The 10 Craziest Scientific Experiments Ever Conducted

Wilhelm Reich Studied How Sex Affects Weather

A psychoanalyst who in the 1940s who was really really focused on sexuality, Wilhelm Reich believed that the human libido had its own kind of crazy kung-fu type chi energy. He called it orgone, because "humptricity" was the name he was saving for his rock band.

He built orgone accumulators, boxes made of metal, steel wool and various other pulled-out-of-his-ass materials so that people could sit inside and absorb all that sexy orgone goodness. Orgone was so awesome it caused weather, the sky being blue, gravity and sexuality. So you really liked sex, Wilhelm. We get it.

But everything good has a downside and apparently orgone radiation was pestered by an opposite force (called deadly orgone radiation) that caused plants around Wilhelm's lab to die and menacing clouds to form. We wish we were making this up. Wilhlem made it up, but we didn't. Anyway, to combat the deadly orgone, Wilhlem did what any rational man would do, he build a "cloud buster," a bunch of tubes that had cables leading to water. He pretty much just got crazier from there.

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.

Charles Claude Guthrie and the Two-Headed Dog

Charles Claude Guthrie wasn't exactly a cackling, evil madman, but due to the constraints of the time he lived in (early 1900s), being all full of crazy shit and whatnot, the man performed a couple of experiments that today would get you shunned by all but the maddest of scientists.

Guthrie was instrumental in developing modern day transplant practices, and while that would be a pretty cool legacy for any man to have, he was also probably the first guy to sew the head of one dog onto another dog, at least for business purposes.

And just to clarify, that wasn't a head transplant. He made a two-headed dog, possibly as a first step towards creating Cerberus, the three-headed dog of the Greek underworld that you probably saw in the first Harry Potter movie.

Hwang Woo-Suk's Mammoth Mistake

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.

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.

In fact, this little dude would be better than making a human the old fashioned way (via sweaty, grunty humpage, for you naive types) because you could keep it pure, since Paracelsus figured a real baby is all corrupted with those female juices, and who wants that garbage?

No, according to Paracelsus' writings, the only way to create a pure man via homunculus was to take some semen, put it in a bottle, and submerge it in horse shit for 40 days. Then, when the tiny man you've created starts to form and wiggle around in the bottle, he said you needed to feed it blood for 40 more days.

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.

Thought to be the inspiration for the good doctor from Mary Shelley's book, while in the castle he spent his days practicing anatomy and alchemy. Naturally, it's said some of this anatomy involved boiling various body parts in large vats to make some kind of mad man stew. Rumor has it he also tried his hand at moving the soul from one corpse to another, possibly with a funnel, a hose and a lot of lubricant.

There are also various rumors of grave robbing that lead to his association with the Frankenstein story. Whether any of that is true is up for debate, but he did get run out of town for whatever the hell he was doing.

He is also credited with inventing Dippel's Oil, a tasty tonic made from bones, blood and various other fun animal products distilled into what was supposed to be the Elixir of Life, but apparently was just a foul-smelling stimulant that probably gave people mad cow disease.

Nikola Tesla: The Crazy Edison

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.