Furtherman
11-10-2003, 09:38 AM
The Worst Jobs In Science (http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,12543,484153,00.html)
Great article. Hate your job? Try being one of these guys:
1. FLATUS ODOR JUDGE
2. DYSENTERY STOOL-SAMPLE ANALYZER
3. BARNYARD MASTURBATOR
4. BRAZIL MOSQUITO RESEARCHER
5. HOT-ZONE SUPERINTENDENT
The article explains more, but here is an excerpt of the Worst Jobs Hall Of Fame:
THE WORST-JOB HALL OF FAME
Pre-med student Stubbins Ffirth (1784-1820) ate, drank, and breathed the blood, urine and vomit of yellow-fever victims (he also dropped the fluids into his eyes and worked them into cuts on his skin). He didn't get sick-the patients were in a late, uncontagious stage-so he erroneously decided the disease's cause lurked elsewhere.
Physician Robert Mayer (1814-1878) conceived the first law of thermodynamics but got no credit because he was unable to express it mathematically. Shattered, he leapt out a window, but survived.
As part of the doomed Greely expedition to establish a North Pole scientific base, physician-naturalist Octave P. Pavy (1844-1884) and 24 others were stranded for a year near Greenland. Pavy eventually drugged himself to hasten starvation; others resorted to cannibalism.
Marie Curie (1867-1934), who won a Nobel Prize in 1911 for discovering polonium and radium, suffered crippling pain, anemia and cataracts from exposure to those radioactive elements. She died from leukemia, also caused by radiation exposure.
Hungarian pathologist Miklos Nyiszli (1901-1956) survived Auschwitz by assisting Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Nyiszli's job was to autopsy fellow Jewish prisoners after they had been experimented upon and executed. Once freed, he never lifted a scalpel again.
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Great article. Hate your job? Try being one of these guys:
1. FLATUS ODOR JUDGE
2. DYSENTERY STOOL-SAMPLE ANALYZER
3. BARNYARD MASTURBATOR
4. BRAZIL MOSQUITO RESEARCHER
5. HOT-ZONE SUPERINTENDENT
The article explains more, but here is an excerpt of the Worst Jobs Hall Of Fame:
THE WORST-JOB HALL OF FAME
Pre-med student Stubbins Ffirth (1784-1820) ate, drank, and breathed the blood, urine and vomit of yellow-fever victims (he also dropped the fluids into his eyes and worked them into cuts on his skin). He didn't get sick-the patients were in a late, uncontagious stage-so he erroneously decided the disease's cause lurked elsewhere.
Physician Robert Mayer (1814-1878) conceived the first law of thermodynamics but got no credit because he was unable to express it mathematically. Shattered, he leapt out a window, but survived.
As part of the doomed Greely expedition to establish a North Pole scientific base, physician-naturalist Octave P. Pavy (1844-1884) and 24 others were stranded for a year near Greenland. Pavy eventually drugged himself to hasten starvation; others resorted to cannibalism.
Marie Curie (1867-1934), who won a Nobel Prize in 1911 for discovering polonium and radium, suffered crippling pain, anemia and cataracts from exposure to those radioactive elements. She died from leukemia, also caused by radiation exposure.
Hungarian pathologist Miklos Nyiszli (1901-1956) survived Auschwitz by assisting Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Nyiszli's job was to autopsy fellow Jewish prisoners after they had been experimented upon and executed. Once freed, he never lifted a scalpel again.
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