We, the common people are eternally grateful for the several contribution made by scientists, in various field, that has helped enhance the experiences of human life on the planet, as well as outside the planet. But, there are quite a number of unknown or lesser known scientists who have worked only to gain their own end and some purely evil ones who don’t care about humanity at all. Here’s a list of 10 such bizarre and sinister scientists:
10 of The Most Bizarre and Sinister Scientists:
10. Paracelsus (1493-1541)
Paracelsus is considered an alchemical genius of the middle ages. Born as a Swiss-German, he was an occultist, physician, botanist, astrologist and of course an alchemist. He was revered for his defiant rational outlook and was quiet popular during his life time owing to his many contributions. However he had a bizarre belief that he can create homunculi, i.e. mini human (only a foot tall), somewhat like the Jewish mythological creature Golems. Paracelsus believed homunculi could be created by using human hair and semen. His mad project is known to have been successful and that his mini-man had, one day, turned on him and eventually ran away.
9. Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976)
Lysenko was an agricultural researcher and the director of Institute of Genetics. He was ambitious and blinded by the want of success that made him dishonest in his work. He said “In order to obtain a certain result, You must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result, you will obtain it …. I need only such people as will obtain the results I need.” Under him, the Soviet Union’s scientific researches suffered setbacks. His anti-Mendelian doctrines were secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. But fortunately, scientific dissent from Lysenko’s theories of ‘environmentally acquired inheritance’ was officially outlawed in 1948.
8. Johann Konrad Dippel (1673-1734)
Dippel, born in Castle Frankenstein, was a controversial theologian who had several admirers of his work as well as enemies all over Europe. Emanuel Swedenborg, who was one of his many disciples, later turned into his critic and had reportedly said that Dippel was the “most vile devil…who attempted wicked things”. Of course these wicked things were never discovered but he was rumoured to have carried out vicious experiments within this tower with ‘cadavers’ (i.e. dead bodies) in which he attempted to transfer the soul of one cadaver to another. He had also preformed surgical experiments on several living animals. And during his crazy researches he had even ended up destroying a tower. Dippel’s most famous discovery was the ‘Dippel’s Oil’ (an animal oil) which actually had a number of uses but most of which has become obsolete now.
7. Alfred Nobel (1833-1897)
Nobel was responsible for the invention of dynamite. He was a Swedish engineer, chemist, innovator and arms manufacturers. Nobel had acquired huge wealth through his numerous inventions and apparently had held 350 patents. Since his discovery of the deadly explosive, the device has been used for mass killing for uncountable times. Nobel’s own brother had Emil had died in a factory accident and surely the future death toll from his creation will number in hundreds and thousands. In 1988, during the death of his another brother Ludvig, a newspaper had mistakenly published Alfred’s obituary. It was titled ‘The Merchant of Death is Dead’, he was astonished and concerned about his image after his death. Thus began the bestowing of the Nobel awards.
6. Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967)
Dr. Oppenheimer was a nuclear physicist and was as smart as a whip. He was a champion of communist movements and never imagined the devastation that was to occur by the hands of the group of scientist, who were under his leadership. This group of scientists were, during the war, engaged in a project called the Manhattan project which was behind the use of atomic bomb. Dr. Oppenheimer claimed to have been horrified by the result of his project. One of his co-worker Victor Weisskopf, had reportedly said:
He did not direct from the head office. He was intellectually and even physically present at each decisive step. He was present in the laboratory or in the seminar rooms, when a new effect was measured, when a new idea was conceived. It was not that he contributed so many ideas or suggestions; he did so sometimes, but his main influence came from something else. It was his continuous and intense presence, which produced a sense of direct participation in all of us; it created that unique atmosphere of enthusiasm and challenge that pervaded the place throughout its time.
5. Dr. Jack Kevorkian (1928-2011)
Kevorkian was best known for being openly vocal about euthanasia i.e. patient’s right to die (especially those suffering from an incurable disease) though doctor-assisted suicide methods. He claimed to have assisted around 130 patients end their lives. In 1998 Kevorkian was charged with second degree murder for poisoning of Thomas Youk, a 52 year-old man of Oakland County, Michigan and was sentenced to 10-10to-25-years of imprisonment. During the declaration of his sentence, the judge had said:
“You were on bond to another judge when you committed this offense, you were not licensed to practice medicine when you committed this offense and you hadn’t been licensed for eight years. And you had the audacity to go on national television, show the world what you did and dare the legal system to stop you. Well, sir, consider yourself stopped.”
Kevorkian had been nicknamed as ‘Dr.Death’ and had famously said, “dying is not a crime.”
4. Sigmund Rascher (1909-1945)
Rascher was a German SS doctor who carried out gruesome and dangerous experiments on humans at Dachau Concentration Camp during the World War II. Rascher had asked Himmler (a leader of SS from the holocaust project) with whom he had good acquaintance, to provide him with humans to be experimented on, as the previous test made on monkeys were unsatisfactory. Following this request, 300 prisoners were made available to him as test subjects, one third among which perished. At Dachau, Rascher created a cyanide capsule that can be easily bitten through, either deliberately or accidentally and ironically this was the drugs by means of which Himmler committed suicide.
3. Members of The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
The Tuskegee Syphilis experiment was conducted between 1932 and 1972 by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) on 399 black men. These men were mainly uneducated African American residing in rural areas who were suffering the last stage of syphilis. They were told that they were receiving free treatment to their disease from the U.S. government whereas in reality they were only subjects of an experiment which studied the natural progress of untreated syphilis. This unethical experiment went on for forty years until the whistle was blown by the Washington Star in 1972. This can be taken as an easy example of racism but the bitter truth is that the project, so enthusiastically hosted by the Tuskegee Institute, was a historically black college and the main researchers involved in this project were themselves black.
2. Joseph Mengele (1911-1979)
For an inhuman physician interested in anthropology, concentration camps would be the ideal place to conduct genetic researchers on human subjects. His researches on the prisoners were unscientific, dangerous and with of course no regard of the health of the victims. Mengele also supervised the selection of prisoners who were to be killed; consequently he was known as the ‘Angel of Death’. Later he escaped to South America where he stayed hidden for the rest of his life.
1. Shiro Ishii (1892-1959)
Lieutenant general of a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, Shiro Ishii was also a microbiologist. In 1932, he started on a secret project experimenting in biological warfare weapons for the Japanese military. Later he built a huge complex with 150 buildings stretching over six square kilometres outside the city of Harbin in China where he carried out the following heinous crimes on humanity – vivisection of women who were impregnated by the doctors under his charge, parts of prisoners bodies were frozen and thawed to study the untreated gangrene, limbs of prisoners were cut off then again joined to other parts of their body, inoculations disguised as vaccines were injected into prisoners bodies to study their effects, Living humans were tested on with flame throwers and grenade. Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. Male and female prisoners were raped and infected with syphilis and gonorrhea, to study the effects of untreated venereal diseases. There were several other unthinkable experiments carried out under the leadership of Shiro Ishii, you can find them here.