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As the 20th century approached, our understanding of the natural world and of the cosmos was increasing at a more rapid pace than any time in the history of science. We were building on our knowledge of asteroids, the discovery of Neptune, and understanding the transit of Venus, and science fiction like Jules Verne's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" was taking our imagination deep inside our own planet. But one man rejected the long march of seemingly-irrefutable scientific progress. The cult leader Cyrus Teed was convinced that we weren't living amidst a complex solar system, and that we weren't on top of the Earth at all. Cyrus Teed thought that we were living inside the Earth.

Everyone knows Roald Dahl’s stories, and several generations have grown up on Willy Wonka, Matilda, and more. But lurking behind the Oompa Loompas and the giant peaches is the life of a scientist, an inventor, and a medical pioneer so important that his work has saved thousands of lives worldwide -- and Dahl did his best to make sure you didn’t know it.

Genie Wiley was found in California in 1970, a feral child subjected to 13 years of horrors at the hands of her father -- and her tragic story blurs the line between research and true crime. It's part psychology, part biology, part linguistics... and all a chapter in the dark history of science. Genie presented an incredible opportunity to study the limits of and potential for language acquisition at a time when Noam Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" dominated linguistic debates. But was it even possible to help an abused girl and study her at the same time? That depends on who you ask -- but the result was limited scientific knowledge and a broken life.