- today
#ShowMovies
#The UnXplained
#The UnXplained
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00A trailblazing biologist determined to design a half-man, half-beast hybrid, a gifted neuroscientist
00:12whose machine can manipulate the human mind, and an eccentric aristocrat who inspired the
00:20world's greatest mad scientist.
00:23For thousands of years, mankind's great thinkers have made enormous contributions to scientific
00:30progress.
00:31Yet, throughout the centuries, there have been more than a few men of science who, while
00:36brilliant in their own right, pushed the boundaries of experimentation to the edge of madness.
00:45They were renegades, known for bizarre experiments involving human-animal hybrids, mind-control
00:52devices, and even unspeakable torture.
00:58What were these mad scientists really trying to achieve, and what set them down a strange,
01:06dark path in their pursuit of knowledge?
01:10Well, that is what we'll try and find out.
01:17December 30th, 2019.
01:31A Chinese district court finds biophysicist Hei Jun-kui guilty of illegal medical practices.
01:40His crime involves a highly controversial procedure where the DNA of three female embryos is genetically
01:48edited for the purpose of creating HIV-immune babies.
01:53The academic and medical communities call the radical experiment unsafe and unethical.
02:00And Hei Jun-kui is added to a long list of geniuses whose dangerous acts have deemed them mad scientists.
02:13I think there are so many questions about what motivated him.
02:16Scientists are driven by the same kinds of motivations that other humans are driven by,
02:20in the same way that people want to gain fame or notoriety.
02:24Scientists may want to gain fame or notoriety too.
02:27Sometimes that ambition drives them to cut corners, or to do unethical experiments because
02:33it could lead to a major breakthrough that would advance their career.
02:37And that desire to become famous, to get a Nobel Prize, to be internationally recognized
02:44can really, in many ways, poison the work rather than improve it.
02:49There's one particular psychological bias that scientists are more prone to than your regular
02:56person.
02:57And that's the idea that they can get seduced by the idea of their own brilliance.
03:05They can get attached to an idea and they will go to extraordinary lengths to be proven right.
03:14The mad scientist represents this idea.
03:17When we think of a mad scientist we often imagine an obsessed madman, performing extreme and disturbing
03:25experiments in a dark laboratory.
03:28But where does that image come from?
03:29The term the mad scientist really enters the mainstream in 1818 with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
03:41Victor Frankenstein was the doctor and she described him as a mad scientist.
03:47And that's really the character that we think of when we think of a mad scientist.
03:53Victor Frankenstein created a humanoid figure, a monstrous humanoid figure.
03:59He was playing God and therefore he was the ultimate mad scientist.
04:04Mad scientists who are fanatically driven to experiment well away from the eyes of the population.
04:13And often these experiments, they're unethical, they're immoral, they could be grotesque and
04:18horrifying as with Dr. Frankenstein.
04:22The stereotype of the mad scientist comes from the early 19th century.
04:29We know that at that time many scientists worked in isolation.
04:34And so this idea of a mad scientist working by themselves in some dungeon and laboratory somewhere
04:42who perpetrated some great crime against humanity.
04:46This comes from this Victorian era way of conducting science.
04:53While stories of evil geniuses have frightened and intrigued us for hundreds of years, in reality,
05:00history can point to many gifted scientists whose work could be called progress or perversion.
05:07And perhaps the most surprising example of this is a brilliant mind from the 17th century
05:14who laid the foundation for modern science, Sir Isaac Newton.
05:20Isaac Newton was an extraordinary, extraordinary genius.
05:26He invented a way of expressing how the world works in his mammoth book, Principia Mathematica,
05:36which was a bestseller in the day.
05:39Basically, he was showing people how to make sense of the world through mathematical formula.
05:45Newton articulated the three laws of motion.
05:48He devised the principle of universal gravitation.
05:51So I think it is fair to say that even his contemporaries thought that the Principia Mathematica
05:57was extraordinary and had almost put an end to science.
06:01That is to say, there was very little left to do after Newton's work.
06:05Yet, despite Newton's groundbreaking achievements, to some, the father of physics was also the
06:13most famous mad scientist of his time.
06:17If you're talking about the trope of the mad scientist, Isaac Newton is a classic example
06:24in the sense that, on the one hand, he is an emblem of human rationality, of using human reason
06:34to figure out how nature works.
06:36But Newton was also a crackpot, we'd have to say, in modern terms.
06:41He was a practitioner in alchemy, which is this kind of occult precursor of modern chemistry.
06:48He actually did experiments, hoping he could find the philosopher's stone, which would be
06:53a way to turn lead into gold.
06:58In addition to his interest in alchemy, Newton's most notable achievements include the invention
07:03of calculus, the creation of the reflecting telescope, and groundbreaking work in optics.
07:12But his determination to understand the composition of light and color, and how we see them,
07:18would lead him to conduct gruesome experiments on his own eyes.
07:26Newton's experiments with his eyeballs are extraordinary.
07:30There's nothing like it.
07:32What he's trying to find out is, how do we see things?
07:36We have two separate notebooks where he describes in detail what he did, what the effects were,
07:41because they damaged his eyesight.
07:43We know that his eyesight was damaged by looking at the sun.
07:47So much so that in the last months of his life, he recalled that he could still see the sun
07:51if he shut his eyes.
07:52That he clearly damaged his eyes so much that this lasted for 60 years.
07:58Newton was really interested in understanding its sight.
08:02So in the pursuit of this, he took what he called a bodkin, a large needle, and he decided to
08:10see what would happen if he stuck it into his eye and pushed it back as far as it would go.
08:17And he saw all these little lights going off, because if the eye is injured, it will send
08:22little screaming light signals to your brain.
08:25Now, you know, most people probably wouldn't do that.
08:29Isaac Newton was kind of crazy.
08:31On the one hand, it's perfectly possible to understand the rationale of what he was doing.
08:39It's a perfectly sensible question.
08:41What does happen to your sight when the eyeball is distorted in various ways?
08:46But the thought that a good way of answering that question would be to push a needle around
08:53the back of your eye, it's just a horrible, horrible thought no sane person would do something
09:01like that.
09:02But Newton clearly thought that this was a perfectly sane thing to do.
09:07You know, there lies the mad scientist.
09:14Vacaria, Brazil, 2021.
09:18A scruffy-looking dog is found injured and brought to an animal hospital.
09:23But upon examination, doctors soon realize this is not a typical canine.
09:30In fact, this four-legged creature is an entirely new hybrid animal.
09:35A unique combination of domesticated dog and pampus fox.
09:41Now identified as a doxum, its origins are unknown.
09:48Was it created in nature, like the coyote-wolf hybrid called coy wolves?
09:54Or was the doxum man-made, like the liger, which is half lion, half tiger?
10:02Our fascination with hybrid creatures can be traced back for thousands of years.
10:07And many times these freaks of nature include strange, unthinkable combinations that are part
10:13animal and part human.
10:16If you go back and look at Paleolithic art, 40,000 years old, they were painting on cave walls, hybrids
10:26of men and birds, women and bison.
10:31Another famous example is the Sphinx in Egypt, the body of a lion and the head of a person.
10:39And one of the driving forces behind this was the idea that it might have been possible,
10:46using magic to actually acquire some of the powers that animals had.
10:55While tales of half-man, half-animal creatures have been part of folklore and mythology since
11:00ancient times, has modern science now reached a point where human hybrids could become a reality?
11:09This mad notion was the focus of a Russian scientist with a disturbing vision.
11:19Moscow Soviet Union, 1928.
11:23Dictator Joseph Stalin launches the first five-year plan for the Soviet Union.
11:29Heavy industries like steel, coal and machinery are the focus of rapid industrialization.
11:37Farmers are pressured to increase their harvests to support the growing workforce.
11:42And scientists are tasked with figuring out how to breed stronger livestock.
11:49Leading this effort is a Soviet biologist named Ilya Ivanov.
11:55Ilya Ivanov started his career as a biologist under the czarist regime.
12:02And one of the things that he was very interested in was the idea of the artificial insemination
12:08of horses and cattle.
12:10So this was a way to take particular desirable biological traits, find the stallion who had
12:17the traits you wanted.
12:19And if you milked the sperm and artificially inseminated it, then one horse could fertilize
12:265,000 mares.
12:28Before the 20th century, artificial insemination was looked at something that just would not
12:35work.
12:36Ivanov helped to prove that this was not the case.
12:40And he began using these techniques to create strange new creatures.
12:46He created a zebra-donkey hybrid called a zedonk and a bison-cow hybrid called a zoobron.
12:55And it was amazingly successful.
12:57He became the foremost expert in the world on artificial insemination.
13:03But then he had an even bigger idea.
13:07He thought, could we breed a human with a chimpanzee?
13:11To most of us, the idea of a half-human, half-chimpanzee hybrid sounds, well, insane.
13:20But Ilya Ivanov was convinced such a combination was possible.
13:23And he became obsessed with the idea of creating an entirely new species called Humanzi.
13:30Ilya Ivanov wanted to create a crossover between apes and humans.
13:36He called these the Humanzi experiments.
13:38It was government-funded research.
13:41Part of what people believe he was trying to show is that humans really did evolve from
13:47apes.
13:48And by showing this kind of interspecies impregnation, it would, in theory, prove that kind of evolutionary
13:53link.
13:54As far as we know, Ilya Ivanov tried this in a lot of different ways.
13:57He tried to get human women to be willing to be inseminated artificially by ape sperm.
14:05He tried to transplant tissue from the uterus of a human woman into an ape.
14:14He was willing to do it in any way that was possible.
14:17For one of his experiments in the summer of 1927, Ivanov managed to bring back to the Soviet
14:24Union a male orangutan.
14:26He named him Tarzan.
14:28And he actually managed to find five female volunteers in the Soviet Union.
14:35One of the women memorably commented that, I'm willing to volunteer for this because I feel
14:43that my life has no more sense anymore.
14:48So I think he was somehow tapping into the suicidal women in the Soviet Union who were just going
14:55to abandon all hope to participate in this gruesome experiment.
15:01But Ivanov had failed in his attempt because the orangutan promptly died.
15:10Soon after that, one of his colleagues reported him for counter-revolutionary activities.
15:16And he got arrested in one of Stalin's purges.
15:19They exiled him to Kazakhstan.
15:22Two years later, he died of a stroke.
15:25That was the end of his research project.
15:29Was Ilya Ivanov's dedication to his delusional hybrid project simply to prove that human beings
15:36had evolved from apes?
15:39Or was there a more diabolical plan driving the 10-year odyssey to create a human-Z?
15:46Why would a Soviet scientist want to create a human-Z?
15:51Well we don't really know, but we can take some guesses.
15:55One of those would be that he was trying to create a super-soldier.
15:59You talk about the chimpanzee, talking about more stamina, more strength.
16:04If you can pull some of those traits into a soldier, you would have essentially a real-life
16:09Captain America.
16:11And if you ask me, it's probably what Ivanov is trying to do.
16:15While it's widely believed that Ivanov's controversial experiments failed, his work still raises some
16:23very important ethical questions.
16:27Even if Ivanov could create an ape man in a laboratory, should he have ever been allowed
16:33to try in the first place?
16:37The human-Z experiments raised so many ethical concerns.
16:40Ilya Ivanov really regarded, you know, whether it was humans or apes, not as, you know, beings
16:49that required and demanded our respect, but really as instruments for his different scientific
16:56experiments.
16:57So imagine for a moment that the human-Z experiments had actually succeeded.
17:03We have no idea what the consequences for the woman would have been.
17:06Would it have destroyed her health?
17:09And how would we regard that species?
17:11Would we think that was a human that had all of the same rights as a human?
17:14It's almost impossible to grapple with the full set of implications of an experiment like
17:20that.
17:21Why, for thousands of years, have humans been so obsessed with creating hybrid creatures?
17:29One thing that many mad scientists have in common is that they rarely consider the consequences
17:35of their experiments, which was the case of the Harvard professor whose research into mind
17:43control may have turned one of his students into a dangerous madman.
17:51Harvard University, since its founding in 1636, some of the brightest minds in science have
17:59taught at this esteemed institution, including James Watson, a pioneer in the science of DNA,
18:08Nobel Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow, and the highly controversial psychologist named
18:16Dr. Henry Murray.
18:18Henry Murray was a psychologist who, during World War II, worked for the OSS.
18:24The OSS is the precursor to the CIA, so this is military intelligence, and what he was trying
18:28to find out was, how far can you push a man before he breaks?
18:33He was testing the limits of soldiers put under interrogation and pressure.
18:38After the war, Murray went to work at Harvard as a psychologist.
18:44During his time at Harvard, Henry Murray was very interested in how people respond under extreme
18:51stress, how personality is shaped and changes.
18:54He was committed to do so at any cost, and if that meant subjecting students to extreme
18:59stress to do it, then Henry Murray was okay with that.
19:04At Harvard, Murray began a new research project titled, Multiform Assessments of Personality Development
19:11and Among Gifted College Men.
19:14He would experiment with intelligent Harvard undergraduates to observe how they responded to extreme psychological
19:23stress.
19:24He wasn't looking for students that had a sense of self-confidence.
19:29He wanted students that were feeling isolated, out of place, having trouble acclimating to college.
19:40He wanted weak people to be part of this experiment, not strong ones, because the weak mind is just
19:48much easier to break.
19:50So he conducted very in-depth interviews with these students that were potentially for the
19:54study.
19:55He wanted to know what their values were, what their fears were, what they believed,
20:00what made them proud, what made them nervous, what made them ashamed.
20:03And from there, I selected 22 students to be part of the program.
20:09From 1941 to 1962, Dr. Murray engaged five groups of 22 men.
20:15Each group committed to 200 hours of intensive testing from their sophomore to senior years.
20:22After collecting information about each subject's life, beliefs, and values, they were confronted
20:26with vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive attacks, all intended to trigger crippling levels
20:34of stress and mental collapse.
20:36He was using tactics that he'd learnt working in the intelligence services during the Second
20:43World War.
20:45Murray's methodology was to, first of all, have a brightly lit room in which he'd create what
20:51were termed confrontational scenarios.
20:54So his subjects would be covered in electrodes, and then basically shouted at, yelled at, and
21:03this was hugely distressing.
21:05In essence, Murray would spend many sessions just berating students, that they would use
21:10those things that were dear to those students to deflate their self-esteem, to make them feel
21:17like they were worthless, to give them a sense that the things that they believed, the things
21:23that defined them, were horrible things.
21:26Even Murray, by his own admission, said that these were vehement assaults on the ego, with
21:32the intention of breaking individuals down.
21:36There was some controversy and some dissentment among his colleagues that he was a fringe psychologist,
21:43when one considers lowly undergrads and the developmental period in which they're in, that kind of treatment,
21:50that kind of torture, it stays with the person.
21:54The students of Murray's experiments, 25 years later, noted serious negative side effects of
22:00both physical health, mental health, social health, that remained with them.
22:06What motivated Dr. Murray to conduct such disturbing and cruel experiments on vulnerable young minds?
22:12Was it a radical act in the name of science, or was there a bigger force, influencing the
22:18psychologist's mad project?
22:21Well, it's a matter of debate.
22:25Some believe Henry Murray may have been working for the U.S. government's Central Intelligence Agency.
22:31There were rumors that he was, in fact, still working for the CIA, trying to develop techniques
22:37of mind control.
22:38When asked, Murray was quite cagey about just what he was trying to do.
22:46Though I do sometimes wonder, was Murray really capable of controlling the way other people
22:53thought as a result of his experiments?
22:55Is it possible that Murray's diabolical Harvard experiment was secretly a mind control program
23:01for the CIA?
23:03We can only speculate.
23:06But what we do know is that one of Murray's test subjects died in the Supermax prison for
23:13a crime spree that caused death and destruction across the United States.
23:19His name was Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber.
23:25Ted Kaczynski was only 16 years old when he was at Harvard.
23:29This is a very, very impressionable developmental period and one can't help but think, what exactly
23:34was the role of Murray's experiments on Ted Kaczynski's future behavior?
23:41The Unabomber carried out a series of bombings in which three people were killed and 23 injured.
23:48And of course, people have wondered, was it as a result of Murray's experiments that Kaczynski
23:55went on to become this sociopathic serial killer?
24:00We know that for a fact from his manifesto, where Kaczynski specifically went after the
24:07American scientific community and he attacked psychology as a field.
24:13Now we can't make a direct exact correlation that did this experiment in mind control cause
24:20Ted Kaczynski to become essentially a domestic terrorist.
24:25We can't do that.
24:26But certainly these experiments built Kaczynski's worldview.
24:33The psychological mind control experiments conducted by Dr. Murray are distressing to say
24:40the least with us another mad scientist whose fascination with electric medicine led to
24:47the creation of manipulative and shocking experiments.
24:57Lakeside Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio, December 1947.
25:01Cardiologist Dr. Claude S. Beck is performing open heart surgery when his patient suddenly goes
25:10into cardiac arrest.
25:11In that moment, Beck decides to use an untested invention of his own design and saves his patient's
25:20life by shocking him with 1500 volts of electricity.
25:27Dr. Beck's invention called a defibrillator.
25:30Everybody clear?
25:32And other devices like the pacemaker.
25:36And the cochlear implant has transformed lives through electric medicine.
25:42But while it's easy to see the benefits electricity has offered medical advancement,
25:47it is not without controversy.
25:52Such is the case surrounding a troubling tool invented by a brilliant brain scientist named Jose Delgado.
26:01Jose Delgado I'd say is the most flamboyant, outrageous, fascinating scientist I've ever interviewed personally.
26:11He moved to Yale in 1950 and while he was there over the next two and a half decades,
26:18he did all these experiments involving brain implants.
26:23And he spelled this out in a book that was published in 1969 called Physical Control of the Mind.
26:31For example, he developed something called the Stimosever, which is a device about the size of a half dollar that could be inserted inside the skull and had electrodes inserted into the brain that could both detect signals being passed from one part of the brain to another and also stimulate the brain to get various effects.
26:54Through this period, Delgado did a lot of experiments on monkeys.
26:58He had all these monkeys in a chamber and there was one big alpha male bully and a bunch of females.
27:07Delgado put a Stimosever in the brain of the male monkey and when he pushed the lever, it would pacify the male and the male would suddenly become meek and mild and cower in the corner.
27:19There was a little bit of this kind of mad scientist aspect of him.
27:27Through this period also, Delgado had been experimenting not only on animals, but also on humans.
27:35So in the 1950s, he was going into mental hospitals and inserting brain implants into mental patients, most of whom had epilepsy or schizophrenia.
27:46He's trying to show the power of these technologies for treating severe mental illness.
27:55In his book, Physical Control of the Mind, he was showing that he could control people's emotions.
28:02He could make them laugh.
28:03He could make them feel rage just by pressing a button, which was controlling the Stimosevers implanted in their brains.
28:15He wanted to take the technology as far as it could possibly go.
28:20Delgado claimed that his radical experiments with the Stimosever showed evidence that human behavior could be manipulated by applying electricity to the brain.
28:32And to prove it, Delgado created a public demonstration of his mind control machine after embedding his device in the brain of a bull.
28:42Delgado famously went into a ring with a bull, and the only thing he was holding in his hand was a radio receiver.
28:54And as the bull charged toward him, he pressed a button, and the bull suddenly stopped, and what he was trying to show was that it was possible to control behavior of other species through electrodes.
29:08But what it also did was show people how powerfully the brain can be manipulated and induce fear in the public about the possibility of brain control and external brain control by what could be seen as a mad scientist.
29:25The problem with his technology is it isn't designed to suddenly change somebody from charging at you to stop charging at you.
29:33It's designed to suddenly change behavior and to make people or species into puppets.
29:39Delgado had a vision for humanity being reshaped by these technologies that he was developing.
29:49In his book, Physical Control of the Mind, he said that technologies like the one he was developing had the capacity to transform human society for the better, to create this kind of utopia.
30:03But he's describing his patients as though they are puppets.
30:08He can make their limbs move up and down. He can make them wave their arms and clench their fists.
30:15He can make them laugh on command.
30:18And what's creepy is that often these people thought they were doing these things of their own free will.
30:26Where does it cross the line between understanding how the brain works and then making it work in a particular way?
30:36So if we could just have a remote control and press a button and make them behave in certain ways, the next question becomes, why not?
30:47If we think of what Delgado was doing to control human movement and behavior, then that raises the question of who gets to play God in that sense?
31:04Who then gets to control that behavior?
31:08If we are like puppets, then who is pulling the strings?
31:12The idea of creating an army of human puppets is certainly unnerving.
31:21But when it comes to conducting diabolical human experiments, the medical atrocities committed during World War II stand alone.
31:32And earn one mad scientist.
31:36The terrifying nickname, the Angel of Death.
31:45The Auschwitz-Bergenau State Museum, Poland.
31:50During World War II, it was the site of some of the worst atrocities in all of human history.
31:55Over one million innocent victims were murdered here by the Nazis.
32:00And later, survivors would speak of a sadistic doctor stationed here, responsible for truly horrific experiments on the prisoners.
32:11Named Dr. Josef Mengele.
32:14There's no more notorious example of the extremes of scientific experimentation than Josef Mengele at Auschwitz during the course of the Second World War.
32:27His victims called Mengele the Angel of Death.
32:31When he came around, they knew they were going to die in horrible, vicious ways.
32:38Mengele joins the Nazi party in 37.
32:42Early on, he's actually a combat doctor.
32:45He's wounded on the Russian front, sent back to Germany to recover and then reassigned as the chief medical officer of this prison industrial extermination complex.
32:57With an almost unlimited supply of test subjects and given relatively free reign to conduct whatever research it was that he wanted.
33:07That consisted of things like removing a kidney from a prisoner and then putting them back in their work detail to see whether or not they could continue to do that.
33:16He deliberately infected prisoners with various diseases, but he was very interested in genetics.
33:24One of his favorite things was to work with children, particularly sets of twins.
33:31And he would take the twins and use one as the experiment and the other as a control.
33:37What is so inexplicable about Mengele is he could be so kind and warm and gentle to these children one day, giving them chocolates, giving them candy, and the next day turn around and torture and murder them.
33:52What kind of monster does it take to do something like that?
33:56What madness causes a man of science to become a sadistic monster?
34:03Some believe the answer may be found by examining a secret Japanese program during World War II.
34:11Harbin, China.
34:13Tucked away in the city of 10 million people, a group of brick buildings stand as a grim memorial.
34:20It is the home of a research and development unit created by the Japanese during their occupation of China in the 1930s and 1940s.
34:29And it is the place where thousands of prisoners were the victims of heinous experiments conducted under the direction of senior army surgeon Shiro Ishii.
34:40Shiro Ishii was born in 1892 into a wealthy family, a landowning family.
34:45His father grew rice and made sake.
34:48Ishii, though, didn't want to follow in daddy's footsteps.
34:51Instead, he wanted to go into medicine.
34:54He joined the army to become a military surgeon.
34:59Ishii was interested in studying cholera, epidemic hemorrhagic fever, bubonic plague, which was one of his favorites.
35:07But he also recognizes that you can weaponize these diseases.
35:12So he proceeded to examine biowarfare as an option for Japan.
35:17To test bioweapons for Japan, Ishii formed a military research group known as Unit 731.
35:28And between 1937 and 1945, they performed deranged experiments on thousands of prisoners of war and civilians.
35:41General Ishii was focused on military research.
35:45But again, the atrocities are unimaginable.
35:48These were usually Chinese prisoners of war.
35:51But it was really any non-Japanese.
35:54He infected patients with tuberculosis, anthrax, all kinds of diseases.
36:00Just to see what would happen and if he can find ways to make his soldiers immune or how to treat them.
36:08And this was his justification.
36:12It is estimated that Shiro Ishii's bioweapons experiments killed over 10,000 test subjects.
36:23After World War II, both Ishii and Mengele were never punished for their crimes against humanity.
36:29But ever since their horrific secret experiments were revealed to the world,
36:34we still don't understand why these deranged doctors would do such despicable things.
36:41One answer that Mengele and Ishii both offered was that they were doing it for nationalism.
36:48They were trying to further perhaps important military aims of their country.
36:55But I think beyond that, part of the answer is that these two were clearly psychopaths.
37:02They enjoyed doing this.
37:04We really don't know what would drive a person to dehumanize another person.
37:11What happens in their mind?
37:13Do they snap for some reason?
37:15Is there some trauma inflicted upon them as a child?
37:18How could a scientist be drawn to this type of experimentation?
37:24I think this is one of life's great mysteries.
37:34Hesse, Germany, sitting on a lonely hilltop, is an imposing stone fortress that dates back to the year 1252.
37:43Known as Castle Frankenstein, after the family who first laid claim to this land,
37:49legend says it is the location that inspired Mary Shelley's world-famous gothic horror novel.
37:55But surprisingly, Shelley's Frankenstein is not about the original 13th century family.
38:02It is said inspiration for her mad doctor would come from tales of grotesque experiments conducted at the castle centuries later by an eccentric scientist named Johan Dippel.
38:18In 1673, in Castle Frankenstein, was born the perfect man for that name.
38:25That was Johan Conrad Dippel.
38:27He was technically a theologian.
38:30He went to college to study God.
38:33Dippel was a man fascinated with death, with other people's death, with his own death, and wanted to prolong his own as long as he could.
38:42He believed that the soul was a physical liquid inside the human body.
38:49And he procured cadavers, legally and illegally, to perform experiments on bodies in all kinds of ways.
38:59What it entailed was sticking a tube, usually made of animal intestine, into a cadaver, extracting the fluids from the cadaver, and then transfer it into another cadaver.
39:12The goal being to reanimate that cadaver with this other one's soul.
39:18It makes sense that if the soul has a specific physical location in the body, then you can kind of extract it and put it in another body.
39:33So about half a century or so previously, the French philosopher René Descartes had developed a view of humans.
39:42That the soul has a physical location inside the body.
39:46In case you're interested, your soul is there.
39:50That's where the pineal gland is, and the pineal gland, according to Descartes, is where the soul lives.
39:57But nevertheless, even by the standards of the early 18th century, if Dippel did indeed carry out these experiments on the dead,
40:07trying to transfer the soul from one body to another, this sounds, from our point of view, mad.
40:16Like the famous fiction, these stories of horrendous experiments, they serve as cautionary tales about the pursuit of knowledge.
40:27You really have to ask, is the way science is being pursued, is it being done with wisdom?
40:35Or do we risk creating Frankenstein's monster?
40:40The mad scientist, for me, leaves me conflicted.
40:44We need to push science forward.
40:46We also have to maintain our ethics and our dignity.
40:49But there are experiments that may require us to forego our ethics, even if just for a moment, for the greater good.
40:58And I think that's why the mad scientist archetype will continue to persist.
41:03As long as we pursue the boundaries of science, we'll always be questioning our own boundaries as humans.
41:11Were Johann Dippel's attempts to resurrect the dead driven by ambition, curiosity, or plain old madness?
41:21Maybe it was all of the above.
41:23And it stands to reason that a unique combination of genius and insanity may also apply to other great thinkers throughout history.
41:33But no matter how potentially groundbreaking their outrageous experiments might be, they serve as a chilling reminder that the price of progress is often paid in blood.
41:47Whether it's ego or a warped notion of right and wrong, what ultimately motivates these mad scientists remains unexplained.
41:59So, let's go to Alabama!
42:01Well, you have done this.
42:02All right, we are
42:14right.
42:15Well…
42:17Back to Alabama.
42:22Yeah, that's the friendship.
42:26Yeah?
42:27And the importance of reality is that, you know,
Recommended
41:06
|
Up next
42:06
42:49
27:49
42:49
33:28
42:06
48:11
46:46
47:13
43:22
58:56
42:13
1:02:27
55:55