Everything you come in contact with has its own story. Familiarity has drained some items of any interest. However, when looking at even the most mundane things, there is almost always something surreal.

Just because that item is banal doesn’t mean that its history is. The people behind even the most mundane things lived lives that were anything but. Here’s hoping these dark and disturbing backstories can bring some excitement to these commonplace things.

10 A Stagecoach Accident Created Movies And A Murder

In 1860, Eadweard Muybridge was traveling through Texas on a stagecoach. When it crashed, he and the other passengers were thrown out. After hitting his head, Muybridge suffered from double vision, sensory impairments, and confused thinking.

To recuperate, his doctor told him to take up a new hobby to recover. Muybridge decided to get into photography. With bold and deadly stunts, he earned a reputation as one of the most acclaimed photographers of the era.

His injuries grew worse. In 1874, he discovered that his wife, Flora Stone, was having an affair with a mutual friend. Muybridge shot the man at pointblank range, killing him instantly.

Unsure if his wife’s child was his own or that of her lover, Muybridge put his own kid up for adoption. People who knew Muybridge said that his eccentric behavior was caused by the crash. Though he plead insanity on the murder charge, he was acquitted on the grounds that murder was justified.^[1]

Muybridge’s exoneration was great news for Leland Stanford, the man who had raised money for Muybridge’s defense. The men’s relationship was about to change the world.

A prominent horse gambler, Stanford wanted to know if a horse in mid-trot takes all four feet off the ground. From rows of cameras placed along the track, the stills showed every motion of the horse. Replayed in sequence, the images came to life and revealed a momentary hold of all four legs off the ground. This little bet inspired the forerunner of the motion picture.

9 Slinky’s Inventor Abandoned His Wealth And Family To Join A Bolivian Cult

The Slinky’s origin is as whimsical as its iconic childhood status would suggest. In a happy accident, Richard James watched a spring walk down a pair of stairs. His children stood by laughing in delight.

Two years later, James showcased the newly debuted Slinky as the hot new Christmas gift of 1945. Despite its simplistic background, the Slinky has become one of the quintessential toys in American history for over 70 years.

Richard James did not have as amusing a story. The toy circuit was apparently a very scandalous place. Flushed with Slinky money, he became a serial adulterer. Remorseful for his affairs, James wanted to find religion again. He started sending his money to Episcopalian groups. His religious curiosity led him to join stricter and stricter faiths.^[2]

For a man who brought so much joy to children everywhere, James could not bring happiness to his own children. In 1960, James abandoned his six kids, who ranged from two to 18 years old. Richard James’s wife, Betty, had to raise their children on her own while James was busy sending all of Slinky’s profits to a religious cult in Bolivia.

None of James’s kids saw their father in the last 14 years of his life. The only communication was letters urging them to repent and join him in Bolivia. By shepherding the company in her husband’s absence, Betty personally saved the company from bankruptcy and let the toy entertain children to this day.

8 The Mathematician-Turned-Magician Behind The Decimal Point

John Napier was a paradox. Both a man of logic and superstition, he drove humanity forward by looking to the past. Perceived as consulting in the dark arts, Napier was an early mathematician who formulated the logarithm and invented the idea of a decimal point. All his advancements were grounded in his theological beliefs of the impending Apocalypse.

Reading the Book of Revelation, Napier calculated that the Apocalypse was set to occur in 1688 or 1700. Apparently, he allowed a little wiggle room for the end of the world.

Others in the community perceived Napier’s profound faith in Armageddon as evidence that he was a wizard. Convinced that the end times were imminent, Napier experimented with a proto death ray that harnessed and reflected the power of the Sun to burn ships.

His reputation was slandered, but his own eccentricities did not help. Napier would walk around in an all-black gown decorated with skulls. His ensemble was completed with a black pet rooster and black spider crawling on him. Never denying rumors about his ability to communicate with animals, he fostered beliefs that his rooster could read minds or that he (Napier) could control pigeons.

Speculative rumors led to his most daring exploit. Noted treasure hunter and pirate Robert Logan hired Napier to discover the buried treasure of Fast Castle.

Believing that Napier’s sorcery could easily locate the chest, Logan signed a contract to storm the castle. Little came of this exploit, which was good for Napier. Had he gone through with the heist, the notorious outlaw would have likely killed the genius, setting mathematics progress back for years.^[3]

7 The Toy Made By A Nazi Used To Fight Nazis

William Gruber was obsessed with mushrooms. He wanted the rest of the world to join him. In Gruber’s fantasy, people around the world would use his device to educate themselves on detailed depictions of flora and fauna. The world eventually grew to love his invention, but he never got to revel in the success. He was too busy being ostracized as a Nazi spy.

Raised in post–World War I Germany, Gruber was swept up in the Nazi fervor. Even after he moved to Oregon in 1924, he still proudly supported the burgeoning Nazi Party.

While photographing Oregon’s natural beauty, Gruber had a chance encounter with the honeymooning Harold Graves. Fascinated by Gruber’s bizarre technique of taking simultaneous photos with two different cameras to create a 3-D image, Graves thought that Gruber should make a machine to view these images up close. So they formed a partnership.

In 1939, Graves debuted their project at the New York World’s Fair. It was named the View-Master.

The outbreak of war later that year was not enough to shake Gruber’s Nazi allegiance. The FBI was worried about this vocal and prominent Nazi advocate with constant business connections with a German lens manufacturer, so they froze all of Gruber’s assets. Then the government banished him to Idaho.

Ironically, that same government was about to buy more than 10,000 View-Masters. Military servicemen used the reels as a necessary educational tool to quickly familiarize themselves with equipment or locations.

Returning to the product’s educational roots, Gruber’s last association with View-Master was a macabre project known as “A Stereoscopic Atlas of the Human Anatomy.” Instead of stills of beloved Disney characters, the reels were filled with dissected cadavers. However, Gruber had no control as the View-Master became an iconic symbol of baby boomer childhood instead of the educational tool he foresaw.^[4]

6 Milton Cooper Wrote Of Aliens And The Language Of Hip-Hop

Serving as an Army foot soldier in the Vietnam War, Milton William Cooper personally saw the government lie to the American public. And if you believe him, he also saw extraterrestrials. UFOlogists heralded Cooper as a government official turned whistle-blower. Others dismissed him as a plagiarist. No matter his credibility, Cooper was launched as a major figure in conspiracy circles.

In 1991, that culminated with Behold a Pale Horse. His book combines traditional conspiracy theories embedded with a new strain of paranoia. Subjects were as varied as the beliefs that the government created the AIDS virus and John F. Kennedy was assassinated because he was about to reveal the existence of aliens.

Readers have interpreted the meandering manifesto in multiple ways. Seeing the text as a call to violent insurrection, Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. A different type of explosion went off in Harlem. Stoking the already-present distrust of the government, Cooper’s theories help launch the ’90s artistic boom in hip-hop.

As an omnipresent force in Harlem, Behold a Pale Horse was simply called “The Book” by many readers. Influenced by Black Islam’s call to serve as “lyrical assassins,” many of the most consequential rappers of the ’90s got their start by referencing Cooper’s book.

Notable Rappers who sneaked in nods to Cooper include the Wu-Tang Clan, Big Daddy Kane, Busta Rhymes, Tupac Shakur, Nas, Rakim, Gang Starr, Public Enemy, Mobb Deep, and Jay-Z. Modern hip-hop traces its roots through Cooper’s text, even if he would not live long enough to see the results.

As of the 1990s, Cooper’s fears of government persecution were no longer just a theory. In 1998, he was charged with tax evasion. Two years later, a bloody altercation with his neighbor landed Cooper with an aggravated assault charge.

Labeled a “major fugitive,” United States Marshals arrived at Cooper’s house on November 5, 2001. Vowing to never be taken alive, Cooper shot an officer in the head. Prophetic until the end, Cooper was shot in the chest and died.^[5]

5 The Sex Doll By A Sex Addict Became A Childhood Staple

Despite being one of the most wholesome toys of all time, Barbie dolls have always been controversial. Many parents have worried that the doll’s unrealistic body figure is a bad role model for little girls’ body image.

Barbie’s exaggerated dimensions were meant to be sexualized from the beginning. While vacationing in Switzerland, inventor Ruth Handler found a Bild-Lilli doll. These dolls were pocket-size models of a namesake call girl from a German comic strip.

The Bild-Lilli dolls were risque trophies handed to women on dates for the men to make their intentions clear. Handler brought one of these dolls for her new business partner, Jack Ryan.

He was an odd fit for the toy world. Ryan initially set out to be a rocket designer. Using his engineering know-how, he modified the dolls with movable joints or individual fingers.

Unable to pay him an engineering fee, Handler arranged to give Ryan a small royalty for every toy sold. As Barbie took over, his contract made him extremely wealthy. He used that money to fund all types of bizarre purchases including his own fire engine and a castle surrounded by a moat.

Described by others as a “sex addict,” Ryan’s castle featured a sex dungeon covered in black fox fur. His insatiable sexual appetite was part of the reason that he married five times, including once to Zsa Zsa Gabor.^[6]

Sex was far from Ryan’s only vice. He also used copious amounts of alcohol and cocaine. In part due to his antics, Ryan was ousted from Mattel. This exile only exacerbated his already-debilitating cocaine addiction.

The cocaine took a mental and physical toll on his body. His drug use was a factor in a stroke that left him crippled. A few years later, he killed himself at age 64.

4 The Cult In The Kitchen

Considering the rest of his family, John Humphrey Noyes really stands apart. His father served in the US House of Representatives. His cousin was President Rutherford B. Hayes.

Apparently, the late 1800s would let it slide, but it might make the news today if the president’s cousin was running a religious sex cult. In his own small way, Noyes’s accomplishments affected daily life just as much as his cousin’s did.

In 1831, Noyes experienced a religious conversion. Citing a prophecy that the millennium would arrive within a generation of Jesus’s crucifixion, Noyes calculated that the Earth was redeemed in AD 70. All these generations later, Noyes was now free from sin.

His interpretation slowly gathered his own wave of followers. Together, the congregation of 250 formed a burgeoning community to recreate their own Heaven on Earth. Motivated by Jesus’s call to renounce Earthly possessions, the community shared everything.

Economic and physical possessions were divided among all the converts. This included romantic partners. All the men were married to all the women, and vice versa. Group sex was common and encouraged.

No longer comfortable with the unregulated sexual openness, Vermont authorities forced the organization out in 1847. In 1848, the group resettled in Oneida, New York.

Now dubbed the Oneida Perfectionists, the community had to find a way to fund themselves. They tried multiple activities including farming and sawmilling. The most successful was producing steel beaver traps for the Hudson’s Bay Company.

Following the collapse of the fur trade, the Oneida Perfectionists continued blacksmithing with a line of silverware. In 1881, the cult collapsed, but the silverware company survived. Today, Oneida Silverware is a mainstay of china cabinets everywhere.^[7]

3 Frederick Hoelzel Crapped Out A Masterpiece

Diet yogurts, McDonald’s hamburgers, and dairy products are but a fraction of the common foods containing cellulose flour. Food manufacturers add cellulose to cheapen the processing price.

With almost no vitamin value of its own, cellulose flour sates appetites without adding any extra calories. Dietitians may rue the invention now for its lack of healthy properties, but fellow nutritionist Frederick Hoelzel had other priorities on his mind when he discovered the product.

Everybody eats cellulose flour, but nobody should eat like Hoelzel. In the 1920s, he became a minor celebrity in Chicago for his remarkable stomach.

Ingesting inedible things like gravel, glass, feathers, ball bearings, and gold pellets, he recorded the amount of time they took to poop out. To put it mildly, it was a painful process. Self-sacrifice is admirable, but Hoelzel’s research had limited applicability.

Despite no one ever needing to know how long it takes to poop cotton, Hoelzel went ahead and tried. Probably a welcome relief from the gravel, he grew to love the taste of cotton-based surgical gauze. As a new favorite, the cellulose in the cotton got him interested in looking into further uses of the compound, eventually leading to the flour.^[8]

2 Eric Gill’s Fonts Are Good; Everything Else About Him Is Not

If one turns on BBC World News, brushes off an old VHS tape of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off or Toy Story, rides down the London Underground, shops at a Tommy Hilfiger, grabs a copy of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, or reads any Penguin Publishing classic, he would see Gill Sans font.

More celebrated for his sculpting abilities, Eric Gill turned that artistic sensibility into one of the most ubiquitous typefaces in the world. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, he was repeatedly acclaimed as one the best artists of his generation. Upon his death, Gill’s diaries revealed jarring accounts of his private life that complicate the question of delineating the art and the artist.

Gill’s sexual improprieties were rooted in his Catholicism and deep shame of his sin. If he felt sinful, he never atoned. Instead, he lived a life of increasingly amoral actions.

Gill’s sins started early with lifelong incestuous affairs with his two sisters. The affairs only ended when one of his sisters died. Modeling one of his statues after what his sister looked like while they were having sex, the affair is inseparable from his sculptures. (There is some question about whether he had an incestuous relationship with one or both sisters.)

However, Gill’s incest did not end with his sisters. When two of his three daughters were still children, he raped them. In diary entries, he relished the disgusting deeds by graphically describing his own children’s anatomy.

No diary entry highlights the extent of Gill’s depravity more than the ones mentioning his love of fellating his dogs. With all the incest, rape, pedophilia, and bestiality, maybe Toy Story should choose a different logo.^[9]

1 W.C. Minor’s Life Cannot Be Defined

It is hard to know where W.C. Minor’s name should appear in the dictionary. His heavily bearded face could appear next to words as varied as “genius,” “dedicated,” “murderer,” or “insane.” Whichever word you choose, Minor’s work certainly played his role in history.

A Yale graduate turned Union surgeon in the Civil War, Minor was poised to do great things. Watching the contorted bodies burn in the Battle of the Wilderness changed all of that.

With the forest in flames, Minor burned a deserter himself with a scalding hot “D.” The Irish ancestry of the branded deserter damaged Minor in turn. Haunted with new psychological apparitions of the Irish nationalist group the Fenian Brotherhood, Minor’s mind degraded.

His mental unrest first manifested itself with a more acceptable vice—sex. Living in the red-light district of his town, Minor visited brothels almost daily. Decades later, he could no longer control his urges. Now wanting to have sex with young boys, Minor chopped off his penis. He used the exact knife that was about to cut out definitions in ancient manuscripts.

Instead of seeking treatment, Minor tried to murder his hallucinations. George Merrett was sadly caught in the crosshairs. A bullet that Minor intended for his Irish specters accidentally hit local businessman Merrett. Seven weeks later, Minor was found not guilty by reason of insanity.

Institutionalized in the Broadmoor asylum, he reached out to the widowed Eliza Merrett. Their relationship grew. Each week, the two would exchange their favorite books. Buried inside one of the books was a pamphlet mentioning that the Oxford English Dictionary was looking for volunteers.

Thanks to Merrett’s contributions, Minor had a collection of thousands of books. Scouring the texts, he found the etymological roots for hundreds of words. His contributions to the dictionary were incalculable.

In the preface of the fifth volume of the Oxford English Dictionary, the publisher thanked Minor for enhancing “our illustration of the literary history of individual words, phrases, and constructions . . . so enormous have been Dr. Minor’s contributions during the past 17 or 18 years that we could easily illustrate the last four centuries from his quotations alone.”^[10]

If you liked the article, you can email the author at [email protected]. You can follow the author on Twitter. Feel free to read any of the other articles they have written.

Known as the human form of mad cow disease, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) is an incredibly rare yet terrifying illness. Scientists currently do not know as much as they would like to about this condition.

But what they have discovered is fascinating and has led to increased health regulations for cattle meat production. For example, the US Department of Agriculture requires that all materials from the spinal cord and brain be eliminated from high-risk cattle. These products are not permitted in the US food supply.

Nevertheless, the facts about the human version of mad cow disease are truly horrifying.

10 It Is A Prion Disease

Prion diseases (aka transmissible spongiform encephalopathies) are rare forms of brain disorders which alter the structure of a patient’s brain and can be transmitted from one organism to another. Prion diseases can be found in both humans and animals, and vCJD is one of the deadliest human forms of prion disease.

All humans have prion proteins in our brains, but the normal function of these proteins is not yet fully understood by scientists. In vCJD, these normal prion proteins are affected by a diseased prion that is transmitted into the victim.

The infected prion will attach itself to the victim’s prion proteins and bend them into an abnormal shape. These newly infected prions will destroy brain cells and create gaps in brain tissue that cause the brain to resemble a sponge. As more prion proteins become infected, the victim will experience brain damage and other psychiatric symptoms.^[1]

9 It Is Transferred Directly From Cows

The way in which humans obtain the abnormal prion that causes vCJD is almost always from eating the meat of a cow with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (aka mad cow disease or BSE). Mad cow disease is similar to vCJD because BSE is caused by an abnormal prion being transferred to the cattle.

It is not clear how mad cow began, but it is believed that it started with a cow consuming cattle feed that contained the meat of a sheep infected with scrapie (another prion disease). Scientists agree that mad cow originally spread in the UK when the meat of infected cattle was fed to young calves. Researchers have confirmed the relationship between these two diseases since the first cases of vCJD were reported in the UK, the same place where mad cow began.

UK citizens were most likely to be exposed to infected meat between 1984–86, and the first reported cases of vCJD were between 1994–96. This makes sense because the average incubation period of the diseased prion in both cows and humans is about 10 years.^[2]

In some rare cases, a person has contracted vCJD from getting a blood transfusion from someone who has vCJD. But it is far more often caused by the meat of cattle infected with mad cow disease.

8 It Is A Form of A Larger Disease

vCJD is only one form of the more general disease known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), which is defined as a disease caused by an infectious transferable prion. CJD is narrowed down into four specific diseases as each one has the prion being transferred to the human a different way. One of these specific forms of CJD is vCJD, and the other three forms are the same except for the way the prion is passed to the victim.

Sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (sCJD) is the most common form of CJD, but it is also the most mysterious. In sCJD, one of the normal prion proteins in the victim’s brain changes spontaneously into an infected one. Scientists do not fully understand the cause of sCJD, but they believe it is more common in people with a specific version of the prion protein gene.

The third form is familial CJD, which is caused when a child inherits a gene abnormality that produces misshapen proteins. The symptoms of this disease usually do not begin until age 50, so parents with the mutated gene may not know they have it when they choose to start a family.

The last form of CJD is called iatrogenic CJD, and it is incredibly rare. This form transfers the diseased prion when a medical instrument that was used on someone with vCJD is not properly cleaned and is then used on another person.^[3]

With all four of these terrifying diseases under the umbrella of CJD, many scientists have called Creutzfeldt-Jakob one of the most devastating brain disorders in existence.

7 It Created Another Disease

Kuru is another terrifying prion disease that spread through the tribal areas of Papua New Guinea. The disease was found in tribes that practiced a form of cannibalism where they ate the brains of their dead relatives as a mark of respect.

The tribes stopped this practice in the early 1960s, but cases of kuru continued because the disease has a long incubation period (at least 10 years). Interestingly, what happens in the brain of a person with kuru is similar to that of someone with vCJD as it causes a similar misshaped prion to begin infecting the brain’s proteins.

Scientists conducted research to determine why cannibalism caused a prion abnormality and came to a shocking hypothesis: Kuru originated from tribe members eating the brain of a person with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. Scientists confirmed this theory by comparing kuru prions with prions in all four forms of CJD and concluded that kuru prions have transmission properties very similar to those in CJD.

This means that a deceased member of a tribe in Papua New Guinea had CJD and nobody knew it. So they ate his brain and created a new form of prion disease. Scientists have not yet figured out what form of CJD the diseased tribe member had, but there is a high chance that it was vCJD.^[4]

This is because there is an abundance of cattle in Papua New Guinea with very few health regulations or guidelines, which could have led to tribes consuming mad cow–infected cattle.

6 There Are No Viable Treatment Options

Unfortunately, there is no known cure for vCJD. A victim of this disease will sadly only survive an average of 13 months from the time of his first symptoms. Many drugs, such as amantadine and pentosan polysulphate, have been tested on vCJD victims, but none have proven to consistently help.

However, these medications have helped individual victims of this disease. In one reported case, a 22-year-old vCJD victim was treated with pentosan polysulphate (a drug meant to slow down the destruction of brain cells) and survived for 51 months after his first symptoms.

This is much higher than the 13-month average survival period, which means that this solution could work for more victims with further research. Currently, though, treatment is focused on keeping the patient comfortable and alleviating the symptoms of vCJD.^[5]

5 It Causes Awful Psychiatric Symptoms

The symptoms of vCJD are mostly the same as the symptoms of the other forms of CJD. This happens because the abnormal prion is the same in every form, and the only difference among the forms is how they are transmitted.

As this diseased vCJD prion destroys the cells of a patient’s brain, it causes many symptoms related to the nervous system. First, a patient will experience problems with muscle coordination, such as involuntary muscle jerking and spasms.

As the brain deteriorates, the victim can experience numerous symptoms, such as hallucinations, forgetfulness, and, in some cases, blindness. Within a year after the first symptoms begin, the patient will lose the ability to talk or move and will enter a coma. Many patients contract pneumonia or other infections while in this coma, and that is usually what kills them.

Although these symptoms are similar to the other forms of CJD, vCJD is different because it affects younger people. The average age of a vCJD victim is 28 years, while sporadic and inherited CJD affect mainly middle-aged and elderly people.^[6]

4 A Diagnosis Can Only Be Confirmed After Death

As vCJD is such a rare disease, it can be challenging for doctors to officially diagnose a person with it. If a doctor suspects that a patient has a form of CJD, the first step is to run standard tests to make sure that the patient does not have a more common mental disorder. These tests include spinal taps and MRI scans, which may detect the type of abnormality that is common in CJD.

However, the only way to confirm that a patient has a form of CJD is a brain biopsy or autopsy. Although a biopsy is conducted while the patient is still alive, it is not recommended for CJD victims because it can be dangerous and does not always get brain tissue from the patient’s affected brain cells.

Unless a person with CJD wants to take the risk of getting a biopsy, doctors can only confirm a CJD diagnosis by examining the patient’s whole brain in an autopsy after his death. Luckily, scientists are trying to change this by creating new tests that could help diagnose CJD.

For example, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has developed a test that looks for a specific protein in the brain that causes neural degeneration. They do this by examining the spinal fluid of a patient. With further research, this test could lead to a way to confirm a CJD diagnosis before death.^[7]

3 It Is Extremely Rare

Worldwide, CJD will affect around three people out of every million. This already classifies it as an extremely rare disease, but this is just CJD as a whole. vCJD makes up less than 20 percent of CJD cases, and there have been only 231 cases of vCJD reported since it was first identified in 1996.

Out of the 231 known cases, 178 of them are from the UK, which makes sense because that is where mad cow disease emerged in cattle. In the US, there have been only four documented cases of vCJD. In two of these four US cases, the mad cow disease prion was transmitted to them when they were traveling in the UK.

In three out of the 231 reported cases, the vCJD infected prion was transmitted to a person through blood transfusion. This means that 1.3 percent of all known vCJD cases were not actually caused by eating diseased cattle but were transmitted by a person who already had vCJD. Scientists consider this a rare combination of vCJD and iatrogenic CJD and now encourage people with all forms of CJD to avoid donating blood.^[8]

2 It Has Spread Worldwide

Despite being such an uncommon disease, vCJD has spread beyond the UK over the past few decades. We already know that 178 of the confirmed vCJD cases come from the UK and four come from the US. But the remaining 49 come from 10 different countries.

In order from most cases to fewest (as of 2017), there have been 27 cases from France, five from Spain, four from Ireland, three each from the Netherlands and Italy, two each from Portugal and Canada, and one each from Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan.

Although the UK has the vast majority of cases, this may not be true for long. vCJD cases in the UK peaked in 1999 and have been declining since then. But the opposite seems to be happening in other countries.

Despite the UK having far more reported cases of vCJD, Portugal has recently had a higher rate of vCJD cases compared to their number of mad cow–infected cows. This means that Portugal had a higher number of diseased cattle getting in their food supply and infecting humans, so Portugal could eventually have more confirmed cases than the UK if the UK’s infection rate continues to decline.^[9]

1 Awareness Is Increasing

Luckily, many steps have been taken in the US and UK to prevent vCJD from spreading. For example, strict guidelines have been put in place to stop the meat from cattle with mad cow disease from entering the human food supply. These new guidelines include banning certain animal feed as well as BSE testing for all cattle over 30 months old. (Mad cow disease is rare in cattle under 30 months old).

In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has taken many steps to monitor the spread of this disease. They review all CJD cases in the US and analyze them to try to find patterns that could help scientists create new treatments.

In 1997, the CDC created the National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center which conducts advanced tests, including brain autopsies, for prion diseases. Although vCJD and the other forms of CJD have not been eradicated, these steps by scientists and doctors have helped to limit its effects.^[10]

J.J Grover enjoys writing lists, playing mahjong, and eating waffles.

The line between crazy and genius is thin, and in science, many examples of people blurring that line exist. While scientists start their experiments hoping to make striking discoveries, they can go downright apish when they don’t make a discovery. Some sacrifice their subjects while others borderline torture their volunteers. This list presents ten mad scientists in history, detailing the ambitious pursuits that led to their fame or infamy.

Related: 10 Crazy Scientific Theories That Used To Be Accepted As True

10 Paracelsus (1493–1541)

Ever wondered how you could create a man? Paracelsus was a botanist who thought there was a teeny-tiny yet fully formed human inside every sperm. He even had a 40-day recipe to prove his idea, complete with instructions to make this venture successful.

While the idea sounds preposterous in a world that has made immense discoveries in biology, Paracelsus’s idea was not as strange in his time. As a scientist from the 16th century, Paracelsus advanced the theory of preformation—which believed that organisms grew from small versions of themselves. In his instructions on creating life, Paracelsus even described how the sperm held the key to life. For the scientist, a creator only required the right incubation to develop a new human.

If you’re keen on trying out Paracelsus’s 40-day recipe on how to build a human, you’ll need a warm incubation device and human blood. But if you succeed, you’ll be the first because even Paracelsus couldn’t pull it off.

9 Josef Mengele (1911–1979)

War is tough, but what’s harder is what it reveals about the human condition: inhumanity. Joseph Mengele was a brilliant scientist whose power and influence during the Nazi era earned him an infamous reputation as the “Angel of Death.”

As a scientist assigned to the Auschwitz camps during the Second World War, Mengele performed bizarre experiments with human subjects. Some core interests of the mad scientist bordered on examining connections between twins, eye pigmentation, and persons with disabilities. The insane reality of his experiments is that he forcefully used live prisoners as guinea pigs for his experiments.

Modern scientists are horrified by the lengths that Josef Mengele went to as he attempted to study human biology. Sadly, after all his trials, they didn’t amount to anything besides shedding light on the horrors of Hitler’s reign.

8 Giovanni Aldini (1762–1834)

As far as celebrity scientists go, Giovanni Aldini was a rockstar with global fame. At a time when electricity was still a new invention, Aldini traveled across Europe with the sole purpose of electrifying subjects. This may sound horrific, and it was, but it was all in pursuit of science.

In his travels, Aldini became an entertainer who gave audiences the rare spectacle of witnessing what happens when corpses are electrocuted. In a demonstration, Aldini would attach electric nodes to observe how the body reacts. When attached to a human or ox head, the facial muscles would contort, teeth would chatter, and even eye sockets would pop out. Where the body was involved, the limbs and parts moved in motion, giving the impression that the organism was suffering or reanimating.

Yet, besides his antics, Aldini was one of the few scientists who managed to cure mentally ill patients with shocks to the brain. His curious and interesting experiments indicated the power of electricity in science.

7 William Buckland (1784–1856)

William Buckland is as mad a scientist as they come. On the one hand, he was the brilliant scientist who walked beside Charles Darwin and was the first man to describe the fossilized dinosaur, the Megalosaurus. For the English intelli-vore, science had so much to teach, and he was willing to learn and, at other times, taste it. Yes, he’s also famous as the man who could eat anything.

Besides his active pursuit of science, Buckland scoops the award for the man with a diverse palate, devouring anything from puppy, panther, and kangaroo and to sea slugs. According to his records, the most unpalatable things he ever tasted were the mole and bluebottle fly that wouldn’t just sit right with his taste buds. But, while eating every being that walks on Earth is impressive, Buckland didn’t stop there.

One famous story about Buckland is that he was once a guest at a fancy dinner where the mummified heart of Louis XI was on display. As a piece of the precious relic was passed for the guests to observe, Buckland decided to add it to his long list of culinary accomplishments. He became the mad scientist that ate the heart of a king. This is not a bragging point most scientists can claim. Nor one I would want to add to my resume.

6 Sidney Gottlieb (1918–1999)

Sidney Gottlieb is a mad scientist, by all accounts, one responsible for the CIA’s quest for mind control. As a chemist for the USA’s CIA, Gottlieb participated in some of the darkest experiments in recent history. In the 1950s and ’60s, Gottlieb was the mind behind MKUltra—a mind control program.

Some of Gottlieb’s most infamous experiments involved the use of cocaine, THC, heroin, and LSD. Gottlieb’s ruse for continuing his projects was the justification that it would help in the discovery of truth serum. However, despite all his pursuits, the LSD and other components didn’t aid interrogations but instead hindered them.

Gottlieb’s work on Project MKUltra is frowned upon, mostly because the scientist experimented on both knowing and unknowing Americans. As far as mad scientists with unquenchable power go, Gottlieb is one of the maddest.

5 Carney Landis (1897–1962)

Carney Landis was a psychology graduate at the University of Minnesota who decided to study human emotions. In his experiment, Landis hoped to spot commonalities between human reactions to various triggers.

What made Landis a mad scientist, and what led many to call him an unethical psychologist, was how he executed his experiment. In the experiment, Landis took pictures of his fellow students as they performed various acts; the more bizarre, the better. Some activities included smelling ammonia and sticking hands in buckets filled with the slimiest frogs and electric shock wires. While these instances are weird, they’re still tolerable.

The act that sent everyone through the roof was the forced decapitation of a live rat. Participants that refused to do it on their own were still captured watching Landis do it himself as he recorded their reactions. Almost all participants experienced trauma and confusion after the experiments, whose outcomes were not as convincing. The only saving grace in this story is that Landis never massacred another rodent as he went along to practice sexual psychopathology.

4 Johann Conrad Dippel (1673–1734)

Johann Conrad Dippel was your everyday scientist back when alchemy was the thing. Alchemists were practically scientists who dedicated their lives to discovering elixirs by manipulating all kinds of metals. Like his peers, Dippel was a notorious resident of Castle Frankenstein, a hilltop castle that was the stuff of myth and legend.

As the official alchemist at Castle Frankenstein, Dippel experimented with everything. The most peculiar ingredients for his elixirs included leather, ivory, blood, and horns stripped from human cadavers. While the authenticity of his elixirs was never confirmed, Dippel claimed to have found a one-all cure for all ails, from epilepsy to common colds.

But when he wasn’t solving society’s ills, the scientist was obsessed with soul transplants. Yes, corpses and grave robbers were involved. All is fair in love and science, right? Dippel had the brilliant idea that one could transfer a soul from one corpse to another using lubricant, a hose, and a funnel! Naturally, Dippel’s pursuits inspired the Frankenstein monster stories, but that’s a tale for another day.

3 Jose Delgado (1915–2011)

Jose Manuel Delgado is one of the most brilliant scientists in recent history. Before Delgado, many before him had toyed with the idea that electricity could manipulate the brain. Identifying the promise in the idea, Delgado took it to the next level, successfully controlling animals and humans with electrodes.

In what seems like a product of science fiction minds, Delgado successfully developed technologies that manipulated the mind electrically using a brain chip. Like the movies, Delgado stimulated the neural tissues of monkeys, controlling them with nothing but remote control. Gradually, the mad scientist perfected the technology and used it on a bull. The experiment was incredible since he was able to stop the bull right before it charged straight for him!

The experiments were so advanced that at least 20 humans were involved in his experiments. Envisioning the success of his technology, Delgado even bragged that generals and their armies would soon be controlled remotely through electric brain stimulation. He was truly ahead of his time, or maybe that’s just the electrode implants speaking.

2 Robert Knox (1791–1862)

Anatomy was one of the most prestigious pursuits for scientists of the 19th century. In this market, Robert Knox was a legend, a true pioneer of comparative anatomy who also doubled as a lecturer. Sadly, like all mad scientists, Knox went to some depths that destroyed his stellar reputation.

Since anatomy requires one major component, bodies, Knox relied on two suppliers. At the time, demand outweighed supply, and the two gentlemen, Burke and Hare, resorted to killing people and supplying them to Knox. Gradually, the law caught up with the gentlemen after their exploits were too successful. Investigations revealed that they were responsible for a 16-person killing spree where Knox was indirectly implicated alongside the crooked body snatchers.

The accepted “ask no question” practice toward cadavers bit Knox, whose reputation took a huge hit. The incident was so grand that from the media frenzy, the authorities came up with the Anatomy Act of 1832. The pursuit of cadavers truly killed Robert Knox’s career.

1 Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov (1870–1932)

In science, there’s nothing like too far, and Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov subscribed to this creed. Ivanov created the strangest and creepiest hybrids as a Russian specialist in interspecific hybridization and artificial insemination. To carry out his unholy experiments, Ivanov even traveled to Guinea, West Africa, where he hoped to cross-breed humans and apes.

When Russia sought worldwide dominion, the state saw Ivanov’s experiments as key to discovering super-strong hairy warriors. Backed with financial and political support, Ivanov set out on the secret mission that collapsed soon after. Fortunately, Ivanov found it impossible to create a hybrid between humans and our ape relatives.

Yet, despite the failures of his ape-human project, Ivanov was successful in other ventures. He created a zeedonk (zebra-donkey hybrid), a zubron (bison-cow hybrid), a guinea-pig rabbit, an antelope-cow, and even a mouse-rat. These bizarre incarnations made him a legend within scientific circles, but he never could overcome the negative publicity from the ape-human trials. As far as experiments go, we’re sure glad some failed.

So it’s the beginning of a new year, you’ve spent the past month so stressed out that you forgot what exercise even is. And your least favorite coworker came back from vacation looking hotter and healthier than ever. Some people might respond to this with so much urgency that they overdo it after one gym session and never go back. Or they might try out a fad diet and make themselves sick just a few weeks after the holidays.

But you’re not like them; you think things through before making commitments. You do your research. Here are 10 myths about exercising that will make you mad—and all the information you need to make sure you don’t fall victim to them…again.

10 Myth: Sweating Out a Cold

Whether it’s a quick HIIT or 10 minutes in the sauna, “sweating out” a cold is something that just doesn’t work. There are a few components to this myth that make it so believable. The first is the idea that toxins exit the body through our sweat, which is completely false. Sweat is entirely comprised of water, salt, and fat. Toxins are filtered through the kidneys and liver and will definitely not come oozing out of our sweat glands no matter how hard we try to make it work.

“Stop trying to make sweating out a cold happen!” *cue Regina George voice*.

Another part of the “sweating out a cold” myth is the misconception that we “feel better” after a workout. While it’s true that exercise can release endorphins, which might boost our mood, there isn’t anything curative about working out while you’re sick. In fact, our immune systems are actually weakened for 24 hours following high-intensity workouts.

9 Myth: Getting “Toned” Muscles

The myth of “toned” muscles is one that needs to die in the new year. To make things very clear, when we do strength training of any kind, we are building muscle. The concept of having lean or “toned” muscles is a marketing ploy.

According to Insider, Rachel Hosie describes this myth as one targeted specifically at women to increase female gym users. She adds, “There are so many workouts and exercises that are branded as ‘toning,’ particularly those targeted [at] women. And it makes my blood boil because it’s misinformation that preys on women’s insecurities.” Beauty standards expect women to be lean, and when the fitness industry decided it wanted to target women at a higher rate, it created the myth that women should have “toned” muscles.

This narrative suggests that women ought to lose fat and gain muscle, somehow all without getting “too muscular.” It creates a rather vicious cycle that keeps women insecure about their bodies while having them invest more time and money into the health and wellness industry.

8 Myth: Exercise Makes Back Pain Worse

While it’s true that a workout feels like the last thing you’d want to do when you’re experiencing back pain, the idea that back pain is made worse by exercise is false. Specialists at the Mayo Clinic note that movement is what our body needs to recover from back injuries and muscle soreness. That means that bed rest and avoidance of exercise might actually be having the opposite effect on your recovery. Sorry, not sorry!

7 Myth: Targeted Fat Loss

Targeted fat loss is another exercise myth that needs to disappear in 2022. I mean it. Ab workouts won’t target tummy fat, an extra hard leg day won’t give you a “thigh gap,” and no device you buy online will cure you of “tech neck.” Let’s debunk this myth in detail, though, because it’s one that a lot of advertisers and fitness “experts” use to get people to spend money on programs they won’t see results with.

First of all, body fat is measured as an overall percentage of fat within the body. Certain parts of our bodies might have more fat than others, but the way our bodies distribute fat is out of our control. This means that when we gain fat, our bodies place it wherever it feels like we need excess fat, and when we burn fat, it comes from where our bodies have stored that excess fat.

When an exercise or workout routine claims to target fat in a specific area, what it really means is that it targets the muscle groups in that specific area. We can build muscle in specific areas and muscle groups, but we can’t burn fat in specific areas.

6 Myth: Turning Fat into Muscle

So, the main problem with the myth that individuals can turn fat into muscle is that muscle and fat are completely different substances.

An article for the Cleveland Clinic describes muscles as soft tissues made up of “many stretchy fibers.” The muscles that are visible when we look in the mirror are known as our skeletal muscles, and they, along with tendons and ligaments, hold up the weight of the bones, organs, and tissue that make up the body.

Fat, on the other hand, is something that our bodies store under the skin and around our organs. Excess fat might show up in areas we’d rather have visible muscles (like our abdomen, for example), so it’s easy for people to claim that when you burn fat in a specific area and gain muscle, that the fat turns into muscle.

But the reality is that two different processes are occurring. The first is that you are building muscles, and the second is that you are burning fat.

5 Myth: Fat Loss = Weight Loss

Something that so many people are confused about is the difference between weight loss and fat loss. In this YouTube video, Dr. Rohini Somnath Patil explains that weight loss (as seen on the dreaded scale) has multiple influencing factors and that it’s not the same thing as fat loss.

Our weight as humans is influenced by our muscle mass, water weight, fat, and even poop. A lot of the time, people will make really significant changes to their diets and exercise routines but not notice any weight loss. This can be so discouraging because it seems like no progress is being made.

When you start working out regularly, you start building muscle. Muscle has weight to it! Dr. Somnath Patil recommends using your measurement changes as a way to gauge progress instead of your weight because fat loss is far more telling of lifestyle changes and improved health than weight loss is.

4 Myth: Cardio Is All You Need

The myth that all you need is cardio is pretty antiquated, but I still hear it time and time again. People swear by running, but modern research tells us that a combination of cardio and strength training is the key to an overall improvement of physical health.

According to Dr. Mike, incorporating strength and resistance training into your exercise routine can improve your metabolic rate, your bone density, your hormonal profile, and even your sleep quality. Not to mention, strength and resistance training can be done from the comfort of your own home really easily.

3 Myth: No Pain, No Gain

No pain, no gain, you say? How about less pain, more likely to continue your fitness journey long term. The notion that a good workout is defined by how sore you are afterward is not only false, but it holds people back from realizing their exercise and fitness goals. Being overly sore after a workout leaves your body more vulnerable to injury.

So—and I cannot stress this enough if your new year’s resolution is to hit the gym—don’t hit it too hard.

2 Myth: Tracking Numbers is Everything

Counting calories consumed, calories burned, steps in a day, and so on can be helpful to some people. And it can be absolutely detrimental to others. At the end of the day, personal progress and health can’t be measured by a collection of numbers.

Do you have more energy? Are you enjoying yourself? Is your exercise routine fitting in with your regular schedule? Have the changes you’ve made helped to improve your overall quality of life? Do you like the way you look? Are you feeling stronger?

These are the kinds of questions you can ask yourself instead of fixating on numbers that mean something different to everyone anyway.

1 Myth: Bigger Is Better

The final myth I want to bust wide open is the one that says bigger muscles are stronger. While some people might prefer larger muscles for aesthetic reasons, bigger, bulkier muscles don’t necessarily lift heavier weights.

Differences in muscle length and limb length can impact the size of someone’s muscles, making it more difficult to increase their muscle size. Genetic differences between individuals will also impact someone’s ability to build larger muscles, but that doesn’t say anything about their actual strength or ability to lift heavy weights. Essentially, you don’t have to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger to be the strongest guy in the room.