I was reading through capsule reviews of some old films, and one of them read, “A mad scientist puts the brain of an executed murderer into the body of a gorilla.” Now. Come. On. You just know that’s gotta end badly. What was he thinking? Putting the brain of an executed murder in the body of a kitten would be a bad idea, but a gorilla?
So I got to thinking about other mad scientists, and each and every one of them suffered from the total inability to think things through.
• Dr. Jekyll and the Invisible Man. Sure, test your untried, possibly deadly serum on yourself. That’s a good idea.
• Dr. Moreau. Create a race of half-beasts/half-humans, piss them off and maroon yourself on an island with them.
• That Brain that Would Not Die doctor. I can see the whole Jan-in-the-Pan idea; but the huge, distorted, angry monster kept behind a flimsy door in your basement? Nuh-uh.
• Dr. Frankenstein. Send demented assistant to get brain. Don’t even check receipt.
• Bela Lugosi in Bride of the Monster, talking about “creating a rice of pipple: atomic supermen to rule de vorld!” and all he manages to do is create one rubber octopus? Which winds up killing him?
The Return of the Jedi. Start work on a new Death Star to replace the one the rebels blew up, then, once the rebels find out where it is, go hang out on it.
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Nuclear hand grenade. Think about it.
Actually, most of the Tom Swift books involved the following sequence:
Tom invents a new thingy, usually a vehicle, usually nuclear-powered.
Tom decides to test the new thingy, usually by strapping himself into it and firing it up.
New thingy malfunctions and almost kills Tom and, usually, his best friend.
Tom fixes the malfunction and the thingy performs flawlessly from that point on.
My favorite mad scientist is from Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, probably because his compassion and humanity make his cringe-worthy deeds that much more horrific. Although he doesn’t necessarily do anything stupid, he still would’ve been better off if he’d been nicer to those dogs.
What, do these people never read newspapers? They don’t talk among themselves at the annual Mad Scientists Hell-Bent On World Domination Annual Convention? Does James Bond actually have that terrible a publicist? Come on, you guys. Get with the program! It really is quite simple. Bond. James Bond.
•X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes You’ve developed a serum/eyedrop solution that grants the user the ability to see through solid objects.
The Rhesus monkies you’ve tested the drops on do indeed seem to develop “X-Ray vision”…but they all keel over and die within a few minutes of taking the drops.
So, you decide to test the drops out on yourself.
In both of your eyes.
Now, I could understand using the drops if you were already blind, or something…
I can even understand, if not condone, using the drops in ONE of your own eyes.
In the film, Osbourne does try the formula on himself. In original comics however, he is working on a serum when it explodes violently. He ends up unconscious, breathing fumes and with the serum seeping into numerous cuts.
Re The OP
For the true Scientist, there are times you must be not just the experimenter but the experiment
That being said. I am a firm believer in adequate safety precautions. If you’re building monsters you should have reinforced steel cages and triple redundancy saftey measures. Any mad scientist should have back up generators and those generators should have back ups.
This isn’t so far-fetched. Using the mind of an executed killer is obviously unwise but, from an anatomical and neurological standpoint, a human-to-animal cerebral transplant might have the greatest chance for success with a member of the ape family as recipient. The adult human brain has been hard-wired for walking upright and using the opposable thumb – hands are indeed a core factor in human intelligence and identity. Take such a hard-wired cortex and place it in an animal that goes about on four feet, and the brain might not even be able to adapt to controlling the body. That is what I told my colleagues, but they laughed. Laughed, I tell you! Now that I’m about to unleash my race of super beings, we’ll see who’s laughing then!
It’s a Mystery Science Theatre joke from Bride of the Monster. At the very end of the movie, a police officer observes of Bela Lugosi’s mad scientist, “He tampered in God’s Domain,” but says it in such a indistinct mumble that Joel and the `bots are not certain what the heck he said. They interpret the line as “They Peppered in God’s Lo Mein.”
“Rice of pipple” comes from the same MST’d movie, based on Bela’s pronunication of “race of people.”
For sheer mad-scientist goofiness, my personal favorite would be the tiny people Dr. Pretorius creates in Bride of Frankenstein and keeps in mason jars. Think of marketing potential; who wouldn’t want their very own minature Henry VIII?
A true story for those who think this kind of behavior is only fictional. Back in the 1970’s a biologist was studying some of the genetic causes of cancer. He had isolated a gene that he believed caused cancer in humans. In order to have a ready supply of it, he planned on splicing it into an E. Coli bacteria colony in his lab. Before he actually did so however, he attended a conference where he mentioned his plans to another biologist. The other scientist was shocked and pointed out how taking one of the commonest bacterias in the human body and breeding a cancer causing gene into might be a triflingly bad idea.
You know, I’m quite sure this is done daily in biological research labs around the world. Heck, a bacteria with an oncogene would be harmless. It just means that the bacteria might be prone to cancer (or uncntrolled division, since it’s single celled) than wild-type cells.
A virus (which could transfer the oncogene to the host) could be more dangerous, but not more so really than the hundreds of carcinogenic chemicals routinely kept in labs. Be careful and you’ll be fine. I’m working with potentially oncogenic viruses right now, actually.