Woo boy, could I disavow you of this with some stories of labs that I’ve worked in!
Well, to take your 3 examples for a moment, I wouldn’t really call Mengele a scientist. He was simply a sick and twisted fuck who got his jollies out of torturing people. Ishii might fall into the same category, I dont’ know enough of about him to say for certain, but it could simply be that he was “just following orders,” and not an instigator of such things. Bull, wasn’t exactly mad. He had some rather unconventional ideas and was desperate to prove that they would work, so he shopped his ideas around to anyone who’d pay him. IIRC, he eventually realized that Saddam was a nutbag and was planning on getting out of there, when the Mossad whacked him. Bull’s son was so enraged by this that he went back to Iraq to try to complete his father’s work (and I’ve no idea what happened to him afterwards).
I didn’t say Ishii and Mengele were good (in terms of skill, or personal morality) scientists, but they were medical professionals ostensibly trying to acheive goals through research. (And Ishii, as I recall, actually did get some results in his bio-warfare experiments—the Japanese were producing and using bioweapons in China.)
And Bull…c’mon. He’d devoted himself to a wild technological scheme that few others believed in, and when he lost his funding and his standing in proper society, he sold it to an evil dictator for use as a superweapon, and so he could continue his work. How is that not an archtypical Mad Scientist story? Because he didn’t kidnap someone’s nosy but beautiful love interest for a test subject? Too few Tesla coils? Not enough flying monkeys for your tastes?
Do tell!
i always wondered why bond had to fly around looking for the secret base hidden in a volcano when the construction alone would have required thousands of tons of cement and other building materials ,several hundred construction workers who would all need to be fed ,fuel etc. and up and running a couple of hundred henchmen,stationary ,phone ,power and sewage lines . secret !! the local population for miles around would have supplying the evil masterminds h.q as the mainstay of the economy !
Because I’m still working on securing funding, and a volcano.
Steinbrenner?
I agree with Fiveyearlurker. There are plenty of loonies in science.
Last Week
MM: Where’s the clock?
Co-worker: Dr. L took it down. The ticking was bothering him.
MM: Dr. L? From across the hall?
CW: Yep. He put the clock in a desk drawer in a room downstairs.
MM: Wouldn’t it have been easier to take out the batteries?
I was the first, and last, graduate student to graduate under my PhD advisor. Six grad students entered. All but me left the lab. He was stripped of his right to have grad students entirely after me.
He was an MD, not a PhD. No experience in a lab whatsoever. Why they let MDs like this have labs is beyond me.
I could name a lot of scenarios. One in particular that gets my goat was that I had a tumor model working in mice. I had constructed a viral vector that was shrinking tumors, or at least slowing their growth. I had repeated the experiment twice, and was doing the third (if you can’t do it thrice, you shouldn’t publish it). All of a sudden, halfway through the experiment, the data went screwy. Tumors that had previously been small, were all of a sudden large and vice versa.
Turns out, that in an attempt to prove that I was fabricating data, he switched the tags on the mouse cages. I spent months trying to figure out what was going on, and he let me suffer knowing full well what had happened. And then he did it again. Only this time, he was an idiot because I had nine mice in one group and ten in the other. All of a sudden those numbers were reversed as well.
When confronted, he called me a baby for complaining about it, and informed me that he had done it to teach me a lesson about being humbled by science or some such crap. It was all just an ego thing. He couldn’t take not being the center of attention in the lab, like he was in the surgery suite.
Then there was the time he threw a pipette at my head.
And the time he tried to cut my funding without telling me so that I would keep working and not getting paid.
Or the time he tried to have my name removed from my patents, and his put on them.
Or the time he informed my thesis committe that I had agreed to postpone my dissertation defense for a year.
Don’t let your babies grow up to be scientists.
[QUOTE=Ranchoth]
I didn’t say Ishii and Mengele were good (in terms of skill, or personal morality) scientists, but they were medical professionals ostensibly trying to acheive goals through research. (And Ishii, as I recall, actually did get some results in his bio-warfare experiments—the Japanese were producing and using bioweapons in China.)Well, technically, no mad scientist is good, but I’m still not certain that either one of them qualifies, since it’s entirely possible that they both could have been cogs in a machine. (Mengele, most likely wasn’t, but I don’t think that he should be considered a scientist since very few of his experiments had any realistic or practical goals [or even fell under “pure” research] and were more a way for him to get his jollies.)
Bull, I don’t think fits completely, either. He had a vision for a technology and didn’t care about where the money came from in the beginning, but gradually, he decided that Saddam was just too nutty. He was more of the “amoral scientist” type than the mad type. After all, his primary goal for his supergun was to launch payloads into orbit and not to fling large shells at Israel. Had he been motivated primarily to build a weapons system, then I think that he’d had fit the model almost perfectly. YMSMV (Your Mad Scientist May Vary).
If I may be so bold, you’re splitting hairs. There are plenty of characters in fiction (or real life, at that) generally considered “mad scientists” who “fought on the side of the angels,” and I’ll humbly suggest that the line between “mad scientist” and “amoral scientist pioneering fantastic technology that’s easily applied to creating superweapons” is so fine as to be inconsequential.
And I’m hardly an expert on the subject, but Shiro Ishii was about as much a “cog” as Werner von Braun was. He was a microbiologist who commanded Unit 731.
Hans Zarkoff being a fine example of such.
“Once ze rockets go up
Who cares where zey come down?
That’s not my department,”
Says Werner von Braun.
---------------------------Tom Lehrer
David Lesar.
he’s about the only one who fits the bill-he had enough money to fund his own research-for a while. And his laboratory was full of weird lights, thunder bolts, and noxious gases. But, as a consequence of his madness, tesla lost his money and went broke-his later years were quite pitiful. As for gerald Bull-the man was indeed obsessed-and working for Saddam Hussein was his undoing (the Israeli Mossad got wind of what he was doing). He was warned to stop, but kept at it-so the Mossad bumped him off.
There must be some truely creative sorts that are also good at project management (needed to build underground hideout, and construct uber weapon) and people management (keeping your,co-conspiritors and fiercely loyal private army in line) but I have yet to meet one.
And seriously, If your really smart, then you realize how screwed up the world is, and who in thier right (or otherwise) mind would want to rule such a cluster fuck?