1Gregor Mendel
Gregor Mendel actually began his genetic experiments with mice but was told to change his experiments by a local bishop, who thought it was inappropriate that Mendel watched mice have sex.
2. Niels Bohr hid the Nobel Prize medals of the Jewish Max von Laue and James Franck from the Nazis, by dissolving the gold medals in acid, and then reversing the chemical process to retrieve the gold after the war.
3. Thomas Edison's last breath is reportedly contained in a test tube at The Henry Ford museum near Detroit.
4. When Isaac Newton was 20, he compiled a list of his sins. They included: "threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them", "peevishness with my mother". and "wishing death and hoping it to some".
5. Louis Pasteur was the head of the science program at a French school during the mid-1800s. He once told students that anyone caught smoking would be expelled. Seventy-three of the school's 80 students resigned.
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6Francis Crick
Francis Crick, the Nobel winning scientist, was high on LSD when he first deduced the double-helix structure of DNA.
7. Leonardo Da Vinci could draw forward with one hand while writing backward with the other.
8. The middle finger of Galileo Galilei is on display at the Museo Galileo in Florence.
9. Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, before having 10 children, three of which died before the age of 11. This lead him to wonder whether close genetic matches had an impact on health, adding to his theory of evolution and the passing of traits to offspring.
10. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of the DNA molecule and Nobel prize laureate, sent a letter accompanied by a cheque for 10 guineas to Winston Churchill, saying that the money should be used for the establishment of a brothel at the Cambridge University, instead of a chapel.
11Thomas Edison
Thomas Edison abandoned his research into x-rays when he damaged his eyesight, and his assistant had his arms amputated from repeated exposure. “Don’t talk to me about X-rays,” he said. “I am afraid of them.”
12. Isaac Newton once tried looking at the sun in a mirror, essentially blinding himself for 3 days and experiencing afterimages for months.
13. Nikola Tesla was voluntarily chaste, despite numerous women "vying for his affections... some even madly in love with him", because he believed sex inhibited his abilities to think in a scientific manner.
14. Benjamin Franklin used chess as a means of learning Italian. He would play games with a friend who was also studying the language. The winner of their match assigned a task to the loser; such as making them learn some Italian grammar, which had to be performed before their next match.
15. Anders Celsius originally created the temperature scale with 100 degrees as freezing and 0 degrees as boiling. Carl Linnaeus, another scientist, waited until he died to change the scale to what it is today.
16Robert Hooke
Robert Hooke, despite pioneering the experimental method and discovering many elements of gravitational theory first, was almost entirely erased from history by Sir Isaac Newton because they did not like each other, and Newton lived 25 years longer, allowing him to edit history to his favor.
17. Stephen Hawking once dined in the company of Edward Teller, pioneer of the hydrogen bomb, and typed "He is Stupid" in his speech synthesizer without bothering to lower the volume.
18. Marie Curie was involved in a sex scandal when a newspaper published love letters between her and a former student of her deceased husband. Her lover later challenged the newspaper’s editors to a dual to defend Marie’s honor.
19. Looking for publicity for his television, John Logie Baird went to the Daily Express to promote it. The editor was so terrified by his invention he said, "Get rid of a lunatic who's down there. He says he's got a machine for seeing by wireless! Watch him — he may have a razor on him."
20. Rosalind Franklin is the unsung hero of DNA research. Her X-ray Crystallography allowed her colleagues Watson and Crick to accurately characterize the double helix. Many believe she should’ve shared in their Nobel prize.
21Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin wanted to make the odor of farts smell good so that farting in public will become socially acceptable. He wanted flatulence to be "as agreeable as perfumes."
22. As a teenager, Neil Degrasse Tyson walked people’s dogs and earned 50 cents per dog, per walk, two or three times a day. He saved up $200 and bought his first serious telescope at the age of 14.
23. Emilie du Châtelet was a female scientist who in 1749 feared that bearing a child at the age of 42 would be the last thing she did. She worked furiously on a magnum opus that would eventually change the world of physics. Within days of completing her work, she gave birth to a daughter and died soon after.
24. Charles Darwin ate every animal he ever discovered. He sought out “birds and beasts which were unknown to the human palate.”
25. Famous chemist and lifelong bachelor Robert Bunsen once proposed to a girl who said yes, but he then lost himself in his work for a few weeks. When he finally emerged from his lab, he couldn't remember if he ever proposed or not, so he did it again, only to have her turn him down.
