by Darth Obvius
Contrary to what many people think, Frankenstein wasn't the name of the monster in Mary Shelley's famed novel, but the scientist who created him. But there have been other, non-fictional scientists who, attempting to invent stuff to make the world a better place, have seen their creations rise off the slab and lurch down towards the village .
Alfred Nobel (chemist, 1833-1896)
Ta-Da!: In 1866, Nobel invented a new chemical compound for the purpose of mining and quarrying that was safer and more convenient to handle than other then-prevalent explosive mixtures.
Oops: The invention, as you probably know, was dynamite. Nobel followed it up nine years later with gelignite; both were quickly appropriated by military men for extensive use in warfare. A premature obituary that called Nobel "The Merchant of Death" spurred him to found the Nobel Awards, presumably so that he would be remembered for something other than a lot of dead bodies.
Antonio Egas Moniz (neurologist, 1874-1955)
Ta-Da!: Moniz was the first Portuguese to receive a Nobel Prize, for "his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in certain psychoses." This revolutionary treatment was used to cure all mental illnesses, from depression to schizophrenia to psychosis.
Oops: Except that it didn't actually cure anything. If you got treated with Dr. Moniz's procedure and only became a drooling vegetable, you could consider yourself lucky. That's because what Moniz discovered is better known as "lobotomy", which involved painfully removing the prefrontal cortex of your brain.
It only took the medical profession two decades to figure out that it was "one of the most barbaric mistakes ever perpetrated by mainstream medicine." As you can see later on, that's not such a long time to reach such a conclusion.
Francis Galton (anthropologist, 1826-1901)
Ta-Da!: Influenced by his half-cousin, Charles Darwin, Galton developed the science of eugenics, which he planned to use to better the human race via selective breeding.
Simply put, eugenics claimed to accurately predict and classify humans' physical and mental states by studying their ancestry and physiology.
Oops: If you can see how all this can go horribly wrong, congratulationsyou're smarter than 19th-century Englishmen. Lauded at home, Galton's new science was snapped up by racial theorists around the globe. Eugenics was subsequently used to justify the sterilization and murder of "inferior" people and races to protect the purity of the superior master (read: white) race. Sound familiar? That's the Nazis' Aryanism in a nutshell. You're a pretty big screwup if your findings are used to justify genocide.
Eugenics, today, is remembered only as part of the name of a series of fictional wars that, according to Star Trek mythology, happened during the 1990s.
Warwick E. Kerr (entomologist, born 1922)
Ta-Da!: Kerr decided to crossbreed African and European honeybees to try and produce a strain that would be more productive in his native Brazil. He technically succeeded, creating the super-adaptive Africanized bee hybrid.
Oops: The project would have been considered a complete success were it not for a few niggling side effects it created in the bees. Such as swarming by the hundreds of millions, abnormal territoriality, and aggressiveness that would put an NFL linebacker to shameall of which add up to the name Dr. Kerr's creation is better known by: Killer Bees
Still not quite worried? You should be. In 1957, 26 killer bee queens were accidentally released from their apiaryand they've been breeding and moving steadily north ever since. They'll be in Florida by 2012.
Thomas Midgley, Jr. (chemist, 1889-1944)
Ta-Da!: Originally a mechanical engineer, Midgley developed methods to get rid of annoying engine knock in cars and produce safe refrigerators.
Oops: Remember that elimination of engine knock? Midgley did it by adding tetra-ethyl lead (TEL) to the gasoline. Lead, may we remind you, is dangerously toxic, especially to the neurological system; Midgley's cheaply-produced TEL was being legally emitted via car exhaust all over the world until 1986, contaminating the air and sickening or killing dozens of production workers.
His one man war on air not quite over, Midgley turned his hand to fridges. While early refrigerants were highly dangerous, he invented a gas that was stable, non-flammable, non-corrosive, safe to breathe and able to double as a propellant in common household objects such as spray cans and inhalers. It's called Freon.
Freon, to put it bluntly, is the single worst invention of the 20th century.
That's because it has this regrettable side effect of destroying far more important ozone. One kilo of Freon tends to a) hang around for a whole century until it dissipates; b) devour 70,000 kilos of atmospheric ozonehence the hole in the ozone layer; and c) be 10,000 times more efficient at retaining heat than a kilo of carbon dioxide, itself no slouch in the greenhouse effect department. Oh yeah, and it took scientists 50 years to notice this was happening.
In other words, good old Midgley caused more pollution than any one person before or since. Lord only knows what would have come up with next if his last invention, a pulleys-and-wire contraption designed to maneuver his polio-stricken body in bed, had not exhibited the unfortunate side effect (sound familiar?) of strangling him.
We're guessing laxatives. Uranium-laced laxatives. Made out of puppies' hearts.
