Cranks... Villains... ...And Unsung Heroes

By Frederic Golden, Leon Jaroff, Jeffrey Kluger and Michael D. Lemonick

[CRANKS]

STANLEY PONS AND MARTIN FLEISCHMANN

Producing energy through nuclear fusion is easy enough to do--provided you have a reactor that can generate temperatures hotter than the sun's. If you could somehow achieve fusion at room temperature, you'd have an unlimited source of power that could retire petroleum, nuclear and solar energy for good.

In 1989 chemists B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann announced to great fanfare that they had done just that, building a bench-top fusion percolator made up of two electrodes and a slug of heavy water. But Pons and Fleischmann were vague about how their "cold fusion" reactor worked, and when other scientists tried to duplicate the pair's results, they got mostly cold water for their trouble.

The University of Utah, which held the patent on the process, allowed it to lapse, and cold fusion fell from view. Pons and Fleischmann repaired to Europe to continue their work-- separately and quietly.

WILHELM REICH

Even by his field's indulgent standards, Reich was surely one for the casebooks. Brilliant and charismatic, the Austrian-born psychoanalyst was an early disciple of Freud and produced a shrewd addition to analytic theory: a patient's character, he said, was revealed as much by body language--"muscular armoring," he called it--as by couch talk. Before long Reich split with Freud and went off on his own wobbly path. After dabbling with Marxism, he began theorizing about a universal life-giving "orgone energy"--which, he said, was expressed through neurosis-free orgasms. He fled to the U.S. and soon had followers like Norman Mailer sitting naked in orgone accumulators to achieve "orgastic potency" as well as relief from everything from anxiety to cancer. Meanwhile, Reich's own mental state became increasingly suspect when he blamed UFOs for a deadly counter-energy and said red fascists were out to get him. He died in 1957 while serving a two-year federal prison term for shipping his "dangerous" boxes across state lines.

[VILLAINS]

TROFIM LYSENKO

He was Joseph Stalin's favorite scientist, and it's easy to see why. Lysenko was a peasant-born agronomist and Marxist ideologue who rejected Mendel's ideas because they contradicted the doctrine of dialectical materialism. He offered instead to solve the Soviet Union's chronic crop failures through a process he called vernalization, by which he would "train" spring wheat to be winter wheat and thus increase the number of annual harvests. Lysenko believed all living organisms passed on to succeeding generations characteristics acquired in their lifetime. This untested theory was at odds with what Lysenko scathingly called "alien bourgeois" genetics, but Soviet scientists who dared disagree risked being sent to the gulag. The cost was high. Even after Lysenko's final fall at the end of the Khrushchev era, Soviet agriculture continued to suffer. Worse still, Soviet scientists missed out on the genetics revolution. To this day, Russian biology lags behind that of the West, thanks to Comrade Lysenko.

JOSEF MENGELE

The Hippocratic oath keeps it simple, reminding physicians that first, they must do no harm. No one in medical history violated that canon with more murderous zeal than Germany's Dr. Mengele.

The son of a Bavarian industrialist, Mengele joined the Nazi Party in the 1930s and began studying the sham science of "racial hygiene." In 1943 he became medical chief at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he sent more than 400,000 non-Aryan prisoners to the gas chambers. On the side, he engaged in all manner of experimental butchery--dripping chemicals into prisoners' eyes to see if he could turn them a more Reich-pleasing blue, exposing others to infectious diseases to watch how different races respond to pathogens.

When the war ended, Mengele fled to South America. He died there in 1979 and was buried quietly under an assumed name. His remains were disinterred and identified in 1985--a too late bit of proof that even the Ubermensch can come to an ignoble end.

[UNSUNG HEROES]

ALFRED WEGENER

When he first proposed his heretical ideas early in the century, many geologists treated this German meteorologist as if he were a member of the Flat Earth Society. Convinced that the continents were anchored firmly in place, geologists dismissed as preposterous his theory that the earth's major land masses had once been huddled together in a single supercontinent, which he called Pangaea (Greek for "whole earth"), then began slowly drifting apart. Wegener had plenty of evidence, ranging from the jigsaw-like fit of the continents to the discovery of matching fossils on opposite sides of oceans, but he couldn't give a satisfactory explanation of what caused the global breakup.

For years continental drift was held up to derision--until scientists in the 1960s found a plausible mechanism in the earth's internal motions under the ocean floor. Suddenly, Wegener's disreputable ideas became reputable. Renamed plate tectonics, they gave geology a single unifying theory, explaining everything from earthquakes and volcanoes to the formation of mountain ranges and ocean basins. Sadly, Wegener, who perished on the Greenland icecap in 1930 at age 50, didn't live to see it.

ELISABETH KUBLER-ROSS

For this Swiss-born psychiatrist, death was medicine's dirty secret. American doctors, she learned early on, rarely discussed the subject with the terminally ill, and the idea of administering pain killers or letting patients die at home or with their families around them was almost unheard of. Determined to overthrow this taboo, she interviewed hundreds of dying patients, sometimes in the presence of startled medical students. Her best-selling 1969 book, On Death and Dying, detailed her now popularly accepted conclusions. The dying, she wrote, go through five psychological stages: denial ("No, it won't happen"), anger ("Why me?"), bargaining ("God, just a little longer?"), depression and finally acceptance. Lecturing and writing at a furious pace, she went on to campaign for hospice care in the U.S., gave countless "life, death and transition" workshops around the world and tried to help babies with AIDS. Her current infatuation with mysticism and the afterlife distresses some in the psychiatric community. Even so, though hobbled by several strokes, Kubler-Ross, at 72, remains a powerful voice for the terminally ill and their loved ones.

EUGENE SHOEMAKER

The idea that a comet or asteroid might be bearing down on Earth--as in Deep Impact and Armageddon--can be traced to this crusading geologist. Probing Arizona's Meteor Crater in 1956, Shoemaker found a form of quartz that is created only by tremendous impacts. Finding the same telltale mineral in other craters, he concluded that they had been formed not by volcanoes, as most scientists thought, but by large objects hitting Earth. It was only a matter of time, he said, before Earth would be struck again. So he launched the first organized search for big incoming objects, recruiting astronomers to join the hunt and cajoling Congress into funding it. Even the public began to take notice when, in 1994, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (which he co-discovered) crashed into Jupiter in an awesome demonstration of what could happen here.

SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN

A minor bureaucrat in Madras, India, Ramanujan tried twice to interest professional mathematicians in his spare-time dabbling with numbers. All too familiar with numerological crackpots, they were profoundly uninterested. But Ramanujan persisted, and his third shot was the lucky one. The eminent Cambridge don G.H. Hardy took the time to decipher the young man's idiosyncratic scrawls and realized he was corresponding with a genius. Unlike trained mathematicians, Ramanujan knew his speculations about numbers were true, so he didn't bother to prove them. That wouldn't do. Hardy brought him to England in 1914, and the pair spent four years working to prove the self-taught mathematician's intuitively brilliant conjectures. Alas, Ramanujan hated England and died of tuberculosis in 1920 at age 32--with so much of his opus left unproved that mathematicians today are still working on it.

--By Frederic Golden, Leon Jaroff, Jeffrey Kluger and Michael D. Lemonick