The Care and Feeding of Mad Scientists
L. Sprague de Camp
You could hardly have science fiction without scientists, mad or otherwise. A check of the current issues of eight science-fiction magazines shows that about a quarter of the stories deal with scientists, either puttering in their laboratories or plunging into trackless wastes on expeditions. As a result, we readers have acquired a certain mental picture of how laboratories and expeditions are run.
Well, are they run that way?
Yes and no. The pictures in the stories are sometimes accurate especially when a scientist writes the story and sometimes not. If they have any consistent fault it is one of omission. That is, there are certain practical problems and difficulties in managing scientists and their activities that are seldom touched upon in the stories, though any scientist or scientific administrator will weep on your neck for hours about them.
To begin with, who or what are scientists? People who practice science. To save type in a chase for definitions we might as well include engineers as "applied" scientists, though some of the "pure" scientists may object. The two classes are not very different as human types, except that you might say that pure scientists are like engineers only more so; or that engineers are more "average" than pure scientists.
Now, scientists vary just as other people do. There are wise and foolish ones, sober and dissipated, solitary and gregarious, courteous and boorish, puritanical and lecherous, industrious and lazy, and so on. They do as a class show certain tendencies. For one thing they are all people of high intelligence, because even to be anchorman in the graduating class at one of our tougher Institutes of Technology one has to be up in the top four or five percentile of the whole population; and to get through a Ph. D. examination in science puts one up in an even more rarefied stratum. The scientist may be a fool about some things, but he must have that basic mental power to become a scientist at all; he cannot be a moron in any strict metrological sense.
Being more intelligent than the average, scientists perhaps tend to be more reasonable, rational, and judicious than most people. When conflicts of interests or ideas occur among them, there is a better chance but a chance only of settling the conflict by reason and discussion. All of which does not prevent some scientists from getting into love-life troubles, falling for obvious hoaxes and swindles, or embracing pseudoscientific doctrines like Spiritualism and Marxism.
Dr. Sheldon, the varieties of human physique and temperament man, thinks that scientists tend towards his ectomorphic physical type and cerebro-tonic temperament. From what I have seen of scientists I am inclined, on a basis of subjective impressions, to agree. The ectomorph is the thin man, and the cerebro-tonic is the thoughtful, introverted, nervous, self-controlled, subdued individualist. He likes to work by himself, prefers ideas to people, and ages well, becoming wrinkled and leathery instead of paunchy and jowly. The psychologists class him as a schizoid.
Every time I attend a meeting of the alumni of my college California Tech I look around the circle of lean, slowly wrinkling men with sober faces behind steel-rimmed glasses gleaming over the highballs; note the careful gestures and precise speech, and chalk one up for Sheldon. How different from a conclave of salesmen or politicians.
Of course we have here a chicken-and-egg problem: Are they scientists because they lacked the physical strength to compete with other boys in sport and combat and thus directed their energies in other directions? Or are they thin and under-muscled because they never had enough interest in food to eat enough to fill them out? I don't know and doubt if anybody else does.
Some scientists are interested in arts, games, and sports in addition to their work. Einstein's violin is famous and I know several who paint. Others take an attitude of willful Boeotian ignorance towards interests outside their particular field. Many read science fiction because, as one explained: "In the stories the experiments always work."
Most of them are sociable in the specialized way that writers and other practitioners of numerically small professions are sociable: They like to congregate with the few others of their kind, but find the general mass a bore. Most of them make good matrimonial risks if the girl doesn't mind such quirks as refusing to come to meals until they have finished some recondite train of abstract thought. According to the statistics the sedentary ones like chemical engineers make better-than-average husbands, but some of those whose work requires extensive travel and exploration, such as anthropologists, are poor matrimonial risks.
The usual accusations against scientists of absentmindedness, lack of interest in great wealth, and a tendency to treat a date with a girl as a problem in advanced socio-dynamics, have a grain of truth. However, a couple of late science-fiction novels, Stewart's "Earth Abides" and Norris' "Nutro 29," each presented a hero evidently intended as a typical scientist. The egregious characteristic of these men was, let's say, lack of character. Isherwood Williams and Thomas Hightower are weak, pliant, easygoing, irresolute men, content to drift with the tide.
Now as far as my acquaintance with the breed goes, that is not at all typical. For of all men, scientists are on the average the world's most stubborn and refractory individualists, usually inoffensive, but capable of pursuing any objective on which they have set their sights with the fanatical intensity of mania. When people call scientists "mad" they refer to this quality. If that were not the case, they would never undergo the long and intense educational process that it takes to make a scientist.
Which brings us to the main question: How do you govern the ungovernable? Should you even try?
But before we get into that subject there are two other varieties of fictional scientist, common in stories but extremely rare in fact, who require comment. One is the rich scientist. Rich scientists are rare because a boy born rich is unlikely to develop the necessary drive, while poor scientists seldom have either the commercial acumen or the time and opportunity for financial manipulations to get rich.
There are exceptions: I once knew a young scientist who inherited a pot of money, built his own lab with it, became one of the country's leading biophysicists, and is now an authentic big shot, serving on committees to advise the President what to do with the Atom and so forth.
But for practical purposes the rich scientist is like that other familiar fictional character: the super-colossal hero seven feet tall, with tawny hair and smoldering ice-blue eyes and never mind the mixed metaphors broad of shoulder and mighty of thew, who pulverize platoons of dastards and "liberates" droves of wenches as easily as we common clods put on our rubbers.
Now, it is not true to say that no such person ever lived. There was one once: King Harold III of Norway (10151066 ) whose fantastic career out-Conaned Conan. Harold the Roughneck was seven feet tall; he did lead his army bellowing battle songs and cutting down foes like ripe wheat with a two-handed sword; he did hew his way at the head of the Byzantine Emperor's Varangian Guard through the Muslim hordes to Jerusalem and back half a century before the Crusades officially began, and so forth. But the type has never been.
The other fictional type is the beautiful lady scientist. As a matter of cold fact most lady scientists range from plain to downright ugly, even though Dr. Beebe did have a very photogenic assistant, a blond girl ichthyologist, some years back. The reason is simple. Ugly girls tend to go in for science just as skinny boys do, because they can compete in this field with their fellow-beings better than on more conventional grounds.
Now comes the problem of putting our scientists to work and keeping them at it in an efficient manner. Well, where and how do scientists work?