The Most Notorious Mad Scientists of All Time

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Mad scientists often get a bad rap. Many of the madder scientists also did some great shit in-between bouts of crazy. One of the best examples of mad scientists who made immense contributions to the world of less mad science was Nikola Tesla. His work with AC electrical currents, radio, and x-rays remain quite valuable to the scientific community long after his death. The list of less helpful shit he got into was pretty extensive, however. At different points in his life, Tesla worked on particle guns, anti-gravity flying machines, and believed he had been in contact with extra-terrestrials. He also had an aversion to touching human hair, which is definitely more "mad" than "science."

Yo dawg, your girl tells me that you could use a visit from Robert G. Heath. Unlike your run-of-the-mill mad science types, Heath was not bent on world domination. Heath was a scientist ... of love. He focused on wiring up people's brains so that he could give them bursts of pleasure. Heath found that the result of dosing his subjects with acetylcholine was absolute ecstasy. Some subjects enjoyed multiple orgasms for as long as thirty minutes after getting an injection of Heath's love potion. Even those of you who actually put time into foreplay can't boast those kind of results. Heath also experimented with a substance that would put people into a stupor, which he tried out on inmates, which is a little bit more in the realm of traditional mad science.

Dr. White was the first person to keep a dog's brain alive outside of its body. That right there is enough to earn you some serious made scientist cred. As with most mad science tales, that is just the tip of the iceberg. A couple years later, White successfully transplanted one dog's brain into the neck of another dog because that seemed like the next logical step. The next move was monkeys. In the 70s, White took the head of a monkey and successfully fused it on to the body of another. After doing this several times, he perfected the technique so that new-headed monkeys could survive for sometime. Unfortunately, the surviving monkeys were permanently paralyzed from the neck down. Eh, you win some, you lose some. White planned to try the same move on humans, but died before he got the chance.

It turns out that MouseRat is more than your favorite fictional band. The mouse-rat is also one of a number of terrifying creature hybrids created by a Russian mad scientist. Ivanov dedicated his life to playing god by cross-breeding animal species like show dogs. Some of his creations include the antelope-cow, a zebra-donkey, and a guinea pig-rabbit. And no, he didn't just tie antlers onto a cow in a clever rouse. This was the real deal. Ivanov's dream was to create a human-ape hybrid. This is one of those times when we're kind of glad that dreams don't always come true.

And here you thought that ape mind control was just a plot of your unsold Law and Order spec script. It turns out there is actual scientific precedent for making animals do our bidding (mwhahahahahaha). Back in the 1950s at that den of madness known as Yale University, Delgado used electrode implants in order to control monkeys via remote control. And every Christmas since then, kids have been clambering for their very own remote control monkeys. Thanks Jose. True to his madness, Jose also wired up a bull, which he stopped from charging at him, of course, over two dozen humans. His prediction that "someday armies and generals will be controlled by electric stimulation of the brains" hasn't come true yet, but like most great minds, he was probably just ahead of his time. Then again, maybe that's just the electrode implants talking.

With any trend there is the dude who takes it too far. Whether this is a guy who takes that whole hippies-don't-shower thing too seriously or gets heavy into grave digging, nobody wants that guy at a party. In the early 1700s everybody was into alchemy. But Dippel was really into alchemy. This got him into thinking about artificial life. Okay, kind of crazy, but still not "mad scientist" bad. Then came the grave robbery. Dippel started experimenting on cadavers in hopes of performing soul transplants, yes, soul transplants. Dippel also apparently blew up a wing of a castle at one point with nitroglycerine. No, we're not sure exactly how that relates to the whole alchemy thing either.

Don't feel left out y'all, the U.S. of A. has a few mad scientists of its own. Though science doesn't necessarily owe Gottlieb a huge debt, spy thriller novelists certainly do. Gottlieb was in charge of the CIA's MK-ULTRA project in the 1950s. This project's goal was to investigate "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything." How did Gottlieb go about achieving that dubious goal? All sorts of crazy ways. He dosed unsuspecting subjects with LSD, experimented with heroin, and sought out all sorts of exciting ways to poison people, including Fidel Castro (he is the man behind the infamous poison cigar). It's important to note that crazy espionage scientists have hobbies to; Gottlieb loved folk dancing despite being limited by a club foot.

We don't have very many scientific rock stars these days. In fact, outside of Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson we have approximately zero. Back in the day, Giovanni Aldini was as baller a scientist as there ever was. Everybody knew his name, and he was even honored with knighthood. Why was he given such an honor? We like to think it wasn't for his travelling scientific circuses, but it was probably for his travelling scientific circuses. There were no clowns at these circuses, but there was electrocuting of animal carcasses to make them seem alive. His greatest experiment was doing the same thing to an executed convict in 1803. Sounds like he would be right at home working in the Arizona prison system.

Sometimes all it takes is a war to turn a crazed scientist into a horrific war criminal. Ishii is remembered as the Father of Biological Warfare. Under his watch, thousands of captives were infected with deadly diseases and thousands more were impacted by chemicals on the battlefield. As if that weren't enough to cement his evil legacy, Ishii performed a bunch of experiments that had nothing to do with chemical warfare including forced abortions, vivisections, and simulated strokes. Because life is totally fair, Ishii was never charged with war crimes and he died peacefully at his home in Japan in his late 60s.

Mengele was just a stone-cold killer. There is no wacky eccentricity to tell of in Mengele's career, just horror after horror. The "Angel of Death" performed experiments on 3,000 sets of twins and less than 30 survived his depraved antics. His experiments included, but sadly were not limited to, dying children's eyes, sewing twins together to make them conjoined, and giving them gangrene. It is generally agreed upon that the "science" of Mengele's work is suspect at best. In fact, many of his evil deeds weren't scientific at all. He reportedly smiled as he took part in the "selection" process of sending arrivals at concentration camps who were unfit for labor straight to the gas chamber. He died in 1976 and as never brought to justice for his crimes.