Prologue: Cleopatra’s Legacy
According to legend, the first unethical science experiment in history was designed by none other than Cleopatra.
At some point during her reign (51 to 30 BCE), a question arose among Egyptian scholars: when can you first tell whether babies are male or female in the womb? No one knew, so Cleopatra enlisted some maidservants in a fiendish plan.
This wasn’t the queen’s first foray into medical science. According to ancient sources—and modern historians back this up—Cleopatra took a lively interest in the work of her court physicians. She also invented a dubious cure for baldness—a paste of scorched mice and burnt horse’s teeth, which was blended with bear grease, deer marrow, reed bark, and honey and massaged into the scalp “until it sprouted.” More ominously, the Greek historian Plutarch reported that Cleopatra experimented on prisoners with poisons. She started with tinctures and chemicals—probably derived from plants—and graduated to venomous animals. (She even pitted different venomous beasts against each other in combat, fascinated to see who’d win.) This knowledge came in handy when Cleopatra ended her own life by letting an asp bite her breast, which she’d observed to be a relatively painless death.
As bad as poisoning prisoners seems, her experiment with fetuses surpassed that in depravity. We don’t know the source of Cleopatra’s obsession here—why she cared about the answer so much. But whenever one of her maidservants was sentenced to death (an apparently common occurrence), the queen ran her through the same procedure. First, in case she was already pregnant, she forced the maid to swallow one of the noxious substances she knew about, a “destructive serum” that purged the womb. With the slate now clean, Cleopatra had a manservant forcibly impregnate the maid. Finally, at some predetermined time later, she had the maid’s belly torn open, and the fetus inside fished out. Accounts differ on the results, but Cleopatra could reportedly distinguish males from females by day 41 after conception—thus proving that sexual differentiation began early. All in all, she considered the experiment a success.
Now, the only historical mentions of this horror come from the Talmud, and on the face of it, the accounts are suspect. Cleopatra had scores of enemies who spread propaganda about her, and it’s hard to think of a story that would demonize her more effectively than this. Furthermore, according to what doctors now know, the results don’t make sense. Six weeks after conception, fetuses have eyes and a nose and little finger nubs, but they’re only a half-inch long and don’t have genitals—making it impossible to distinguish males from females. (Genitals form during week nine, when the fetus is two inches long.) So even laying aside the propaganda, it’s doubtful whether Cleopatra performed this experiment.
Legend or not, however, many generations of people believed this story—which says something important. Cleopatra was powerful and hated, and the ghastly vividness of the tale gripped people’s imaginations. We expect tyrants to do horrifying things. But even beyond that, something else about the account rang true. There was an archetype lurking there, something deep and scary that was recognizable even back then—a person who takes things too far and lets their obsessions get the best of them. What we now call a mad scientist.
The madness of a mad scientist is a peculiar one. They’re not muttering gibberish or buttonholing you about loony conspiracies. To the contrary, they think quite logically. Here, Cleopatra experimented only on maidservants sentenced to death. If they were going to die anyway, she apparently reasoned, why not have them serve some useful purpose in the meantime? This decided, she made them take an abortifacient, to ensure that any prior pregnancies didn’t confound her results. She then recorded the exact date of the rape-insemination, to nail down her answer to the day. If we judge this solely as an experiment, Cleopatra did everything right.
Judged by every other standard, of course, Cleopatra did nothing right. She grew so obsessed, so blinkered, that she abandoned all notions of decency and compassion—ignoring the gore and the shrieks of pain, pushing ahead no matter the human cost. No, what makes mad scientists mad isn’t their lack of logic or reason or scientific acumen. It’s that they do science too well, to the exclusion of their humanity.
Introduction
In our society, scientists are the good guys—usually. They’re cool and clever, rational and clear-headed, calmly dissecting the world around us. But as the story of Cleopatra shows, sometimes obsession grips them. They turn things inside out and twist what’s normally a noble pursuit into something dark. Under this spell, knowledge isn’t everything—it’s the only thing.
This book explores what pushes men and women to cross the line and commit crimes and misdeeds in the name of science. Each chapter is devoted to a different transgression—fraud, murder, sabotage, espionage, grave-robbing, and more: a comprehensive tour of the criminal arts. Admittedly, some of these stories are dastardly fun—who doesn’t enjoy a good pirate yarn, or a juicy tale of revenge? Others, however, still leave us squirming centuries later. And while some of these incidents were splashed across the headlines of every tabloid in their day, many have been overlooked in history or receded with the fog of time, despite their sensational nature. This book resurrects these stories, and dissects what drove people to break the ultimate taboos.
These tales also have surprising things to say about how science works. We all know how discovery usually happens. Someone observes a curious event in nature, or gets a light-bulb idea into how some process or particle behaves. Then they test their hypothesis by running experiments or heading out into the field. If they’re lucky, things go smoothly (ha). More often, frustrations pile up: experiments flop, funding gets yanked, fossilized colleagues refuse to accept new results. Finally, after much persistence, the evidence is too overwhelming to ignore, and the opposition thaws. The scientist returns from the intellectual wilderness, hailed as brilliant. The world at large benefits with a new medical treatment or high-tech material, or maybe even insight into where life comes from or the fate of the cosmos.
It takes a certain type of person to endure this gauntlet, someone patient and self-sacrificing. That’s why our society has traditionally revered scientists as heroes. But science is more than a string of isolated eurekas. Like much of the rest of society, science has faced a moral reckoning recently, and understanding what good and evil look like in science—and the path from one to the other—is more vital than ever. Science has its own sins to answer for.
Even more surprising is the realization that unethical science is often ipso facto bad science—that morally dubious research is often scientifically dubious as well. At a glance, that might sound strange. After all, people often argue that knowledge is neither good nor bad; only human application makes it so. But science is also a communal activity—its results need to be checked, verified, and accepted by other people. Humans are baked right into the process, and as story after story in this book shows, science that ignores human concerns or tramples human rights consistently falls short of what it could be. At best, such work disrupts the scientific community and squanders time and energy on strife; at worst, it undermines the cultural and political freedoms necessary for science to take place. Harming and betraying people harms and betrays science in turn.
That’s why these stories are of more than just academic or biographical interest. Only rarely do scientific villains emerge fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. In most cases, morals erode slowly; people break bad step by painful step. By understanding what these scientists were doing, and why they thought themselves justified, we can spot the same dubious reasoning in modern research and maybe even prevent problems from arising. Indeed, dissecting depraved deeds provides an opportunity to learn how to short-circuit bad impulses and redirect people toward better ends.
Along those same lines, many stories here plumb the psychological motivations behind these warped deeds. What are scientifically minded criminals like? How do they differ from run-of-the-mill criminals? And how does their intelligence and advanced knowledge of the world aid and abet their wrongdoing? Chapter four, for instance, examines a sensational murder at Harvard, where a medical professor used his knowledge of anatomy to dispatch and dismember a university trustee. (He thereby became the second Harvard alum in history to be executed for a crime. In a later chapter, we’ll meet the man who was nearly number three.) Many people just assume that intelligent folks are more enlightened and moral; if anything, the evidence runs the other way.
Finally, how do scientists justify their sins to themselves and others? Psychologists have actually identified several tricks that researchers use to rationalize their deeds and minimize their guilt—a primer on Why Good Scientists Do Bad Things. For one, scientists are more likely to trample ethical boundaries when they feel excessive pressure to reach their goals. Scientific scoundrels also employ euphemisms to mask their deeds, even to themselves. Or they perform a complex mental arithmetic, whereby the good they’ve done in the past somehow “cancels out” the harm they’re causing now.
Scientists seem especially prone to tunnel vision. It’s no secret that science rewards intense focus, and tunnel vision is a corollary of that focus. When immersed in their research, some people can’t see beyond it, and they subsume everything in their lives to the pursuit of their goals, ethics included. In these cases, the morality or immorality of a research project might never occur to them. Chapter two recounts how many pioneering European scientists in the 1600s and 1700s—including giants like Isaac Newton and Carl Linnaeus— piggybacked on the transatlantic slave trade to gather facts and collect specimens from far-flung places. Yet few of them ever questioned their involvement in slavery, as long as the data kept flowing.
In still other cases, ethics get inverted. Compared to, say, politics, science seems pure. Just think of all the miseries science has liberated us from, all those life-saving medicines and labor-saving technologies. Scientists are justly proud of this record. But it’s all too easy for some to fall into the trap that Science = Good, period. And in this worldview, anything that furthers scientific research must therefore be positive as well. Science becomes its own end, its own moral justification. Similarly, scientists with delusions of grandeur often fall for the means-end fallacy. They convince themselves that their research will usher in a scientific utopia, and that the bliss of that utopia will supersede, by many orders of magnitude, any suffering they’re causing in the short term. Chapter five shows how Thomas Edison fell into this trap and tortured dogs and horses with electricity in order to prove the superiority of his preferred system of generating current. Even worse, chapter seven shows how research into eliminating sexually transmitted diseases has occasionally involved giving people syphilis or gonorrhea, in order to study them. In both cases, the reasoning was clear: just gotta crack a few more eggs. But when we sacrifice morals for scientific progress, we often end up with neither.
Beyond rationalizations, there’s also the question of what makes scientific crimes unique. When regular people transgress, they do so for money or power or something grubby. Only scientists go rogue for data—to augment our understanding of the world. To be sure, many of the crimes detailed here are complex and have multiple motives; human beings are messy. Above all, however, these crimes spring from a Faustian drive for knowledge. For example, because of societal taboos against dissecting human bodies, many anatomists in the 1800s began paying “resurrectionists” to rob graves for them. Donning a black hat was the only way to get the knowledge they coveted. Some anatomists even robbed graves themselves, or accepted corpses from murderers. They grew so obsessed with their research that nothing else mattered to them, and their humanity got corrupted in the process.
These stories aren’t just macabre antiques, either, something to dust off and scare students with—modern science is still reckoning with the fallout. Take the slavery-based research above. Many specimens collected via the slave trade became the nucleus of now famous museums and remain on the shelves today. These museums wouldn’t exist without slavery, which means that science and slavery are still intertwined centuries later. Or consider the experiments that Nazi doctors ran on prisoners during World War II. They tossed people into vats of ice water, for instance, to study hypothermia. It was barbarous work, and often crippled or killed the victims. But in some cases, it’s the only real data we have, even today, on how to revive people in extremis. So what, ethically, should we do? Turn our heads, or use the data? Which outcome best honors the victims? Evil can roil a scientific field long after the perpetrators have died.
Beyond mining the past, this book contains some stories set in modern times, within the memories of people alive today. It also contains an appendix that looks to the fascinating future of crime. What dark deeds will scientists perpetrate in centuries to come? In some cases, like the crimes that will emerge when we colonize Mars and other planets, we can anticipate what will happen by looking at crimes on polar expeditions, where the bleak landscapes and sheer struggle to survive drove people mad. In other cases, there’s really no precedent. What new crimes can we expect when we all have programmable robot companions in our homes, or when cheap, ubiquitous genetic engineering floods the world?
Overall, this book fuses the drama of scientific discovery with the illicit thrill of true-crime tales. The stories range from the dawn of science in the 1600s to the high-tech felonies of tomorrow, and they cover all corners of the globe. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’ve all fallen into the rabbit-hole of obsession before, or bent the rules in pursuit of something we coveted. But few of us have been as thoroughly corrupted as the rogues in Icepick Surgeon. We tend to think of science as progressive, a force for good in the world. And it usually is. Usually.
