Mad Scientists

Two-Headed Dogs. Drinking fever-ridden vomit. Vivisection. Moving souls from one body to another. Electrocuting corpses to animate the dead. Keeping decapitated heads alive. Human cyborgs. Sensory deprivation and hallucinations. All sound like something from the movies, no? Well, sure, there are movies that feature all of these elements, as well as books with such characters as Victor Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Herbert West. But those are just mad scientists of fiction. The things listed at the beginning of this post are things that REAL mad scientists have done, from the 1600s to the modern day. Some were in aid of advancing science in methods that seem barbarous now, but led to such things as open-heart surgery. Some, unfortunately, were done by people such as Shiro Ishii for the Imperial Japanese Army and Josef Mengele for the Nazis, more for the lust of power than for knowledge. (Auschwitz prisoner Alex Dekel has said: "I have never accepted the fact that Mengele himself believed he was doing serious work — not from the slipshod way he went about it. He was only exercising his power. Mengele ran a butcher shop — major surgeries were performed without anesthesia. Once, I witnessed a stomach operation — Mengele was removing pieces from the stomach, but without any anesthetic. Another time, it was a heart that was removed, again, without anesthesia. It was horrifying. Mengele was a doctor who became mad because of the power he was given. Nobody ever questioned him — why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part". )
    While I like the idea of mad scientists in fiction, mad scientists in real life leave me cold when they experiment on living creatures just for the hell of it, to see what they can do. Other scientists may be called "mad" because of their experiments, or their obsessions with alchemy, but they led directly to the proof-based science of today. Is science perfect? No, but that's not the point. Science is about experimentation. What is it? How is it done?
   Having said that, mad scientists in the movies or books sure are fun.
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