From catastrophic space explosions to drinking cups of disease-infested vomit, we count 9
science experiments that ended in disaster.
9 - NASA Challenger Explosion • Thirty years ago, the world witnessed
a scientific space expedition go horribly wrong.
• A mere 73 seconds into take-off, NASA’s space shuttle ‘Challenger’ suddenly broke
up and helplessly hurtled over the Atlantic Ocean.
Several of the crew were apparently still alive after the immediate explosion, but not
one of the seven crew members survived the brutal force of impact when the cabin plunged
to the ocean floor.
A design flaw in the shuttle’s O-Ring was reported as the culprit for the fatal malfunction.
• The tragedy brought America’s space program to a halt for many years while NASA
implemented stricter safety guidelines to make future flights safer.
8 – Marie Curie • The Polish woman who revolutionised physics
with her radioactive science experiments met an ironic fate when she died of extreme radiation
poisoning.
• In 1898, Curie discovered and named two powerful elements – Polonium and Radium.
At the time, not even Cure understood how lethal these elements were to humans.
Curie would casually carry around radioactive tubes in her pockets, not knowing they were
slowly killing her.
To this day, the furniture that Curie and her husband Pierre had in their home is still
too radioactive to even touch.
• Curie’s science journals are locked away in lead-lined cabinets, which you can
only touch if you’re wearing safety-clothes.
7 - Alexander Bogdanov • This Russian physician had some pretty
wild ideas, including the blood transfusion experiment that lead to his own death.
• Bogdanov’s experimental projects spanned many fields – science, economy, philosophy
and even soviet sci-fi literature.
In his novel, ‘Red Star’, he wrote about a techno-communist society living on Mars
where blood transfusions were the key to eternal youth.
Bogdanov was so sure of this bloody immortality theory that he personally received over 11
transfusions in his life, ultimately causing his death when in 1928 he received blood contaminated
with malaria and tuberculosis.
• His outrageous experimental thinking wasn’t all in vain – his theories provided some
crucial foundations for modern cybernetics and systems theory.
6 - Louis Slotin • At age 35, this Canadian physicist died
from a colossal fission reaction while attempting to assist in the construction of the world’s
first atomic bomb.
• Slotin was part of a team responsible for concocting extremely volatile levels of
nuclear masses under controlled conditions.
During one of his experiments, Slotin’s screwdriver slipped and started a lethal chemical
reaction.
His quick reflexes knocked one of the spheres away, but the biological damage was already
done.
Each of the scientists watching the experiment was instantly poisoned by the invisible radiation.
Slotin died in hospital nine days later.
• The same sphere that killed Slotin was later implemented in the final product - America’s
first atomic bomb.
5 – Monster Study • In 1939, a psychologist named Doctor Wendell
Johnson experimented on the minds of 22 orphan children to devastating and profound consequences.
• The orphans from Iowa were separated into two groups – the first were positively told
that their speech and language was excellent, the others were negatively told that they
were slow and stuttered.
The positive group excelled, and some of those who had a stutter were cured.
The negative group were devastated intellectually – some children even developed a life-long
speech impediment when they spoke perfectly fine before.
• Though it was highly controversial, some people still argue that the experiment has
provided valuable insights into the psychology of speech and stutter therapy.
4 - Salomon August Andrée • Three Swedish scientists attempted to
fly an enormous hydrogen balloon to the North Pole in 1897, but never lived to tell the
tale.
• S.A Andree and his men set sail, but ten hours and 500 kilometres later the balloon
was battered by icy winds and forced to land.
For the next two months, the trio lugged around their scientific supplies on sleds and killed
polar bears for food.
They finally found land by the third month, but they were starting to run out of food
quickly and were sick from putrid bear meat.
• 153 years later, a Norwegian expedition discovered their bodies lying in a tent and
brought them back to Sweden.
3 – Charles Hofling • An experiment that tested the psychology
of power and influence showed that a lot of people will blindly follow authority, even
when asked to do illegal things.
• Psychiatrist Charles Hofling called a hospital in 1966 pretending to be a doctor.
He ordered 22 nurses to double the dosage of the drugs they would normally give a patient
– a dose which would be strong enough to kill.
The nurses didn’t know that the drug had been replaced by a safe alternative – but
21 of the nurses surprisingly complied anyway.
• The experiment alarmingly revealed how easily authority could coerce even the most
educated nurses. 2 – Emma Eckstein
• Sigmund Freud diagnosed Emma Eckstein with hysteria and excessive masturbation,
and recommended she have the inside of her nostrils scorched to cure her condition.
• Eckstein was referred to Wilhelm Fleiss, who numbed Eckstein’s nostrils with cocaine
before burning her inner nose.
Fleiss claimed the procedure had worked miracles in other patients, and even performed it on
Freud himself, but Eckstein’s nose became hugely infected from a piece of gauze that
Fleiss mistakenly forgot to remove.
She was left permanently disfigured and her hysteria heightened because of the ordeal.
• Her treatment was as extreme as her diagnosis - masturbation was thought to be incredibly
dangerous for mental health in those days.
1 – Stubbins Ffirth • Late in the eighteen hundreds, Stubbins
Ffirth tried to prove that yellow fever wasn’t contagious – by drinking the black vomit
of an infected victim.
• Almost 10% of Philadelphia’s population were killed in 1793 when yellow fever was
running rampant through America.
A trainee doctor at the time, Ffirth was determined to prove his theory, so he smeared a victim’s
rancid vomit into cuts in his skin, poured it into his eyeballs and fried the vomit to
inhale the fumes.
Turns out yellow fever is highly contagious, but needs contact with the blood stream.
• Luckily for Ffirth, he avoided disaster because the vomit was no longer contagious
and he walked away scot free.