Scientists that died in the pursuit of great discoveries
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Paving the way for great discoveries and inventions is one of the biggest achievements for a scientist. The endeavor, however, comes with the risk that the journey into the unknown could be a deadly one.
KNow Science Blog - February 22nd 2015 By Simona Giunta
Here are 12 examples of scientists who sacrificed their lives in the pursuit of acquiring new knowledge for us all.
1. Carl Scheele (1742-1786)
Scheele was a pharmaceutical chemist and he discovered several chemical elements, including oxygen, molybdenum, tungsten, manganese and chlorine. He used toxic substances for his experiments and many of the elements he identified were also later found to be harmful. In addition, he had the habit of tasting any new substance he discovered! Long term exposure to arsenic, mercury, lead, and tasting of compounds he discovered, like hydrofluoric acid, eventually led to his death by poisoning and kidney failure by age 43.
2. Elizabeth Ascheim (1859-1905)
A young bookkeeper from San Francisco, Elizabeth Fleischman Ascheim quit her job to study electrical science upon learning of the discovery of X-rays. She soon opened the first X-ray studio in the city and began to obsessively self-experiment in the name of science. She gained a reputation as a pioneer in the field and a remarkable radiologist. However, unaware of the deadly consequences of radiation exposure, she died of an extremely widespread and violent cancer, and is remembered as one of the ‘martyrs of radiology’.
3. Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928)
A Russian physician, philosopher, economist, and a science fiction writer, Bogdanov was a pioneer in hematology and founder of an Institution for blood transfusions. He performed eleven transfusions himself, which – he stated – cured his balding and improved his eyesight. Unfortunately, in 1928, Bogdanov took a transfusion of blood from a young man infected with malaria and tuberculosis that shortly led to his death.
4. Marie Curie (1867-1934)
Madame Curie discovered radium and polonium [named after her homeland], along with her husband Pierre. She spent rest of her life performing radiation research and studying radiation therapy. Her continued exposure to radiation led to her contracting leukemia and dying in 1934. Curie is the first and only person who received two Nobel prizes in science in two different fields, chemistry and physics.The discovery of radium took the lives of many other people working in the Curie Laboratory, including two young assistants of Madame Curie, Marguerite Perey and Sonia Cotelle.
5. Jean Francois De Rozier (1754-1785)
Jean Francois was a teacher of Chemistry and Physics. In 1783, he witnessed the world’s first balloon flight that created a passion in him for flight. After testing various flights of sheeps, chickens, and ducks, he took the first manned free flight in a balloon. He traveled at an altitude of 3,000 feet using a hot air balloon. Later, De Rozier planned a crossing of the English Channel from France to England. He took the flight but unfortunately, after reaching 1,500 feet in a combined hot air and gas balloon, the balloon deflated and he fell to his death.
6. Louis Slotin (1910-1946)
Slotin worked on the US project to design the first nuclear bomb. While performing experiments for his project, he accidentally dropped a sphere of beryllium on to a second sphere, causing a prompt critical (the spheres were wrapped around a plutonium core). Other scientists who were also in the room at the time said to have witnessed a ‘blue glow’ of air ionization and felt a heat wave. Slotin was rushed to hospital where he died nine days later. The amount of radiation he was exposed to was equivalent to standing 4800 feet away from an atomic bomb explosion.
7. Haroutune Daghlian Jr. (1921-1945)
American physicist Harry Daghlian was part of on the Manhattan Project at the remote Omega Site facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. On Aug 21,1945, during a critical mass experiment, he accidentally dropped a tungsten carbide brick onto a plutonium bomb core. Oopsy. The mishap caused a critical reaction, and Daghlian quickly tried to knock the brick away, unsuccessfully, and resorted to removing the bricks by hand to halt the reaction. He stopped the reaction, but was exposed to massive amounts of radiation. He died 25 days later.
8. Malcolm Casadaban (1949-2009)
An associate professor of molecular genetics and cell biology and microbiology at the University of Chicago, specialist Casadaban was performing laboratory research on the bacterium that causes the plague when he became sick and died from plague. According to The Centers for Disease Control, the strain that killed Casadaban had never been known to infect laboratory workers, as it was a genetically weakened strain. Casadaban was found to have undiagnosed hereditary hemochromatosis, which likely played in a role in his death.
9. Richard Din (1987-2012)
Researcher Richard Din worked at the Northern California Institute for Research and Education, where the focus of his research was developing a vaccine to protect against the dangerous bacterium known as Neisseria meningitidis, a strain of bacteria that causes meningococcal disease. The UC Berkeley graduate came down with a headache and nausea, and by the next morning his symptoms had worsened enough to require a hospital visit. His condition deteriorated quickly, and he died 17 hours after his symptoms first appeared. The cause? Meningococcal disease from the bacterium he had been working on. No accidents had occurred, and Din was said to have been a fastidious, rule-following worker, but he wasn’t vaccinated for the illness despite CDC recommendations to the contrary. (Although, likely a vaccine wouldn’t help, since it was a vaccine he was working on for a strain that was resistant to vaccine.) Fortunately, about 70 people who came into contact with Din promptly received antibiotic treatment and none of them came down with the illness.
10. Jesse Lazear (1866-1900) and Clara Maass (1876-1901)
A United States convoy of doctors and nurses left for Cuba at the start of the 20th century to study yellow fever and the disease’s mode of transmission. The research involved some human and self-experimentation, where doctors and nurses would let infected mosquitos bite them and track disease incidence. Doctor Jesse William Lazear and nurse Clara Maass died of yellow fever during the course of the experiments. Many researchers and people recruited for the project let themselves be bitten by mosquitoes. Some were injected with blood from the victims of yellow fever. A few people in this test group developed the disease, but all recovered to full health. The research answered the question of how yellow fever was spread and shed light into the immunity from the disease.
11. Carlo Urbani (1956-2003)
On February 28, 2003, the Vietnam-France Hospital in Hanoi asked Carlo Urbani for help. The Italian doctor was an expert on communicable diseases. He was based in Vietnam for the World Health Organization. The hospital asked Dr. Urbani to help identify an unusual infection. He recognized it as a new threat. He made sure other hospitals increased their infection-control measures. On March 11th, Dr. Urbani developed signs of severe acute respiratory syndrome. Four days later, the World Health Organization declared it a worldwide health threat. Carlo Urbani was the first doctor to warn the world of the disease that became known as SARS. He died of the disease on March 29, 2003. He was only 46 years old.
This list is by no mean exhaustive. Many scientists, medical practitioners and researchers died pursuing their work, either through naivety, accidents, self-experimentation – being unaware of the dangerous substances they were working with, in the name of human advancements.
Many more names can be added, for instance doctors, such as Dr. Victor Willoughby, nurses, medical staff, administrators and others that died in the latest Ebola outbreak in West Africa. This blog represents a small beacon of gratitude to the many heroic scientists and researchers who devoted their lives to the medical science. They should never be forgotten.
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