Gerald Bull qualifies, I think. He was obsessed with building a cannon capable of firing satellites into space (and even had designed electronics which could survive the launch), after the US lost interest in his work, he went to Iraq and began developing his “super gun” there. His work progressed far enough that Israel had him killed. Rumor has it that his son was so enraged by this (apparently dad had decided ol’ Saddie was nuts and was planning on getting out of Iraq for good, when Mossad killed him) that he went to Iraq to complete his father’s work. No idea what’s happened to him since, or even if the rumor’s true.
The Raelians are a religious movement, and they just might qualify for ‘mad,’ to wit: They believe in UFO and geniocracy (government by geniuses). They are certainly scientists in that they claim they’ve cloned humans…
This Dr. Boiselier is my top contender for Mad Scientist of the Year.
Peace.
And she looks the part, too.
The example in the OP about twins brought to mind an interesting story from history.
If we use the word “scientist” to mean a person who uses an experimental method to test a hypothesis, regardless of his academic background, then arguably King James IV of Scotland qualified as a scientist.
The Bible suggests that Adam and Eve were able to speak as soon as they were created, and that there was only one language from their time until Nimrod attempted to build the Tower of Babel. This suggests that there was some original, universal language which was first choice of God, both for His communication with mankind, and for the communication of men and women among themselves.
This idea has had a powerful influence at times.
It is well established that twins who have little or no verbal interaction with other people develop a shared ideoglossia, a private language which was not taught to them.
To test if one of the existing world languages might be a natural, innate language, and, by implication, the special first language given by God, James IV ordered that a pair of identical twins be raised without ever hearing human speech. When it was decided they had grown to an appropriate age, they were summoned before the king and a panel of interpreters and compelled to speak. It was decided they were speaking Hebrew, albeit not very clearly.
If a mad scientist is one who conducts crackpot experiments, I would suggest that King James IV qualified. Anyway, I think it is a weirdly interesting story.
Another thought: years ago 60 Minutes did a report about a medical researcher in Canada who did sleep research subsidized by the U. S. Government in (IIRC) the 1950s. He would suggest to people carefully selected in advance that they required “sleep therapy” for some problem or other they suffered, and neglect to tell them that he was going to keep them captive and under sedation for weeks and months at a time.
One of his test subjects described the consequences of the brain damage she sustained. She had been unable for decades to recall faces; she could interact with the same person every day for twenty years, and still be unable to recognize them by their face.
This might be stretching definitions a bit, but since “mad scientist” isn’t really a clinical term, I think John Whitesides Parsons qualifies. In addition to his work developing solid rocket fuel, Parsons was also at one point Aleister Crowley’s choice to run the U.S. branch of the Ordo Templi Orientis.
I can’t believe nobody has brought up Lysenko yet! To make a long story short, Lysenko was a poorly educated man with an interest in agriculture who, because he was living in the Stalinist Soviet Union, was promoted again and again due to political and social connections, not merit. He eventually rose to be one of the heads of Soviet science and agriculture. He had some interesting ideas, like that anything could be domesticated by treating it in a domesticated fashion. The example I remember from a prof. was that he thought if you treated a fox like a dog, its offspring would be dogs. So he did fun things like deciding to save money by not buying wheat seed and instead just planting long grasses and treating them like they were wheat. he figured they would “evolve” into wheat within a generation. He was wrong, and millions starved because he was in charge of the entire country’s agro-policy. And he would kill or exile any real scientist who tried to point out how wrong he was. As good a candidate as any for 20th mad scientist.
[slight hijack]
So did the Nazi’s actually produce any viable scientific data from their “research”?
[/slight hijack]
There’s some debate about that. The “research” that they did on subjecting folks to immersion in freezing water could be useful for cases of hypothermia. However, some people feel that the data shouldn’t be used because it could “validate” the methods that the Nazi’s used. Others say that the tests were conducted in such an unscientific manner that there’s no valid information contained in the analysis.
slipster writes:
> It is well established that twins who have little or no verbal
> interaction with other people develop a shared ideoglossia, a
> private language which was not taught to them.
>
> To test if one of the existing world languages might be a
> natural, innate language, and, by implication, the special first
> language given by God, James IV ordered that a pair of
> identical twins be raised without ever hearing human speech.
> When it was decided they had grown to an appropriate age,
> they were summoned before the king and a panel of
> interpreters and compelled to speak. It was decided they were
> speaking Hebrew, albeit not very clearly.
I don’t think this is very accurate. First, the word is “idioglossia.” Second, it’s not true that twins who don’t have verbal interaction with other people develop a private language. They simply don’t learn to speak at all. A child has to have a fair amount of verbal interaction with other speakers or they won’t learn to talk. What happens in the twins’ idioglossia is that, as they are learning to speak their native language from the adults around them, they are also doing a lot of talking between themselves. They frequently create private pronunciations of words that then become their own “language.”
If I remember the story about King James correctly, he had the children raised by people who couldn’t speak. The children never learned to do anything except babble occasionally. At some point the children were examined by King James’s scholars, who had begun the experiment believing that Hebrew was the original language of humanity and that any child raised without learning to speak from other people would naturally begin speaking Hebrew. The scholars listened to the children’s babbling and heard something that sounded to them like a Hebrew word and decided that their theory must be right.
I asked the same question a while back. Im just mad about mad scientists!
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=111937&highlight=mengele
In my search for that thread I also found this:
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=43425&highlight=mengele