You’ve gotta be pretty evil to even be a runner-up in this competition.

Will the real Evil Scientist please stand up?

Jesse Lawler
Aug 27, 2017 · 7 min read

It’s an interesting experiment to ask people to name their choice for the world’s most evil scientist.

Most people will default to fiction. Dr. Moreau and Dr. Frankenstein are both popular choices — the latter inaccurately, as Mary Shelley’s protagonist was actually kind of tragic but well-intentioned.

The problem is, unless you work in the sciences, you probably can’t name a whole lot of scientists — except for the top tier of household-name scientists: the Einsteins, the Salks, the Marie Curies and Louis Pasteurs. However, none of them got famous by doing anything particularly evil. Even scientists who advance weapons technology (e.g. Robert Oppenheimer of the Manhattan Project) have strong defenses against moralist finger-pointing. Their defenders can point out that sometimes the best defense is a good offense. And, on balance, strong weapons may deter more violence than they provoke.

So culling through the best known fictional scientists and name-brand science rock stars, there’s no hands-down winner for the Great Dark Sith-Lord of Scientific Evil.

But if we can loosen the qualifications just a bit and not focus so much on the fame ingredient of infamy, candidates start to emerge. Among the viable contestants…

My Runners-Up for Evil Scientist Ignominy

Walter Freeman, the American psychiatrist who popularized the operation now known as the prefrontal lobotomy. “Operation” isn’t really the right term, as the technique he employed took the same hand-eye coordination as operating an egg beater, with similar results. Freeman often did his surgeries in public and liked impressing audiences by “stirring” icepicks in each of a patient’s two eye sockets simultaneously. (He performed these brain overhauls nationwide in a heavily-marketed roadshow, similar to “Trump University” some sixty years later.)

Josef Mengele, the most famous “doctor” in Hitler’s Third Reich. (“Doctor” really seems like the wrong title for this guy, but he sported a medical degree.) The experiments he performed on prisoners remain so stomach-turning even after three-quarters of a century, they almost give curiosity a bad name.

Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who sold how-to recipes for regional armageddons to North Korea, Gaddafi’s Libya, and more. To date, the fallout from his scientific entrepreneurialism hasn’t reached its worst-case potential — but by any rational risk analysis, the expected value of the human death toll from his technology sales, at Las Vegas odds, would rank him favorably among historic serial killers and mass murderers. (And any guy smart enough to productize a nuclear weapons program is smart enough to have run those numbers.)

Each of these runners-up qualifies as an extremely bad person. The world doesn’t have enough little old ladies needing help crossing the street to ever work off the karmic debt accrued from these sorts of crimes.

Nevertheless, none of them earns the top score for my Least Favorite, Most Evil Scientist.

My pick will probably surprise you. For one thing, he’s a scientist who has never killed anyone. Not even by accident. In fact, held up alongside researchers who routinely sacrifice dozens of rodents in animal studies, even his research methods look tame. And his misdeeds — as grave as I think they are — were motivated (he tells us) by “a quest for aesthetics, for beauty.”

What’s more, he expressed remorse. He did so repeatedly and publicly.

But before I reveal his disreputable identity…

A long fuse gets no respect.

So what is the scariest disease in the world?

People treat this as a trick question, but it’s not meant to be thought-provoking.

The answer is cancer. And there’s very little room for debate. Numerically, cancer’s only rival is heart disease — and with our current medical knowledge, cancer is much less preventable by lifestyle tweaks. If you live long enough, life basically devolves into a game of which cancer will you die from first.

That said, I realize that for many people, the first disease that comes to mind is Ebola. Or maybe the Black Death or Cholera. All of these get their notoriety not based on modern-day deadliness but because of their reputation for killing people fast.

Yes, it’s true that the Black Death killed a significant percent of the medieval population — but people died a lot back then. Most medieval kids never made it to the age of five. The Black Death retains its horrific reputation all these centuries later because it could take a perfectly fit adult in the prime of his life and turn him into a corpse in under 36 hours.

By contrast, colon cancer, arteriosclerosis and black lung are slow, methodical, almost yawn-inducing killers. The near certainty that one of them will get you — assuming that you evade a flashier death from Ebola, shark attack, or satanic cultists — just doesn’t affect us at the same visceral level.

We fear the tossed grenade because we know it’s going to blow in seconds.

But some old stick of dynamite with a half-mile long miner’s fuse? We know that those things smolder forever before they get dangerous. Pass the Doritos.

Faking Science

Of the Evil Scientist runners-up I named above, the first two (Walter Freeman and Josef Mengele) fall into the “Ebola” category of evil scientists. Their victims were right in their offices, mutilated and/or murdered up close and personal. As villainy goes, these are open-and-shut cases.

Abdul Qadeer Khan fits more into the “cancer” model. To date, he hasn’t actually killed anyone. His murders are probabilistic. He has a good chance of killing a large number of people. But the blood on his hands is strictly metaphorical. He’s more like a B-52 pilot flying a sortie over your house at 30,000 feet than an axe murderer kicking in your front door. The end result may be just as bad, but it somehow feels a lot more gentile.

My pick for Most Evil Scientist is also a representative of this second group. What he did was not so much a criminal act as it was a betrayal of trust.

Diederik Stapel was a social psychology professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. In 2011, he was fired after an academic investigation revealed that he was making up data for his “research” papers. He had a strong reputation, and dozens of his papers had been published in scholarly journals — over 50 of which have subsequently been retracted.

Stapel wasn’t “fudging” numbers, using bad statistical analyses, or flopping his order of hypothesis and data collection — any of which are scientific no-nos. Stapel was just making crap up. He fabricated numbers out of thin air for the purpose of making his graphs look pretty. As scientific sins go, this is like offering up sacrificial infants to Beelzebub.

After getting busted, Stapel expressed “regret” (an easy choice when you’ve been caught red-handed), wrote a tell-all autobiography, and avoided criminal prosecution by trading away some employment benefits and doing 120 hours of community service. To my mind, this sounds like getting off easy to a scandalous extreme.

But does he really qualify as evil?

Am I serious in saying that he beats out a card-carrying Nazi?

A Cancer in the Heart of Science

If you read about his case, Stapel winds up sounding like a scumbag, not a mustache-twirling villain.

And I’ll grant you: that’s exactly what he is.

But mustache-twirling villains are as rare as unicorns. What the world has a dangerous number of…are scumbags. Scumbags are grown-ups smart enough to anticipate the downstream effects of their actions — but for selfish reasons, they look past them or rationalize them. The scumbag child molester doesn’t leave physical bruises on a kid, so he tells himself “the kid is okay” and ignores the psychological suffering that can last a lifetime and amplify over generations.

Diederik Stapel is an all-star of the scumbag category. He’s a social psychologist — which is richly ironic, because of all people, he should recognize what undercutting the public credibility of science can do.

Science has earned its legitimacy by being a reliable and efficient system for producing things that work. Too often, we forget that. Sometimes those working things are gadgets and sometimes they are ideas, but the cool outputs are why we like science. And why we should like it. The facts that you didn’t die of some ghastly childhood disease, that you live in a society where people are literate, that you can drink and bathe in clean, temperature-controlled water — these are just a few of the fruits of science.

When Diederik Stapel selfishly undercuts science’s public reputation, his doing so doesn’t threaten mass illiteracy or take a wrecking ball to your municipal water system. What it does is give verbal ammunition to the crowd who claims that “science is just one way of viewing the world.”

These folks just love to hear the story of Stapel. After all, if a respected scientist is just making stuff up, why is the stuff that my side makes up any less awesome?

This argument has its logical problems, but it also gets converts. That’s what makes Stapel a scumbag in the vein of Abdul Qadeer Khan. By weakening public respect for science, he reduces public funding for research. He makes the study of science less attractive for talented students. He clutters up the agenda of working scientists who have to spend time justifying their approach rather than building us a better future.

Is needlessly delaying future scientific breakthroughs evil?

Given everything that science does for us — both life-saving and life-improving technologies — I think the burden of proof is on anyone who thinks the answer is “no.”


PS: Check out Smart Drug Smarts Episode #186: and hear how science is working to self-correct its systems to improve accuracy and accountability.

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Thanks to Michelle Silbernagel, Barry Lawler, and Anushtup Chatterjee

Jesse Lawler

Written by

Software Dev, Podcast Host, Skeptic, Techno-Optimist. Opinions expressed have a half-life of ~96 hours.

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