Science’s Most Embarrassing Chapter

This really happened…

A physician published a paper in The Lancet claiming period blood wilted flowers among other things and then other scientists spent 50 years trying to prove it by injecting menstrual blood into rats and timing how fast plants died. It was called “menotoxin”.

Nobody thought to ask: if period blood is toxic, why would a human embryo implant directly into it?

The menotoxin didn’t exist. The rats died from a bacterial infection and menotoxin was eventually debunked, but the