Respected Scientists Who Were Actually Terrible People

Scientists: They're way smarter than most people, and they see the world in a different way and ultimately change it ... for better or worse. Sometimes, it's a crapshoot which way it's going to go, but science is always moving the world into a new place and it's being driven by some of the strangest people in the world.

Reassured? Didn't think so. Too often, we hear about the discoveries and achievements of some of the world's most famous scientists, but we don't hear about the other stuff. The terrible stuff. Knowledge comes with a price, and some people aren't too hesitant to pay it. Do some digging, and it quickly becomes clear that some of mankind's knowledge came only because the people chasing it didn't have much in the way of morals, qualms, or the ability to think twice before diving headlong into the icky. These scientists were terrible people.

Brothers John and William Hunter aren't the rock stars of science, but their work is immeasurably important. William made major discoveries about the lymphatic system and the uterus, while John was an anatomist who developed the idea that interactions between organs make people work and laid the foundations of pathology.

Both believed hands-on experience was the way to learn, but here's the terrible. Research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (via The Guardian) looked at just where William and his associate, the unfortunately named William Smellie, got the bodies they lectured over and dissected. They linked the two anatomists to a series of London murders between 1749 and 1755, and say they were likely responsible for the deaths of between 35 and 40 pregnant women.

Each of the men was connected to a shady assistant who "procured" subjects for them. William's murder helper seems to have been his brother, and according to The James Lind Library, John also dug up graves himself before turning to professionals. By the time the brothers were done, they had dissected more than 2,000 bodies, sourced in some shady ways. Oh, and John? He also pioneered the idea of tooth transplants, by taking teeth from the poor and giving them to the rich. Robin Hood, he was not.

Linus Pauling died in 1994, and Oregon State University sang the praises of a man who won two Nobel Prizes (Chemistry and Peace), who dabbled in theoretical physics, made advances in genetic diseases and immunology, pioneered the idea of molecular disease, and invented a device that made anesthesia safer.

That's just a tiny portion of the long list of achievements he's credited with, and that's all well and good. But there's a "but" here, and it's a doozy. Pauling's work with molecular disease and genetic illness sent him careening into the murky, swampy cesspool that is eugenics. Oregon State says Pauling was a proponent of eliminating diseases like sickle cell anemia (and other hereditary diseases) by first testing for it, then tattooing carriers with "an obvious mark" on their foreheads. He also said two carriers should avoid marriage and children, and should consider aborting any child that might come into the picture, even saying it would be immoral for a mother to produce a child who will suffer.

Of course, Pauling can speak for himself. During a lecture at Michigan State University, he said (via Oregon State), " It's all right for [a mother] to be allowed to determine the extent to which she will suffer, but she should not be allowed to produce a child who will suffer. This is immoral."

Without Jack Parsons — or, as he was born, Marvel Whiteside Parsons — there would be no space shuttle, no spaceflight, and who knows what military conflicts would have changed had the U.S. not had his developments in rocketry and fuel propellent. He was an aeronautics and rocketry genius, and he also believed he had summoned Satan when he was 13 years old.

Parsons was a huge devotee of Aleister Crowley, says Gizmodo. He also did a lot of dancing naked by the moonlight. That's not particularly terrible, but what was terrible was his belief that his weird sex-magick rituals (which he usually undertook with the help of L. Ron Hubbard) were going to summon the Antichrist.

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 she did become pregnant. We'll never know if it was really the Antichrist, as she had an abortion. There is a little side note, though. After that whole pursuit petered out, Parson's wife hooked up with Hubbard, and they saw the birth of something else: Scientology.

Everyone knows Alexander Graham Bell as an inventor, but inventing was only a side gig. According to PBS, he was really interested in deaf education and the physiology of speech. He even opened a school for the deaf, but that's not to say he had noble aspirations. Quite the opposite.

Bell was also interested in heredity, and eventually came to the conclusion that eugenics was the way to go. He saw an America that was being overrun by immigrants and the deaf, and he wasn't about to stand for any of it. In his 1884 paper "Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race," he wove a cautionary tale about what could happen if deaf people kept forming clubs, socializing, marrying, having deaf babies, and communicating in a language only they could understand.

It went downhill from there. Rooted in Rights says Bell embarked on a quest to remove sign language from schools, and it absolutely worked. Signing was learned behind closed doors, and deaf students were forced to learn through oral communication. It was so successful that the National Association of the Deaf produced 18 films in the hopes of preserving sign language for a time when people weren't so irrationally hateful.

One thing that's never mentioned along with Bell and his anti-deaf crusade was what his mother thought of the whole thing. Eliza Bell was deaf. And his wife, Mabel? Also deaf. At least they didn't have to hear his ramblings.

You may not know William Buckland's name, but everyone has seen the results of his work. 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.

According to Atlas Obscura, one of his favorite dishes was field mouse on toast, and one of the most disgusting dishes he claimed to have eaten was a meal made of bluebottle flies. He ate moles, hedgehogs, crocodiles, porpoises, 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 there are a few stories that show just how obsessed he really was. He was in an Italian cathedral when he was shown a stain that was reportedly a martyr's blood. Always the scientist, he licked it and said it wasn't blood, it was bat urine. There's another story that when he was presented with the heart of France's King Louis XIV, he ate that, too.

That last one is only alleged, 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 then eat a turtle. Francis was allowed "as a treat" to help the cook behead the turtle. Ahh, childhood.