Scientists are way smarter than most people, but sometimes they change the world for the
worse.
We hear about the discoveries of some of the world's most famous scientists, but we don't
hear about the terrible stuff.
Here are respected scientists who were terrible people.
Erwin Schrodinger is most famous for a thought experiment about putting a cat in a sealed
box and rigging it up with a device that has a fifty-fifty chance of killing the cat.
As he argues, until you open the box and check for yourself, the cat exists in an uncertain
state where it is both alive and dead at the same time.
It turns out that’s a pretty fitting legacy for this guy, since he proved you could be
a brilliant physicist, and also a complete scumbag.
Saying he had numerous affairs is putting it lightly.
According to his biographer, Schrodinger kept a series of "little black books" to record
the names of the women he had affairs with and to rate each of them.
At least three of his mistresses gave him children, and one provided him with the “inspiration”
to develop his famous wave equation.
They were all adults, and that's fine, but it gets much worse.
Schrodinger also did some tutoring, with students that included 14-year-old twins that he was
prone to fondling while they worked on their math lessons.
One of them, Ithi Junger, became pregnant three years later, and Schrodinger quickly
moved on.
Brothers John and William Hunter aren't household names, but they’re credited with major discoveries
about human anatomy and the interactions between organs.
Unfortunately, they developed all of those discoveries through literal grave-robbing.
Both anatomists were connected to a shady assistant who “procured” cadavers for
them to dissect.
William’s personal Igor was his unfortunately named assistant William Smellie, and some
historians believe the two were linked to a series of London murders between 1749 and
1755, which would likely make them responsible for the deaths of 40 pregnant women.
By the time the brothers were done, they had dissected more than 2,000 bodies gathered
up through straight up Frankenstein tactics.
Oh, and John?
He also pioneered the idea of taking teeth from the poor and giving them to the rich
as transplants.
Robin Hood, he was not.
James D. Watson turned his love of bird-watching into a career in research and genetics, and
then won a Nobel Prize for discovering the shape of DNA.
Unfortunately, there are more than a few people who believe he took credit for the work of
another scientist, Rosalind Franklin.
That’s just the tip of this terrible iceberg, though.
Watson has gone on record as saying genetic engineering should be used to "make all girls
pretty," and he's spoken freely on his beliefs that there's a connection between race and
intelligence.
He ultimately retired in 2007 after giving an interview where he stated he was "inherently
gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because he disagreed with the premise that “their
intelligence is the same as ours.”
This is the same guy who spoke out in 1997 in favor of allowing genetic testing to determine
whether a baby was going to be gay, adding that homosexuality should be a reason for
abortion.
In 2014, he also became the first person to sell his Nobel medallion, because he didn't
like the way the scientific community shunned him after his racist remarks.
Without Jack Parsons, or, to use his original and staggeringly awesome name, Marvel Whiteside
Parsons, there would be no space shuttle, not to mention the military applications of
his developments in rocketry.
He was an aeronautic genius... and he also believed he had summoned Satan when he was
13 years old.
Parsons was a huge devotee of occultist Aleister Crowley, and did a lot of dancing naked by
the moonlight.
That's not particularly terrible, but his attempts to summon the Antichrist through
weird sex-magick rituals he performed with the help of L. Ron Hubbard aren’t exactly
good, either.
Without going into too much detail, the basics are that Parsons and Hubbard performed a series
of rituals to incarnate a goddess named Babalon.
Babalon would be the mother of the Antichrist, and they absolutely believed they had summoned
her in the body of Marjorie Cameron.
Cameron joined in all the bedroom fun, and while she did become pregnant, we'll never
know if it was really the Antichrist since she had an abortion.
You probably recognize John Harvey Kellogg’s name, even if you don’t know who he is.
He’s the cereal guy, and he was also a surgeon and a pioneer in the field of nutrition who
promoted healthy foods like peanut butter, yogurt, and soy milk, making him pretty much
responsible for everything on your breakfast table.
If you’ve ever been disappointed by the lack of flavor in a bowl of cornflakes, there’s
a reason for that.
Kellogg believed that tasty food led to rampant fornication, and told people that soy milk
was the only thing they should be thirsty for.
He even went as far as suggesting the use of spiked tools and acid burns to discourage
masturbation, and corn flakes?
He invented those to be so bland they couldn't possibly arouse any kind of desire in anyone.
He did most of his research into the relationship between nutrition and the soul at the Battle
Creek Sanitarium, where he also became one of the founding members of the Race Betterment
Foundation.
Through that, he started a eugenics registry that helped to push the supposed superiority
of anyone of a Nordic background.
So maybe just go ahead and stick to pancakes from now on.
William Buckland was a 19th-century geologist at Oxford University, and he documented geological
phenomenon, wrote papers on fossils and the dinosaurs, and made major strides in mineralogy.
He also made it part of his life's work to eat anything and everything.
And we do mean everything.
He ate moles, crocodiles, hedgehogs, and, worst of all, he was even known to have cooked
up some puppies.
He never said why he felt it necessary to eat puppies, but we do know he passed his
weird obsession on to his son, Francis.
When the boy was a child, his father encouraged him to ride and then eat a turtle that he
was allowed to behead for the cook “as a treat”.
Much later, of course, that experience would lead Francis to grow up and found the evil
ninjas of the Foot Clan.