on Earth was deliberately seeded by extra-terrestrials. This is certainly a thought that should be kept inside and part of science fiction, but he let it out.

Jose Delgado (1915-2011)

Jose Delgado is one of the most extreme modern-day mad scientists. His research at Yale University included studies of mind control. He programmed electrodes and implanted them in the brains of primates, and he used a remote control that gave off radio frequencies to make the animals perform complicated movements. He also did this with a bull and stopped it from charging at him. Most alarming of all was that Delgado wired up at least 25 people to control their actions and behavior. Thankfully, it only impacted their aggression, but his goal was to create an army controlled by electric stimulation of the brain.

Sergei Brukhonenko (1890-1960)

Sergei Brukhonenko helped bring about important advances in open-heart surgery, but his desire for experimentation on animals went much further. He was an impatient man who didn’t like animals to die during his experiments. He performed experiments to keep a dog’s head alive away from its body and also drained all the blood from a dog, and then brought it back to life by adding the blood back to the animal’s body.

Jack Parsons (1914-1952)

Jack Parsons was a rocket scientist, but his life and story were incredibly insane. It’s hard to believe that a researcher from the California Institute of Technology could become one of the mad scientists who were fooled into cult beliefs. He converted to Thelema in 1939, which was an occult developed by Aleister Crowley. He also joined the founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, in many rituals and experiments. Parsons was killed in an explosion that could have been an experiment in magic.

Robert G. Heath (1915-1999)

Robert G. Heath is another scientist who researched mind control but in a different way from Delgado. Heat worked at Tulane University, where he worked to give people bursts of pleasure and pain by administering chemicals through a tube into their brain. Electrodes were also required, but these experiments allowed Heath to give people virtual ecstasy or agonizing pain. There were rumors that he was connected with the CIA’s illegal MK-ULTRA project, which isn’t too hard to believe when you consider what Heath was researching.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)

Nikola Tesla is one of the most famous scientists to ever live, but he is also one of the modern-day mad scientists. He worked on inventions including the particle gun, the Tesla Coil, and electric currents involving X-rays. He eventually became a bit eccentric with a late-life development of OCD and became fixated on the number three. Tesla had an extreme aversion to touching human hair and believed he was in contact with extra-terrestrials. Most famously, he fell in love with a pigeon, cementing his legacy as a crazy genius.

Ilya Ivanov (1870-1932)

Ilya Ivanov is the scientist responsible for one of the most disgusting series of experiments ever. He attempted to breed hybrid ape-humans and did so in many ways. Apes likely share much of the same genetics as humans, but the experiments never succeeded. He attempted to impregnate an ape with a woman’s ovary with human sperm; he also attempted to inseminate women with chimp sperm. Eventually, he was sent away to Kazakhstan before he ever succeeded in finding the right combination to create the hybrid he was after.

These mad scientists experimented in some strange ways and pushed the boundaries of the natural order of things. In some ways, they attempted to do what scientists have done for centuries, but maybe they should have taken a step back before going forward.