Scientists who faced moral crossroads: erasing colleagues' work, recording every conversation, or practicing insanity to understand it. Where discovery meets conscience, choices become complicated.
In 1887, Nellie Bly practiced deranged expressions in a mirror for one night, then got herself committed to a New York asylum. She spent ten days documenting rotten food, ice baths, and patients tied together with ropes. Her exposé triggered a grand jury investigation and forced the city to overhaul its asylum system. The doctors who had unanimously declared her insane never explained how a twenty-three-year-old reporter had fooled them all.
Jagadish Chandra Bose invented fundamental radio technology a year before Marconi — the waveguide, the horn antenna, the semiconductor detector — and refused to patent any of it. Knowledge, he said, belonged to everyone. Then he built the crescograph, which magnified plant movement ten million times. With it, he watched plants respond to light and touch, fall asleep under chloroform, and wake up again. Then he poisoned one. The crescograph recorded a violent electrical spasm, then a flat line. An audience watched a plant die the way they might watch an animal die: with a shudder, and then with nothing.
Buckminster Fuller was expelled from Harvard twice, went bankrupt, and in 1927 stood at the edge of Lake Michigan contemplating the end. Instead, he turned his life into an experiment: what could one broke, discredited person accomplish if he devoted everything to benefiting humanity? He began recording his life in fifteen-minute intervals — every letter, bill, sketch, scrap of thought. He kept it up until his death in 1983. The archive at Stanford measures 270 linear feet. They call it the most documented human life in history.
In 1925, Cecilia Payne wrote what would be called the most brilliant astronomy thesis ever written. She proved stars were made of hydrogen and helium. The scientific establishment said she was wrong. So she added a line to her own thesis calling her discovery "almost certainly not real." Four years later, a powerful male astronomer published the same conclusion and credited her in a footnote. Harvard didn't make her a professor for another thirty-one years.