Hwang Woo-Suk's Mammoth Mistake

Hwang Woo-Suk, a Korean scientist who made some waves with apparent breakthroughs in stem cell research, also happened to be a massive fraud. In 2006, he was indicted on embezzlement and bioethics law violations linked to faked stem cell research. Rather than blow the money on long, sleepless weekends in Vegas, he spent over a half million dollars in private donations trying to clone woolly mammoths.

And while that may be bad enough already, apparently he thought involving the Russian mob, just to take this up a notch on the "what the fuck" belt was a good plan, and gave a chunk of that donated cash to the Russians in exchange for some organized crime-related extinct animal cells (something we didn't know mobsters trafficked in, and in fact would not have believed it had it come up in a movie).

While stem cell research could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of numerous diseases, it will not apparently lead to Hwang's vision of a woolly Jurassic Park.

Kevin Warick: Cyborg

Kevin Warwick, a British scientist and professor of cybernetics, has the distinct honor of being one of the few insane experiments currently still in progress throughout the world. This man has a super hard-on for robots, apparently, so much so that he's endeavoring to be the first man ever to become a cyborg.

To this end, Warwick had a chip implanted in his arm that allowed him to control small, mostly uncool things around his home. He could turn on lights and open doors. Basically the kind of shit having at least one finger will allow you to do now, but lazier.

A couple years later, a more advanced chip was linked to his nervous system to the end of using it to control a robot arm. In a fun PR stunt, they implanted a similar device in Warwick's wife and the two of them engaged in the "first purely electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans" across the internet, whatever the hell that means. We suspect file sharing of porn was involved.

Paracelsus Theorizes the Dung Baby

Paracelsus, who once went by the name Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, which he made up himself, was an alchemist and physician back in the 1500s, and is responsible for some of the earliest work in toxicology and psychotherapy. Apparently he was the first person to ever mention the unconscious in a clinical manner, good for him. He also wrote about how you could create a homunculus, which is basically a tiny man you make yourself. That's right.

Duncan MacDougall Could Guess Your Soul's Weight

Duncan MacDougall is one of the shadiest sounding doctors we've ever come across, and seems like the kind of guy who liked to play games like "Drink This Bubbling Liquid" and "Smell my Ether Soaked Rag," both of which we learned were unfun after playing a couple rounds with the man who sold bikes around the corner.

In the early 20th century, MacDougall theorized that the soul had weight. His experiments even came up with a number, 21 grams, which is where the title of that movie came from. What experiments you ask? The experiments where MacDougall took six patients "in the process of dying" and weighed them.

Being a profound scientific mind, there's not much written about who these people were or why and how they were dying. It's just enough to know that in their last moments, probably while they were hoping for a miracle, or maybe CPR, they were getting rolled onto a scale like deli-sliced meat at the market.

MacDougall also took the time to replicate his experiments with dogs. Fifteen dogs, in fact, which were apparently uncooperative when it came to dying of natural causes, so he had to help them along towards doggy heaven.

Although, according to his experiment, while humans lost anywhere from no weight because they died too quick for him to adjust his scale to several ounces at death, dogs lost nothing and therefore have no souls, which by our calculations means Guthrie's two-headed dog had twice as much no soul as a regular dog and was therefore evil to the core.

Johann Conrad Dippel Was Basically Frankenstein

In 1673, Johann Conrad Dippel was born in castle Frankenstein. Seriously. We could probably just stop talking now, but what the hell, let's go for it.

Nikola Tesla: The Crazy Edison

Nikola Tesla made mad scientists the glamorous kooks they are today. Without him, all those reanimated corpses and turtle babies would be relegated to back alley practices with no one batting an eye. In his life, Tesla made great contributions to research into electricity and electromagnetism, yet also did things that moved him close to Batman villain territory.

For one thing, Tesla had a few quirks. He had an intense fear of dirt and germs. He also disliked anything round, and was disgusted by pearl earrings. He would only stay in hotel rooms with numbers divisible by three and had a curious obsession with pigeons. He hated fat people and would not speak at conventions without his invention, the Tesla coil, which was a giant lightning-shooting transformer made famous in many sci-fi games and films, always buzzing in the background.

When not shooting lightning for kicks, Tesla was pondering other ways to use electricity, among them the theoretical creation of a superweapon particle beam that would be able to shoot down "10,000 enemy planes at a distance of 200 miles." He also put thought into anti-gravity airships, time travel and a thought photography machine that would take pictures of things from your imagination and display them on a screen. We're pretty sure if we hooked Tesla to that machine, we'd just get the same image of the Earth being shocked to shit by huge bolts of electricity, again and again.

Michael Persinger and the God Helmet

Michael Persinger is a cognitive neuroscience researcher who apparently got bored with all that, and instead put effort into turning a snowmobile helmet into a doorway to God Himself.

Thomas Midgley Jr. Tried Really Hard to Destroy the World

First of all, Thomas Midgley Jr. was responsible for leaded gasoline, which he created for General Motors. This is the gas you can't get any more. Why? Because lead is fucking poisonous, that's why.

In fact, while working on his leaded gasoline additives for GM, Midgley managed to give himself lead poisoning. Over the course of its first year in operation, ten employees died of lead poisoning and many others became ill. Naturally, GM didn't like this. Not because people were dying, but because the work was taking too long, probably because of all the people dying. So, in the name of good old-fashioned American efficiency, they made a new plant and started using a faster, more dangerous method.

Within two months the new plant had a slew of new lead poisoning victims suffering hallucinations and insanity, as well as five more deaths. Midgley did the only responsible thing. At a press conference, he washed his hands in the leaded mixture and breathed in the fumes for a full minute to show it was safe. Thus, for decades cars would continue to pump Migley's poison into the air.

But Migley wasn't done. When General Motors told him they needed a chemical to use as a refrigerant, he invented chlorinated fluorocarbons. CFCs. Decades later, long after his death, the world would find out these CFCs were making a hole in the ozone layer. His leaded gasoline, meanwhile would be banned in 1973, only after vehicles had pumped mind-boggling amounts of lead into the air, killing thousands and permanently damaging tens of millions more around the globe.

Midlgey ended up severely disabled by polio and his final invention was a series of pulleys that he used to help himself in and out of bed, proving that even disease was no match for his inventive mind. Some time later he got stuck in his pulley system and died of strangulation, a death that, while tragic, probably prevented him from inventing some chemical that would accidentally melt the flesh off all our bones.

If you liked that, you'll probably enjoy our look at 5 Current Genetic Experiments Most Likely to Destroy Humanity. Then, head over to the blog and find out how to stay a virgin for the rest of your life!