The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science

But when we sacrifice morals for scientific progress, we often end up with neither.

Rivalries are funny things. They waste time and energy. They stir up mean instincts and consume us with petty emotions. Yet in doing so, rivalries also push people to greatness.

...it's all too easy to judge people in the past by the ethical standards of today and feel superior. As the saying goes, fashions in ethics change even faster than fashions in clothing, and it should give us pause to know that people in the future will probably denounce us for things we never even thought to question. But it's fair to judge people for violating the standards of their own day,...

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.

Albert Einstein once said, “Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.” . . . On one level, science is a collection of facts about the world, and adding to that collection does require discoveries. But science is also something larger. It’s a mindset, a process, a way of reasoning about the world that allows us to expose wishful thinking and biases and replace them with deeper, more reliable truths. Considering how vast the world is, there’s no way to check every reported experiment yourself and personally verify it. At some point, you have to trust other people’s claims—which means those people need to be honorable, need to be worthy of trusting. Moreover, science is an inherently social process. Results cannot be kept secret; they have to be verified by the wider community, or science simply doesn’t work. And given what a deeply social process science is, acts that damage society by shortchanging human rights or ignoring human dignity will almost always cost you in the end—by destroying people’s trust in science and even undermining the very conditions that make science possible.

The vast majority of scientists deserve our trust. But no matter how you slice it, scientific fraud isn’t rare. Hundreds of scientific papers get retracted every year, and while firm numbers are elusive, something like half of them are retracted due to fraud or other misconduct. Even big-name scientists transgress. Again, it’s unfair to condemn people from the past for failing to meet today’s standards, but historians have noted that Galileo, Newton, Bernoulli, Dalton, Mendel, and more all manipulated experiments and/or fudged data in ways that would have gotten them fired from any self-respecting lab today.

the first meteorologically detailed account of a hurricane,

what makes mad scientists mad isn’t their lack of logic or reason or scientific acumen. It’s that they do science too well

Regardless, Watts was outraged, and demanded that Freeman stop doing experimental brain surgery in their office.

one bioethicist argued, “Implied consent is no consent at all.

As one historian noted, doctors “joined the Nazi party earlier and in greater numbers than any other professional group.” As healers, they especially relished Nazi rhetoric about “curing” society’s ills and eliminating “cancerous” Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals.

In 2004, a funeral director from Staten Island got caught selling bodies to the U.S. Army for $30,000; the army was dressing the bodies in armored footwear and dangling them over land mines to test how well the footwear worked.)

In a callous response to this complaint, one politician argued that supplying bodies for research was the least the poor could do. After all, look at all the free meals and medical care they’d enjoyed on the public dime during their lives.

(This should go without saying, but given how charged this topic is, it’s worth being explicit: the Africans were the victims here, not the white European.)

Smeathman’s life is worth examining, because it sheds light on an aspect of early science that most historians overlook—how intertwined science and slavery were.

But for every European name attached to some plant or bug, it’s worth remembering that there were probably one or two or a dozen unnamed helping hands.

(A rival politician countered that he too supported the dissection of those who were sucking the public teat dry. He proposed starting with the royal family.)

Many people agreed with one executive who sneered that [Thomas] Edison had a vacuum where his conscience ought to be.

A rival politician countered that he too supported the dissection of those who were sucking the public teat dry. He proposed starting with the royal family.

But psychologists who’ve studied group dynamics have found that teams with high cohesiveness and uniform backgrounds tend to make worse decisions than groups with more diversity of thought. In particular, uniform groups rarely question their own unethical behavior— or more precisely, fail to recognize they’re acting unethically.

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.