Experiments That Went Way Wrong

When the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago couldn't identify a snake that had come into their possession, they sent it to the Field Museum's resident herpetologist, Karl Schmidt. Unfortunately for Schmidt, the little serpent was a young boomslang, which promptly bit Schmidt and administered a deadly dose of venom as he was trying to study and classify it. He was injected with a slow-acting hemotoxin that causes your organs to slowly start bleeding out (ouch). Schmidt resigned himself to death, as boomslang antivenom wasn't readily available in 1957, and documented his own bloody demise over the course of a couple of days. He transcribed his experiences with internal bleeding and organ failure out in his final notes—that is dedication.

Any list of deadly experiments would be remiss to not include the work of Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie, who died of radiation poisoning after prolonged exposure to radioactive materials during the course of her work. It's not as though her exposure to radioactivity was limited to the laboratory, however, since she was known to carry around radioactive materials in her pockets and was often exposed to unshielded X-rays as a technician. Her papers and possessions are still considered unsafe to touch due to the high levels of radioactivity they emit. We have a feeling she would've been a Fallout gamer in modern times.

After Daghlian's deadly accident, the same plutonium core remained in use at Los Alamos, where it became the catalyst for a second disaster. Louis Slotin was using a screwdriver instead of the usual lab-approved separators to keep the plutonium core separated from a hemisphere of beryllium, a material which would cause intense radiation should the two come in contact. The life-preserving screwdriver slipped, a burst of radiation exploded from the plutonium core, and Slotin immediately fell ill, dying nine days later. After this incident, the plutonium sphere was nicknamed the "demon core," and later used in an experimental nuclear detonation at the island of Bikini Atoll.

Even when you're taking proper precautions, it's sometimes not enough to protect you from a scientific mishap. In 1997, Karen Wetterhahn unknowingly dropped two beads of dimethylmercury onto her latex-gloved hand, but made nothing of it until she started experiencing the symptoms of mercury poisoning a few weeks later. As it turns out, not all kinds of latex is impermeable to dimethylmercury, which was not known at the time of the accident. Wetterhahn finally passed away after many months of suffering, but the incident helped rewrite safety protocol, improve standards in protective equipment, and potentially save many other lives in the long run.

Tragedy struck UCLA in late 2008, when student Sheri Sangji accidentally spilled a highly pyrophoric chemical, igniting a fire that would ultimately end her life. While science usually thrives on experimentation and breaking boundaries, most of the incident's aftermath has centered around ensuing lawsuits. According to litigation, Sangji was allegedly never briefed on proper lab procedures or issued the proper equipment by her professor, who was accused of felonious negligence. We're not sure who was at fault, but at the very least, students and professors are now extremely aware of the consequences of unpreparedness and how dangerous certain combustible chemicals can be.