Random Scientists Who Accidentally Paid for Their Research with Their Lives (14 items)

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  (#10) Jack Parsons Made Rockets and May Have Blown Himself Up

  Jack Parsons was probably one of the coolest scientists that ever walked the face of the Earth. Not only was he literally a rocket scientist, but he also helped create special effects in films, and he was a follower of Aleister Crowley, who hung out with L. Ron Hubbard. Parsons was uneducated, but when it came to making rockets he was described as having "an uninhibited and fruitful imagination" and kept his partners, "focused toward building actual rocket engines, not just solving equations on paper."

  Unfortunately, Parsons was all over the place politically and wary about working for the US government (which he never technically did). He kicked around Mexico for a while (where he established an explosives factory for the Mexican government), was investigated by the FBI, and then in 1952 while working on a rush order for some explosives on a movie set, he accidentally blew himself up. Some people speculate that it was suicide, others believe that he was actually murdered by Howard Hughes, but the good money rests on the fact that he was probably high as a kite while he was making explosives. 
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  (#2) Alexander Bogdanov

  • Dec. at 55 (1873-1928)

  Alexander Bogdanov was a fascinating human being. He was a close friend of Vladimir Lenin, a science fiction author, a poet, and a doctor who was obsessed with hematology. One of Bogdanov's theories was that he could become immortal through blood transfusions - which is definitely not a thing, but in the 1920s you had to learn that the hard way. Bogdanov gave himself transfusion after transfusion, claiming that each one made him feel better than the last. Unfortunately, he swapped blood with a student who was suffering from malaria and died. 
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  (#12) Vera Yevstafievna Popova Studied Chemistry and Blew Herself Up

  Vera Popova led an incredibly interesting life as one of the first female chemists in Russia. And she was also the first Russian female author of a chemistry book. After being educated in Switzerland, she returned to her home country where she began researching stereochemistry, the work habits of bees, and published short fiction. In 1896, while attempting to synthesize H-C≡P (methylidynephosphane), a chemical similar to hydrogen cyanide, her lab exploded, killing her instantly. The chemical compound she was trying to create, H-C≡P, would not be successfully created until 1961. 
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  (#9) John Isaiah Northrop

  Northrop was kind of like Doctor Doolittle, minus all of the talking to animals. He was a zoologist who specifically studied marine invertebrates in Eastport, ME, and Grand Manan in the Bahamas. Unfortunately most of his work was published posthumously in the book A Naturalist in the Bahamas, which was released in 1910. Only two weeks before his son was to be born in Yonkers, NY, a freak accident at the zoology museum in the Columbia School of Mines caused an explosion and fire that claimed Northrop's life. His wife would go on to work closely with Columbia's Zoology department in order to introduce nature studies into the curriculums of New York schools. 
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  (#4) Dian Fossey

  • Dec. at 53 (1932-1985)

  Dian Fossey's life's work was studying gorillas in their native habitat in the forests of Rwanda, which is dangerous on so many levels. While primates can be aggressive, the animals didn't actually pose a threat to the to the primatologist and antrhopologist who had been studying gorillas for 18 years - it was humans who were the true danger to her and her work. 

  In 1985, Fossey was found murdered in her cabin in Virunga Mountains, Rwanda. In spite of an investigation, Rwanda courts came to the conclusion that Wayne McGuire, her research assistant, killed Fossey and they tried him in absentia. McGuire had already gone home to the United States by the time the trial, which was dubious at best, had occurred. Since there's no extradition policy between America and Rwanda, McGuire has served no time for the murder. Most people doubt McGuire's guilt and believe that poachers, who frequently interrupted Fossey's research, were truly responsible for her murder. 
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  (#7) Harry K. Daghlian, Jr.

  • Dec. at 24 (1921-1945)

  Daghlian began working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos while still a graduate student at Purdue University in 1944. What should have been a huge career boost for the budding scientist turned out to be the worst decision of his life. While attempting to build a neutron reflector by stacking a set of 9.7 lb tungsten carbide bricks around a plutonium core, he dropped one of the bricks, causing the core to become critical. Daghlian received a dose of radiation that sent him into a coma, and he died 25 days after the accident. Daghlian was the first known fatality caused by a criticality accident.

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