Jack Parson (John Whiteside Parsons) was a researcher on rocket propulsion at the prestigious California Institute of Technology. He also has the rare distinction of being the associate founder of the well-known Jet Propulsion Laboratory. However, he has a crazy side to him as he happened to be a true dabbler in the occult.

However, Parson didn't keep his passion for himself. He got some creepy tattoos and conducted orgies occasionally with a line of black candles burning around him in a circle. He followed Thelema a kind of spiritual philosophy governing human life espoused by a person called Aleister Crowley and was the latter's sardent student and even leading a secret occult organization located in California.

As time passed he began to invoke the Greek mythological deity Pan before every rocket was tested as he believed that the half-man half-goat god was characterized by high aptitude in technology.

To thicken the plot, the notorious and publically disgraced Ron Hubbard was Parson's "magical" friend. Together they engaged in a ceremony named Babalon to summon a live goddess, but without success. Soon Hubbard cheated Parsons of a huge sum of cash to publish Dianetics, the bible of the movement called Scientology. Parsons died before he could see the advent of Scientology, as he was killed in a violent blast of unstable chemicals that lay around in his lab.

An American psychologist named Harry Harlow wanted to find out what is love and to that end, he chose the very strong bond between mother and child. This led him to study babies of rhesus monkeys as well as their mothers, to discover the dynamics of the great emotion, a truly noble effort.

Now, what was this scientist's madness? Harlow equipped his lab with various instruments of torture one of which he chose to call the Rape Rack. Actually, this is a machine that helped in forced mating of monkeys. Ironically, he came to the conclusion that the best way to study the true nature of love was by means of torturing monkeys. He also had another contraption that he used in his experiments; the Iron Maiden.

However, Harlow's most contentious experiment was done using a device that he lovingly called the pit of despair. He placed an infant monkey in a narrow isolated cavity for a year, lacking contact with any other creature, which resulted in the little animals turning psychotic, without any hope of recovery. In this way, he discovered what love is. So in his own words, love means the opposite of the emotion people feel when they have been locked up in a small dark chamber without company for a year.





3. Sidney Gottlieb: The Toxic Scientist

Sidney Gottlieb was a psychiatrist serving the US Army. He had a doctorate in Chemistry from the prestigious California Institute of Technology. He served the CIA at the time of the Cold War, making use of his considerable knowledge in biochemistry to help the US to be one step ahead of the malevolent Russians.

The Madness:

Ironically, Gottlieb used his scientific expertise to amounted to what he called "poison everyone." For instance, it was he who suggested that Fidel Castro's shoes should be soaked with the chemical thallium to make his beard lose all the hair as if the Cuban dictator's beard was what gave him so much power. He also came with the idea of doing away with Castro by poisoning his cigar, fountain pen and wetsuit. Unfortunately, his later 'poisonous' ideas were discarded by the CIA.

In order to show that he had more than mere poisons up his sleeve, he tried to prove he wasn't just a one-note guy, Gottlieb, later on, tried to eliminate the Congolese prime minister and a general from Iraq using neurotoxins which are unlike poison.

Mind Control and LSD:

While he was the director of MKULTRA, a project designed to study ways to control minds with LSD. When the CIA asked him to show if the drug could break the minds of men during the process of interrogation, he with fellow researchers went on a crazy acid trip for the sake of science. Soon he wanted to try his experiment on a lot of people without telling them. Soon Gottlieb was going around his country, sneakily adding LSD in the drinks of people and monitor the effects. In fact, he used junkies and sex workers for these studies because none would believe them if they complained about this mad scientist who randomly drugged US citizens.

4. Giovanni Aldini: Electrocution Man

Giovanni Aldini, the nephew of Luigi Galvani, the father of galvanism, loves to connect things to batteries. For most of his life, he was working on the medical possibilities of galvanism. The Austrian emperor awarded him the Knight of the Iron Crown, in recognition of his services to the cause of science.

Aldini's Craze