The 10 Craziest Scientific Experiments Ever Conducted

Laugh all you want, but Wilhelm talked Albert Einstein into studying his orgone accumulator, and the pair spent some time measuring the device to see if it could in fact draw energy from Einstein's boner. We're going to go out on a limb and say that Einstein was drunk off his ass during their entire project.

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.

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.

Hey, remember when we said the guy was a physician? Yeah, he was treating people this whole time. This is another reason why if you got sick in the 1500s, you were probably better off just staying home and rolling the dice.

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.

Aptly named the God Helmet, Persinger's invention basically fucks with your brain using magnetic fields in your parietal and temporal lobes. The result is the feeling that Jesus may be right on the verge of pantsing you or just sort of hanging out for no good reason. More than 80 percent of participants report feeling an ethereal presence in the room which they say is either God or a dead loved one, but hopefully not Satan.

The point behind zapping someone's brain until they feel like God is in the room is probably really cool and sciency, it seems to us there are only two possibilities: either this will become a party game that kicks the ever-loving crap out of Ouija boards, or else Persinger has actually opened up a portal to the realm of the dead.

Persinger has gone on to try to explain damn near all unexplained phenomenon as being caused by the same kind of electromagnetism (just as the show Lost seems to be doing). As you might expect, he came to the conclusion that UFOs were caused by seismic faults. Seems these faults create EM fields that can cause hallucinations "based on images from pop culture," which doesn't explain why they are always seeing aliens coming at the instead of, say, Harrison Ford or that other guy from Wham!.

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!