“Science is not for the meek and mild,” Michael Brooks writes in this entertaining new book. “It is red in tooth and claw; its very ideas and breakthroughs are subject to the law of the survival of the fittest. Good scientists must strive to overthrow, undermine and destroy their colleagues’ reputations.”

The “radicals” of his title are scientists with an unwavering belief in the truth of their ideas and no compunction about breaking the rules to prove it. They fight, they try to block colleagues’ progress, they commit fraud, they deceive and manipulate others.

And, more than occasionally, they rely on illicit substances and fever dreams. Kary Mullis, who won the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for creating the polymerase chain reaction, credited his breakthrough to regular use of hallucinogenic drugs. Nikola Tesla had to be shaken out of a catatonic state after he saw a vision in the setting sun that inspired the first self-starting alternating-current motor.

Then there is self-experimentation that no medical review board would approve if it were done on others. The Australian physician Barry Marshall discovered the cause of many gastric problems, including ulcers, and drank the suspected bacteria “in a cloudy, brown, bug-nourishing broth” in an effort to prove it. Three days later he began to feel strangely bloated; five days later he was vomiting and his breath smelled putrid. Finally and luckily, his own immune system dealt with the infection. He won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005.