Who Was the Most Evil Scientist in History?
The majority of scientists are, I’d wager, not particularly evil. Most just want to understand plants, or the Moon, or kidneys, or whatever. Conduct little experiments, marginally expand the stockpile of verifiable human truths, that kind of thing. Then there are the eugenicists, weapons/biowarfare specialists, corporate toadies, and genocide technicians who give those other scientists a bad name (and who, in their own perverse way, might think of themselves as little-experiment-conductors and truth-stockpile-expanders). The list of such names is long and spans centuries. But who among them was the most monstrous? Who is, flat-out, the most evil scientist in history? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts for their take, and they were nearly uniform in their response: the Nazi scientist Josef Mengele. But there are other nominees, as you’ll see below, and some nearly manage to match him.
Introduction
In trying to understand how aggression works, as well as aggressive emotions like anger, I decided to go to the animal literature. Human psychology research is all too prone to being determined by researchers’ preconceptions, and we all have a lot of firsthand experience and personal agendas when it comes to theorizing about human behavior. It’s easier to get some distance when thinking about animals; we have less stake in any particular theory of how animal emotions work. It’s also easier to set up experimental conditions with animals that would be hard to do ethically with humans, like keeping them in confinement and exposing them to stressors.