Mad Scientist / Real Life

• The great science writer/explainer (and grandmaster SF writer in his own right) Isaac Asimov once theorized that the concept of the Mad Scientist was born on April 22, 1915, during the Battle of Ypres, because that is when and where poison gas was first used in combat. In his 1971 essay "The Sin of the Scientist", Asimov built an argument that by turning the very air that you breathe into a weapon, the creators of poison gas achieved a new level of evil, beyond anything that science had ever produced before. Gas warfare was seen as being so monstrous that it was outlawed just ten years later as part of the 1925 Geneva Conventions - perhaps the fastest that any weapon has ever been the subject of such an action.
• Isaac Newton, of all people. Throughout his life he placed more emphasis on the occult than science, considering his groundbreaking work to be only a minor achievement. He spent a considerable amount of time on biblical research and attempted to prove that the world would not end before 2060. He went mad at one point and accused philosopher John Locke of sending women to distract him from his divine mission. It's suspected that the mercury he used in his experiments caused brain damage and caused this episode. He once slipped a leather needle between his eye and eye socket "to test his eye theory". Thankfully, there were no lasting injuries, but you have to ask... why?
• Nikola Tesla:
  • Tesla is the man who might have given creation to the whole trope: He built a Teleforce Death Ray. If that's not mad science, we don't know what is.
  • How about harnessing the world's biggest waterfall to power a city, producing 150-foot lightning bolts from his ominous mountain laboratory in Colorado, and plotting to broadcast free power to the world from the Wardenclyffe Tower?
  • Or, alternatively, how about that he had OCD and synesthesia, had flashbacks to his brother's death whenever he was stressed, and, in his later years, would talk to pigeons and mail letters to Samuel Clemens... who'd been dead for decades? He was definitely a psychologically-troubled member of the science profession, even if he hadn't been a Mad Scientist.
• Albert Einstein and the German nuclear physicists heavily influenced early Mad Scientists like Rotwang in the late 1920s. Crucial to the popularity of these "eccentric German physicists" was how they rehabilitated the image of scientists as logic driven pacifists in the wake of WWI, at a time when both war and Germans were intensely unpopular. (Einstein, with his characteristic wild hairdo, became the first scientific superstar and the first Popular Geek, helping spawn the concept of a Reluctant Mad Scientist whose inventions are inevitably misused.)
• The infamous Nazi scientist Josef Mengele, a.k.a. "the Angel of Death". It's not unheard of to think that his name was pronounced "Mangle", given what he did to the prisoners of Auschwitz (which included among other activities, unnecessary amputations, injecting toxic substances into victim's bodies, and ripping out healthy teeth for study). Mengele was primarily an anthropologist (he was a PhD/MD) and while not an incompetent one, used his experience to advance Nazi racial theories which led him to commit many of his atrocities in an effort to prove their supposed validity.
• In a similar vein, the Japanese scientists of Unit 731 led by Surgeon General Shiro Ishii performed experiments on POWs and civilians during World War II and the Second Sino-Japanese War. Their experiments ran the gamut, from frostbite experiments to live dissection, but their most infamous activities came from testing biological and chemical weapons on live subjects before their usage in battle. (Ironically, when Shiro Ishii traded Unit 731's results to the U.S. in exchange for amnesty after the war, the U.S. discovered that their equivalent research programs were more advanced, despite having been conducted without the "benefit" of mad science.)
• The scientists behind MKULTRA studied various methods to use in mind control experiments, with the most prominent of these being drugging unwitting participants with psychoactive substances such as LSD. Notably, documents collected from Unit 731 and Nazi war criminals were used as a base from which MKULTRA researchers drew from in their experiments.
  • Henry Murray was a psychologist who conducted psychologically damaging social experiments on students of Harvard University, in which they were subjected to intense verbal abuse to test their responses to extreme stress. Murray also supervised the research of psychologist Timothy Leary into psychoactive substances and is theorized by multiple experts to have been involved with MKULTRA. One of Murray's victims was 17-year-old Ted Kaczynski, better known as The Unabomber.
  • Kaczynski himself could qualify, as he was a brilliant mathematician who earned his Ph.D. before starting his life of crime. After retiring from academics he attempted to live in the wilderness but snapped and became an Eco-Terrorist in response to witnessing deforestation near his cabin. He then successfully managed to evade the authorities throughout his 18-year bombing campaign, utilizing increasingly sophisticated explosives, until his brother David recognized his writing style and turned him in following the publication of his manifesto. After his arrest, Ted was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia which was likely exacerbated by Murray's experiments. Before his death in June 2023, Kaczynski communicated with the public through letters, seeking successors to his Villainous Legacy.
• Austrian-American psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, whose work on human sexuality led him to "discover" Orgone Energy, an omnipresent cosmic lifeforce that was generated (among other things) by orgasm. He sold Orgone Accumulators and built Orgone-powered "Cloudbusters" which could supposedly make it rain, and ended up being shut down by the Food And Drug Administration for selling lunatic medical devices that didn't work. Another version of the story has government agents smashing his laboratory and burning his books because the "effectiveness" of his work offended the country's puritanical values. He even had minions, and his followers continue his work to this day at his house in Rangeley, Maine.
• Psychologist Harry Harlow was infamous for his experiments on monkeys to simulate the effects of Parental Neglect, possibly as a result of his own parents and a desire to prevent more children from suffering as he did. He was a Large Ham as well, utilizing dramatically-named devices like the "rape rack", "iron maidens", and the "pit of despair". As horrible as it all sounds, his work formed the foundation of what we know today about cognitive development. Harlow knew that in order to understand the human heart, he had to break it (or in this case, one similar to it) and was often criticized by other scientists for using the term "love".
• Aforementioned webcomic Casey and Andy twice had the "Casey And Andy Mad Science Award" for examples of Mad Science in real life. Both times, NASA won: in 2004 for the Genesis Probe and again in 2005 for the Deep Impact space mission. It also appears to have been awarded to the Mythbusters, at least in their early episodes.
• Alexander Bogdanov — Russian-Soviet biologist, science fiction writer, Communist revolutionary, economist, and possibly a real-life Vampire Wannabe. He is renowned for his saner moments such as creating an early precursor to systems theory, but Bogdanov was much more (in)famous for his obsessive experimenting with blood. He believed that treatment and transfusion of young blood to old people was the way to reverse aging, cure diseases and achieve immortality. Even among early Bolsheviks who were a quite eccentric and innovative bunch, he stood out. He died during a blood transfusion experiment on himself in 1929, just in time to avoid being executed along with other Old Bolsheviks in The Great Purge.
  • Surprisingly, Bogdanov wasn't the first or last scientist to experiment with blood in this manner, as German physician Andreas Libavius allegedly performed a similar experiment in 1615 and experiments to treat Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease in the elderly using proteins found in young people's blood plasma are currently ongoing.
• Thomas Edison:
  • He is often portrayed in popular fiction as an evil mad scientist — not because of his scientific skills, but because of his vicious business acumen, shaping him as the prototypical example of Tech Bro trope. He ran a sort of 'idea farm' at Menlo Park and recruited down-on-their-luck inventors to hammer out new devices, allegedly taking the credit (and patent rights) for many of them with or without some of his own input in exchange for financial support and a place to work. Critics claim he didn't always pay what he promised, with Tesla's case being just the most famous.
  • Edison infamously electrocuted Topsy the elephant, recording a Snuff Film of the results.
  • Edison also paid gangs of minions with clubs to smash up early movie theaters and beat the projectionists because they weren't using Edison Brand Projectors.
• DARPA, the US Government's official program to fund Mad Science. Their only mission is "radical innovation". They fund all sorts of seemingly off-the-wall projects. Among their successes are night-vision goggles, GPS, a little thing called the Internet, and self-driving cars.
  • The Department of Defense also sponsored the Stargate Project, an attempt to develop and weaponize Psychic Powers (that later received a film based on it). Can't blame 'em for trying, maybe next time.
• There is a real-life psychological diagnosis known as "Mad Scientist Syndrome", so named because it tends to be a case of actually believing (some wacky event) such as an alien invasion, or collapse of the world economy, will "Show them all that I was right!"
• Yet another article from Cracked about the dangers of science here. Surprisingly, Josef Mengele didn't get mentioned. Perhaps the Cracked writers didn't want to dedicate an entry to a guy whose idea of "science" was torturing helpless prisoners for kicks. Seanbaby's article about exploring the depths of the human mind with The Sims 3 pokes at the whole Nazi scientist thing. Why, without ethics, he says, scientific knowledge increased by leaps and bounds! But then World War II ended and the Nazis that were left were forced to treat Jews, gypsies, and assorted other non-Aryans like human beings again, and that all stopped. So isn't it wonderful now that EA has created a people simulator we can use for the same thing?
• Heston Blumenthal specialises in using scientific study to create tastier food (or, to use the specialist term, molecular gastronomy), his restaurant is currently number two in the world. A quick look at the menu will tell you why he's earnt a place of honour on this list. As will a quick look at him in his kitchen. Scientist-looking chef whites, Bald of Evil, frothing beakers of liquid nitrogen and dry ice... the only thing stopping him from being a classic mad scientist is that he hasn't actually killed anyone yet. (Well, that, and the fact that he's actually this kind of giggly guy with a childlike love of messing with people's expectations and bringing them massive hits of nostalgia.)
• Buckminster Fuller. He invented many things, few of which saw much use. He made up words by dicing up other words and sticking the parts together. He slept two hours a day, spread across four 30-minute naps, for two years. He kept a diary of his entire life, updating it every 15 minutes and including a family history, newspaper clippings, sketches, and copies of all bills and correspondence. From 1915 to 1983. He was still very influential, however. One invention of his that really did take off is the geodesic dome, one of the most efficient ways of enclosing space ever devised, most famously used for EPCOT at Disney World. Also, when a weird class of carbon nanoparticles was discovered that had a geodesic shape, what did they call them? Buckyballs! Or buckminsterfullerene, if you want to be technical.
• Jack Parsons — One of the men that helped refine the jet engine and allow for space flight. He was also a disciple of Aleister Crowley, and teamed up with none other than L. Ron Hubbard. Their attempt was to summon a goddess which would help the new aeon bloom into one of free love and peace rather than war — something which made even Crowley wonder what these nitwits were up to. At one point an angered Parsons is said to have summoned a hurricane against Hubbard. Parsons saw no differentiation between science and magic and died when his lab exploded.
• Edward Teller, the inventor of the hydrogen bomb, who pushed like crazy to get the U.S. government to build it and openly advocated nuking the U.S.S.R. Also advocated using a nuke to excavate a harbor in Alaska and building a tunnel across America using nukes to do the mining. Once used a nuclear test to light his cigar (a man could get cancer doing a thing like that.^note The nuclear test thing, not the smoking. Well, technically both.). He was also the main push behind the Excalibur system — a nuclear bomb-pumped gamma/x-ray laser. An advanced version could fire at hundreds of targets simultaneously. While the principle works, SDI as a whole was doomed to sink long before they dealt with inevitable technical problems, including independently aiming a hundred lasing wires.
• There exists another... Troy Hurtubise, a Canadian backyard inventor, who has invented little things like fire-paste, a grey clay-like material that can withstand blow-torch-grade heat directly for up to 10 minutes. How did he test this? By placing a mask of it over his own face! (What? How else would you do it?) He also invented a viable power armour system that sprang up as an offshoot of his bear fighting armour. The kicker? He invented all of this virtually on his own time and resources.
• David Hahn, a/k/a The Radioactive Boy Scout, a 17-year-old who attempted to build a homemade breeder nuclear reactor.
• Harry Grindell Matthews, an American scientist who claimed to have built a death ray.
• Jane Toppan, a nursing student turned serial killer. She would dose patients with morphine and atropine to see what it would do to their nervous systems, climb in bed with them, and hold them as they died. She also claimed to get a sexual thrill from her murders.
• Some of these keep a lower profile, remaining content with experimenting with some of the nastiest compounds imaginable, and making scientific papers about it. One name that always seems to come up, however, is that of Thomas M. Klapötke. Let's just say that you basically have to wear body armor if you want to come anywhere near whichever lab he's in.
  • Here's a little foray into some of these papers.
• John Haldane, the man the WWI British government turned to in order to get a gas mask designed to protect their soldiers from German gas. He had worked down the mines of Scotland, so he was used to higher-ups issuing crap kit they'd never have to use themselves. He was determined that that would not happen in this case — so he tested chlorine gas on himself. In his own house. With his daughter instructed to break down the door and rescue him if he didn't knock back. Bad. Fucking. Ass.
  "Haldane was a great self-experimenter — he thought the human organism was the best animal to experiment on because it could report on what it was experiencing."
• Gabriel Kron, the brilliant Hungarian engineer responsible for diving deep into diakoptics and related esoterica related to electrical machinery, a poster child for the over-unity/weird science crowd, and a forgotten hero/misunderstood genius of 20th-century science. Introduced the term "Phase Creep" to describe spooky relativistic effects caused by large, spinning motors (a problem that General Electric hired him to resolve). No more time travel problems here!
• CERN was accused of this trope before the Hadron Supercollider came online, complete with protests fueled by a dodgy understanding of physics that feared the thing would generate mini black holes that would grow and consume Earth. Seems Earth is still here.
• William Moulton Marston: Co-inventor of the lie detector, the blood pressure cuff, and Wonder Woman comics. Definitely brilliant, definitely off his gourd. He lived in a happy polyamorous triad with his wife and their partner/research assistant, and argued in scientific journals about the inherent superiority of women and that the path to a more loving and just world could be achieved through proper application of BDSM. He was also surprisingly savvy about dealing with DC Comics; while most creators surrendered their characters for a one-time payment, Dr. Marston arranged a deal that more or less leased Wonder Woman to the company, with a share of the goods going to his estate for the care of his wives and children, a deal that lasted at least until the last surviving member of the triad died in 1993.
• Hideo Murai was the head scientist of the Aum Shinrikyo Apocalypse Cult Far East Asian Terrorists that became known for the Tokyo sarin attacks. He was totally dedicated to the group and its leader, and worked on both the actual weapons and technology handled and developed by the group and on the completely nutty ideas proposed by the guru.
• Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian biologist who developed modern systems of livestock artificial insemination, creating a program that allowed Tsarist Russia, and later the Soviet Union, to produce animals in large numbers. He was also obsessed with using artificial insemination to create animal crossbreeds, including failed attempts to transplant human semen into a chimpanzee.
• David Jones invoked the trope for fun. He had a long-standing column for British science mag "Nature" where he, in his persona "Daedalus", presented one wacky invention after another, and you never could be sure if it would work nevertheless.
• Elon Musk has reached Memetic Badass status for his mad sciencing, having built and sold a (not a) flamethrower for the hell of it and shooting his car into space just to prove what the Space-X rocket was capable of. And this is only a few specific examples. A common joke is he's allowed to do what he wants out of fear he'll turn into The Green Goblin if anyone tries to stop him. Granted Musk isn't directly involved in most of the research and inventions conducted by his companies and is more of a Tech Bro than an actual scientist, but the internet simply doesn't care.
• Anonymous is a Hacker Collective of Mad Scientists who are infamous for various cyber crimes such as DDOS attacks on governments and corporations, targeting controversial groups such as terrorists and cults, and disrupting the mainstream media they disapprove of. Of course, they claim to be Well Intentioned Extremists who wanted to bring down corporate tyranny and incompetent governances for good, but many internet users would disagree.
• Dr. John Kellogg of the Kellogg's corn flakes fame. Not only did he think masturbation was extremely dangerous, he even specifically invented cornflakes as a way to lower people's sex drives and helped popularize male circumcision in America for similar reasons, as well as prescribing bizarre treatments such as yogurt enemas for other ailments.
• B.F Skinner, of the Skinner box fame. He even argued that personal freedom and autonomy were bad things and that people in charge should use "behavior modification" to make people do what they want.
• Michael Reeves is a YouTube engineer, programmer and all-around crackhead. He's well known for his absurd number of tasers and his obsession with killing sea turtles by shoving plastic straws up their nose and has invented revolutionary devices like a microwave powered by screaming, a Roomba that curses whenever it bumps into things, and Trigger Me Elmo, the world's first race detecting toy. Michael himself has admitted that while everybody else with skills like his is trying to make the world a better place, he's just trying to be the best Jimmy Neutron he can be.
• Joseph Konopka, better known as Dr. Ch@os, was a Child Prodigy computer system administrator from Wisconsin who one day decided that Good Is Boring.
  • After spending ten months in prison for various acts of vandalism to alleviate said boredom at the age of 19, he started his own hacking group called the "Realm of Ch@os", with one of his former underlings later being arrested after using what he learned from his tutelage to successfully hack into the United States Department of Defense. Konopka was known to routinely sabotage electrical substations and power pylons to cause power surges across entire towns, a feat that would easily result in electrocution without expert knowledge. He and his group would also sell pirated software, hijack radio broadcasts, perform arson, damage the computer systems of Internet service providers, and disabled an air traffic control system, causing $800,000 worth of damage across 13 Wisconsin counties over the course of the late '90s. Konopka would allegedly use threats and violence to keep his accomplices in line, on one occasion assaulting one with a stun gun For the Evulz.
  • Once the authorities caught up with him, he was facing up to 30 years in prison but violated his bail by fleeing to Chicago and using abandoned sections of the subway system as an Elaborate Underground Base. His reign of terror ended when he discovered in an abandoned warehouse several crates of industrial cyanide (illegal to possess in the state of Illinois without a lawful reason), which he took home with him because he thought it was cool. After being caught by the campus police of the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) after repeatedly using their tunnel systems for burglaries, they found various tools, schematics, and one of the cyanide vials. Half a year after September 11, 2001.
  • The F.B.I. was immediately brought in and after learning of the rest of the cyanide from Konopka and his accomplice, the entire Blue Line was shut down to sweep for traps and chemical weapons. Konopka denied having any sort of purpose for the cyanide with the vial he kept on him presumably to avoid going back to prison, but regardless he was convicted for conspiracy to commit acts of terror and spent 16 years in prison before being released in 2019. He spent his time in prison MacGyvering electronic escape tools capable of disabling surveillance equipment and alarmed fences for fun, disassembling and reconfiguring them to pass the time. Since then he's turned over a new leaf and expressed an interest in a cybersecurity career.
• Computer scientist and Millionaire Playboy John McAfee invented the first commercial anti-virus software in the 1980s and founded the company that bears his namesake. However, he had a long history of recreational drug use that made him inclined towards reckless, impulsive behavior such as a brief stint as a Central American warlord and allegedly putting out a hit on his neighbor for poisoning one of his dogs. He was on the run for a while before being detained by Guatemalan authorities and deported back to the US, married a prostitute 30 years his junior, ran for president as a Libertarian, before becoming a fugitive again for tax evasion but sought the Libertarian presidential nomination for a second time anyway. He was very active on social media throughout all of this, discussing topics such as cryptocurrency, yoga, and consensual sex with whales. Unfortunately, he was found dead^note or not, if his "experiments" regarding quantum immortality bore any fruit in the summer of 2021 after his arrest by Spanish authorities, shortly before his planned extradition back to the US. This spawned many conspiracy theories surrounding his alleged suicide, due to his frequent assertions that he was not suicidal and if anyone said he hanged himself, he was murdered.
• Dr. Alexander Abian, a mathematics professor at Iowa State University, became famous for his proposal to blow up the Moon to fight climate change and compared himself to Galileo. His theories were debunked by astronomers (including NASA), who asserted that not only would the entire nuclear arsenal of mankind be insufficient to destroy the Moon, but if we actually could it would have the opposite effects from what he purported and the debris alone would be harmful to all life. What is it with mathematicians (see Kaczynski above) and explosions?
• "Dr." Emanuel Theodore Bronner was mad in a much more literal sense. As in, he had just as much in common with the rambling, stream-of-consciousness, probably-genuinely-schizophrenic "green ink" type of madmen such as Francis E. Dec or Gene "Time Cube" Ray. He was a soap salesman whose incomprehensible ramblings^note which take up the entirety of the soap's labeling in fine print, by the way, claimed his soap could bring metaphysical cleansing in addition to the literal physical kind one would normally expect of soap, as well as unite all of humanity together. Somehow. What earns him a place on this list is the fact that his soap is, surprisingly enough, a genuinely impressive product in its own right (if unable to live up to the more abstract selling points), being a Master of All soap useable for pretty much any soapy application with the right dilution ratio, to the point where it's still available for purchase today. You can get your own box here.
• X Development, previously known as Google X, a secretive company proclaimed to work on "radical" solutions. The stuff they worked on included Google Brain, advanced AI learning research with ethical controversies that surely can never go wrong, and purportedly, teleportation, which was found to violate the laws of physics.
• Ed Currie, Mad Horticulturist, created the world's hottest chili pepper of several magnitudes by carefully cross-breeding the hottest pepper plants he could get his hands on, just because he loves spicy foods that much. Like any good mad scientist Ed enjoys to pain his creation causes to others, and like any good mad scientist, he has repeatedly taste-tested his peppers to the point that he is immune to their effects.
• Zig-Zagged by Jiankui He, a Chinese biophysicist who created the first genetically-modified humans in 2018 in order to bolster the newborn twins' resistance to HIV. While this doesn't sound like much compared to the other examples on this page and he's perfectly sane, human germline engineering is a massive no-no to the scientific community and virtually all the world's governments, even Red China, as the technology isn't yet fully understood and can easily lead to unintended consequences. In fact, his experiment may have actually enhanced their brains as the altered CCR5 gene is linked to improved memory function in mice (whether this was intended or not is yet to be determined). While Lulu and Nana are reported to be in fine health as of December 2021, He himself was sentenced to three years in prison and fined the equivalent of almost half a million USD.
  • One of the reasons he faced such widespread condemnation is that scientists are intended to have their work peer-reviewed and their data analysis vetted in scientific journals. He attempted to do so but his manuscripts were rejected due to the illegal nature of his proposal. One of his confidants, Professor William Hurlbut of Stanford University, stated that if they had been published it would have offered some legitimacy to the experiment and he was essentially Trapped in Villainy.

---