Do they actually exist or is it this just Hollywook doing what it does best?
I find there is something sexy about the whole evil mad scientist facade...

But have there ever been any real life cases, official or hearsay alike?

Barry

Sure. During the second world war there were scientists that were experimenting on inmates inside of prisons and death camps.

Choose a large group of people using almost any selection criteria, and you can be almost certain that the group will include a few evil individuals.

This is true of scientists, actors, athletes, doctors, English professors, priests, politicians, et cetera.

I would expect a group of scientists to have better than average ethics and a larger percentage of what one might call "good people." I would expect a group of politicians or sales people to have more than the average share of unscrupulous individuals.

On their own initiative, scientists & doctors tend to be decent people with ethics far better than average. The evil experiments which come readily to my mind are all associated with government or military institutions: WW2 Nazi regime medical experiments, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and various CIA/military experiments with drugs during the Cold War.

damit cosmic i was about to write about the nazi doctors. Also i would say the scientists who worked on the manhattan project were mad (well at least unethical) as well as most of the millatry tech scientists

Also i have herd of cases of doctors performing all sorts of experiments on there pts, take for example the case of the doctor in NZ's biggest gynocological hopsital who didnt belive in cervical canser and refused to admit his resurch was unethical no matter HOW many pts died

Then there are cases of doctors DELIBRATLY commiting murder of pts for all sorts of reasons

And then of course there are scientists who work with terriost organisations to produce things like the Sarin gas that was releaced in the tokio railway station

damit cosmic i was about to write about the nazi doctors. Also i would say the scientists who worked on the manhattan project were mad (well at least unethical) as well as most of the millatry tech scientists

How exactly were they unethical?
Technology is not in and of itself unethical, its the people who use it and more importantly HOW they choose to use it that is unethical.

As far as i was aware Nuclear weapons have actually had a beneficial effect, if you consider the long term picture.
The theory of deterrence ensured that the cold war never escalated into open conflict between the USA and USSR.
The dropping of Nuclear weapons Hiroshima an Nagasaki, whilst devastating and horrendous removed the need for a land invasion of Japan, which was estimated by the Pentagon to have meant about 1 MILLION casualties on EACH side, and the war would probably have dragged on into 1947 or even 1948 since that was the time frame for amphibious invasion.

Another great example is Rocketry.
Werner vaun brown, a brilliant rocket scientist, designed rockets for Germany in WW2 and for the USA during the cold war.
He designed the V2 (used to bomb Britain during WW2) and the Saturn 5 (Used in the Apollo missions to send Astronauts to the Moon).

Technology is not unethical, its all about how its used.

Technology is not unethical, its all about how its used.

Two good examples you cited there, and I'd just like to add ''necessity is the mother of invention", ... without the war, and the subsequent cold war, would we have seen technology advance at the pace it has? Would we have the Internet, if Milnet had not been designed to be a scale free, hub free network? Would we have cheap air travel, if military jets had not been rushed into production during WWII?

I think not. We have enojoyed peace thanks to the technology you cited, and enjoyed the spinoffs from that technology. While war is a high price to pay, at least there have been peacetime benefits.

Two good examples you cited there, and I'd just like to add ''necessity is the mother of invention", ... without the war, and the subsequent cold war, would we have seen technology advance at the pace it has? Would we have the Internet, if Milnet had not been designed to be a scale free, hub free network? Would we have cheap air travel, if military jets had not been rushed into production during WWII?

I think not. We have enojoyed peace thanks to the technology you cited, and enjoyed the spinoffs from that technology. While war is a high price to pay, at least there have been peacetime benefits.

Ah that might have been the case back then, but the entire movement towards an emphasised money market also insures a constantly moving technology tree. I mean Moore's law was no created as proportion to War related research. Many companies creating Information Technologies also are doing so because of their own "Corporate wars" as opposed to stale mating War campaigns.

However this consumer market has of course lead to war in the long run, this war being the "War for resources" which some countries will not sell, or will not sell at the prices that richer countries want. But this leads to how such "Mercenary" related movements occur now, to seize what's required when the natural resources aren't plentiful and can not be bought competitively.

Interesting and absolutely true story.

"Dr No" (the book) was almost completely based on the plans of William Stephenson(Intrepid - Boss of Mi6,Mi5 and fledgling U.S intelligence in 1942 and of course, Ian Fleming) to get, to steal, Vichy France's gold during WWII.

Ah that might have been the case back then, but the entire movement towards an emphasised money market also insures a constantly moving technology tree. .

And the last two world wars created the market. We mechanised, and once those factories were done creating munitions, tanks, and aeroplanes, and once we had hundreds of thousands of troops returning, we needed to keep them busy, so retasked the factories, and got troops to work in them, creating goods, which the rest bought, and so was the consumer diven economy accelerated.

If WWI & WWII had never happened, most folks would have quite happily got along with the old class system, but these wars showed the working class that England did in fact need and rely on them, they had worth and potential, and gave them aspirations. Progress through the ranks of an army having an analog in real life. Such was the start of the dissolution of the class system, and the beginning of a meritocracy, education became as important as family background, eventually supplanting it.

I'm not saying these things weren't inevitable, and that as you say, the market would move that way anyway, but they definitely acclerated things. I seriously doubt we'd have such nice toys today, without the world wars, they would be decades off still.

There seems to be a widespread beleif that war is good for an economy and stimulates scientific progress.

I think this is nonsense.Henry Ford & others were well on the way to initiating a vibrant economy when WW1 started.


Suppose the govenment bought millions of cars, refrigerators, et cetera and then dumped them into the Pacific ocean unused. Would this somehow be good for our economy? It is very equivalent to spending huge amounts of money on military equipment which gets destroyed without benefitting anyone.

Please do not lecture me about all the people employed due to the war time economy. If being employed by or on behalf of government enterprises was good for the economy, why not make us all into civil servants and pay us sall huge salaries? Of course we might starve due to the lack of farmers. We might go without electricity due to the lack of a power industry. We might have to walk due to the lack of an auot industry.

Supplying armaments to others who are at war might help an economy, but going to war is wasteful. I think this myth got started due to wars of 150 or more years ago which were fought over colonial empires. These wars resulted in the winner obtaining resources and workers in colonies. They helped the warring nation due to exploiting other countries/cultures.


Relativity & Quantum theory were initiated prior to WW1. Newton & other early sicentists, mathematicians, medicla people, et cetera performed due to having an interest in learning and discovering new knowledge. They did not need a war effort to mkae them think.

There seems to be a widespread beleif that war is good for an economy and stimulates scientific progress.

I think this is nonsense.

Its true there is a widespread belief that war leads to technological innovation and economic progress, and for the most part this is not the case.

However there is one scenario where war leads to increased technological innovation, when a country is engaged in 'high intensity' war (when the other side has very near equivalent or better forces available AND losing of the war would probably mean devastating consequences) such as WW1 or WW2.

Specifically what happens is technologies that are developed for the purposes of the war effort, e.g., the technology behind the machine gun in WW1 was re-purposed to make the washing machine.
Also, some countries, e.g., Australia (where I live) decided after WW2 that we were underpopulated and thus decided to allow in a very large number of migrants relative to out existing population, the influx of migrants (among other things) drove the economic growth.