Whenever the “IFL Science!” bros started beating their chests about the infallibility of The Science™, I like to gently suggest that these honking loons read Walter Gratzer’s The Undergrowth of Science. This invaluable little tome is an antidote to not only incipient Scientism but the uncritical worship of “experts” and labcoated media-tarts.
Gratzer’s book is history of some of the very bad ideas and ridiculous which have captivated the scientific world over the centuries. From Lysenkoism to Cold Fusion, it’s a sobering reminder that scientists are only human, all too human, and that today’s The Science™ is very likely tomorrow’s cautionary tale.
Some of them are still ruling the academic roost, plaguing society – and ruining lives.
Psychologist and sex behavior expert Dr John William Money had a theory that gender is learned rather than innate. He performed sexual reassignment surgery on a baby boy.
The doctor convinced his parents to raise him as a girl, but the experiment failed when the child ended up identifying as male and not female.
“Failed” is putting it mildly. Both the boy and his twin brother committed suicide – but not before exposing Money as an horrific paedophile who got his rocks off by forcing the pre-teen siblings to perform sex acts on each other while he filmed.
Money’s “gender” theories are still with us in the form of the transgenderism fad. Far from being shunned by scientific society, Money is memorialised with a Fellowship at the Kinsey Institute.
Another group of scientists who got away with the most horrific crimes imaginable were the labcoated sadists of Imperial Japan’s Unit 731.
During World War II, the Japanese Army performed chemical and biological warfare experiments on Chinese, Korean and Mongolian natives.
The experiments included live weapons testing, germ warfare attacks, forced pregnancy, and vivisections performed without anesthesia.
General of the US Army Douglas MacArthur pardoned the Japanese doctors participating in these war crimes, saying that they were assisting America in biological warfare research.
MSN
Just as German scientists who were complicit in the Nazis’ system of concentration camp slave labour were recruited and, unpunished, went on to work on US Space Program.
Whether anything of real scientific value was ever learned from the disgusting crimes of Unit 731 has never been established, but, even today, learned scientific journals attempt to hand-wave away the horror.
This paper argues that Unit 731’s inoculation and airborne warfare experiments on prisoners of war were scientifically rigorous. The scientific method is used as the basis against which the scientific rigor of the experiments is tested. The paper reveals that the successes and failures of the human trials were extrapolated to BW missions during the Sino-Japanese war. American researchers’ expectations of BW data were fulfilled, thus paving the way for an immunity deal.
And the inconvenient fact that Unit 731 was little more than a sadistic torture chamber?
Ethical standards in medicine before WWII were not well established, but wartime medical practices and experimentation reveal the context in which the pursuit of scientific knowledge has no boundaries.
Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences
In that context of “no boundaries” pursuit of knowledge, the sadistic experiments of the Behaviourists look almost benign by comparison.
Psychologist Harry Harlow is well-known for his experiments on monkeys in the early 20th century. One experiment involved separating baby monkeys from their mothers to study clinical depression. After they had bonded with their mothers, Harlow would place the monkeys in total isolation for 10 weeks. The monkeys became psychotic after a handful of days and were unable to be treated.
MSN
Yes, they actually had to do an experiment to figure out that taking babies from their mothers and putting them in solitary confinement for months would drive them mad.
All in the pursuit of science, of course.
