The trope of the evil scientist is useful for fiction, but it is grounded in real history. Scientists as a whole are just as ethical as the population of people they came from, and that means that some were fine with doing horrible things to experimental subjects they considered lesser than themselves, whether that involved animals, disabled people, subjugated races, or even uninformed volunteers. Some of these experiments turned out to be a bit fraudulent in their findings as well.
A psychological experiment conducted by John B. Watson in 1920 may seem tame compared to those linked above, but it involved an innocent baby, which shocked the scientific world. It was one of the experiments that led to stricter ethical standards in science experiments, and drove home the importance of scientific rigor in claiming results that may or may not stand up over time. There is little direct documentation left of the Little Albert experiment, but Weird History uses what little photographic evidence is left plus plenty of stock footage to tell the tale.
Comments (0)