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That’s the excuse they usually give for evil. Hitler was mad, so they say. So he may have been. But not necessarily. Evil does exist. Evil is. —Mass murderer George Brougham (Kirk Douglas) in The List of Adrian Messenger The “mad scientist” has become an enduring fictional type, like the gunfighter or the boastful soldier. Psychologist Stuart Asch believes that a feeling of being rendered passive to be manipulated by a mad scientist and his infernal machine qualifies as a “universal delusion” (1991, 187). My Google search for the phrase “mad scientist” in March 2002 generated 209,000 hits. A cursory survey of the sites shows that they range from instructional materials to teach children science to the International Society of Mad Scientists, described by Web master Igor as “dedicated to disseminating information about unusual projects in any field,” and whose “membership is open to anyone that in practice or spirit considers themselves [sic] to be a Mad Scientist” (http://www.Mad-Scientists.org). Yet many of the articles accessed reveal nonfictional contemporary scientists bemoaning the distorted picture of their profession provided by fiction, film, and television (see Heron 2001; Brockway 1998; Alcorn 2001). Indeed, when C H A P T E R T W E N T Y Crazy Like a Prof: Mad Science and the Transgressions of the Rational INA RAE HARK 301 we think of science as a destructive force, some archetypal “mad scientist” in the movies, be he Dr. Frankenstein or Dr. Strangelove, is likely to spring to mind. He is aptly categorized by Lady Caroline Lamb’s appraisal of Lord Byron: “Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know,” which serves as the title of the chapter devoted to fictional twentieth-century villainous scientists in Roslynn Haynes’s From Faust to Strangelove (1994). Although her survey uncovers innumerable examples of evil, greedy, arrogant, and power-hungry geniuses who deserve the second and third terms, the evidence for their actual madness, in a clinical sense, is far less convincing. Indeed, the fictional scientist archetypes she enumerates are none of them mad, despite her chapter’s title. Evil scientists may resemble the medieval alchemist or sinister contemporary biologist “driven to pursue an arcane intellectual goal that carries suggestions of ideological evil”; the absentminded professor so “preoccupied with the trivialities of his private world of science [that] he ignores his social responsibilities”; the unfeeling empiricist “who has reneged on human relationships and suppressed all human affections in the cause of science”; or the well-intentioned scientist who fails to calculate the potential harm that can be caused by his discoveries that have “monster-like . . . grown beyond his expectations” (3–4). Why then, one wonders, do we always speak of mad scientists rather than simply of bad ones? There are, to be sure, historical precedents for the connection, ancient and medieval beliefs that madness was merely a manifestation of demonic possession. Moreover, the scientist’s quest for knowledge, inherent in the very derivation of his calling, the Latin scientia (see Haynes, 7), suggests the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge and the first cause of the entry of evil into the world. Michel Foucault suggests that this evil was at a certain point in history part and parcel of the discourse on what constituted madness: In the Middle Ages and until the Renaissance, man’s dispute with madness was a dramatic debate in which he confronted the secret powers of the world; the experience of madness was clouded by images of the Fall and the Will of God, of the Beast and the Metamorphosis, and of all the marvelous secrets of Knowledge . (1988, xii) Yet the mad scientist figure is generally conceded to spring fully to life only in the person of Dr. Frankenstein and his many nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors, products of an age when insanity was being recast as disease rather than moral defect. Nevertheless, if the madman was not automatically considered bad, the bad man was often (and more frequently) considered mad. In general terms this asymmetry may spring from a refusal to accept evil as an existential category, a denial that “evil is” in favor of a claim that “evil is because.” I would posit that the displacement of the bad by the mad in the case of the scientist has a more specific cause. Let me first articulate a paradigm for the mad scientist as I use the concept in this chapter. This is an 302 INA RAE HARK [3.139.104.214...

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