Original subtitles

WILLIAM SHATNER: A trailblazing biologist determined to design

a half-man, half-beast hybrid.

A gifted neuroscientist

whose machine can manipulate the human mind.

And an eccentric aristocrat

who inspired the world's greatest mad scientist.

For thousands of years, mankind's great thinkers

have made enormous contributions to scientific progress.

Yet, throughout the centuries,

there have been more than a few men of science who-

while brilliant in their own right-

pushed the boundaries of experimentation

to the edge of madness.

They were renegades,

known for bizarre experiments

involving human-animal hybrids,

mind control devices,

and even...

unspeakable torture.

What were these mad scientists really trying to achieve?

And what led them down a strange, dark path

in their pursuit of knowledge?

Well, that is what we'll try and find out.

? ?

A Chinese district court finds biophysicist He Jiankui

guilty of illegal medical practices.

His crime involves a highly controversial procedure

where the DNA of three female embryos is genetically edited

for the purpose of creating HIV-immune babies.

The academic and medical communities

call the radical experiment unsafe and unethical...

and He Jiankui is added to a long list of geniuses

whose dangerous acts have deemed them

"mad scientists."

NINA FARAHANY: I think there are so many questions

about what motivated him.

Scientists are driven by the same kinds of motivations

that other humans are driven by.

In the same way that people want to gain fame or notoriety,

scientists may want to gain fame or notoriety, too.

Sometimes, that ambition drives them to cut corners

or to do unethical experiments

because it could lead to a major breakthrough

that would advance their career.

And that desire to become famous, to get a Nobel Prize,

to be internationally recognized,

can really, in many ways, poison the work

rather than improve it.

ALEX BOESE: There's one particular

psychological bias that scientists are more prone to

than your regular person.

And that's the idea that they can get seduced

by the idea of their own brilliance.

They can get attached to an idea,

and they will go to extraordinary lengths

to be proven right.

The mad scientist represents this idea.

(thunder crashes)

SHATNER: When we think of a mad scientist,

we often imagine an obsessed madman

performing extreme and disturbing experiments

in a dark laboratory...

...but where does that image come from?

The term "the mad scientist" really enters the mainstream

in 1818 with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Victor Frankenstein was the doctor,

and she described him as a mad scientist,

and that's really the character that we think of

when we think of a mad scientist.

Victor Frankenstein created a humanoid figure.

A monstrous humanoid figure.

He was playing God,

and therefore, he was the ultimate mad scientist.

Mad scientists were fanatically driven to experiment

well away from the eyes of the population,

and often these experiments,

they're unethical, they're immoral.

They could be grotesque and horrifying,

as with Dr. Frankenstein.

WALTER GRUDEN: The stereotype of the mad scientist

comes from the early 19th century.

We know that, at that time,

many scientists worked in isolation,

and so, this idea of a mad scientist,

working by themselves

in some dungeon or laboratory somewhere,

who perpetrated some great crime against humanity,

this comes from

this Victorian-era way of conducting science.

SHATNER: While stories of evil geniuses

have frightened and intrigued us for hundreds of years...

...in reality, history can point to many gifted scientists

whose work could be called progress...

or perversion.

And perhaps the most surprising example of this

is a brilliant mind from the 17th century

who laid the foundation for modern science...

Sir Isaac Newton.

Isaac Newton was

an extraordinary, extraordinary genius.

He invented

a way of expressing how the world works

in his mammoth book Principia Mathematica,

which was a bestseller in the day.

Basically, he was showing people

how to make sense of the world through mathematical formula.

ROBERT ILIFFE: Newton articulated the three laws of motion.

He devised the principle of universal gravitation.

So, I think it is fair to say

that even his contemporaries

thought that the Principia Mathematica was extraordinary,

and it almost put an end to science.

That is to say, there was very little

left to do after Newton's work.

SHATNER: Yet despite Newton's groundbreaking achievements,

to some, the "Father of Physics" was also

the most famous mad scientist of his time.

JOHN HORGAN: If you're talking about the trope of the mad scientist,

Isaac Newton is a classic example in the sense that,

on the one hand, he is an emblem

of human rationality,

of using human reason

to figure out how nature works.

But Newton was also a crackpot,

we'd have to say, in modern terms.

He was a practitioner in alchemy,

which is this kind of occult precursor of modern chemistry.

He actually did experiments,

hoping he could find the philosopher's stone,

which would be a way to turn lead into gold.

SHATNER: In addition to his interest in alchemy,

Newton's most notable achievements include

the invention of calculus,

the creation of the reflecting telescope,

and groundbreaking work in optics.

But his determination

to understand the composition of light and color-

and how we see them-

would lead him to conduct gruesome experiments...

on his own eyes.

Newton's experiments with his eyeballs

are extraordinary. There's nothing like it.

What he's trying to find out is, how do we see things?

We have two separate notebooks

where he describes in detail what he did,

what the effects were, because they damaged his eyesight.

We know that his eyesight was damaged by looking at the Sun.

So much so that, in the last months of his life,

he recalled that he could still see the Sun if he shut his eyes.

That he'd clearly damaged his eyes

so much that this lasted for 60 years.

RICHARD SPENCE: Newton was really interested in understanding sight.

So, in the pursuit of this,

he took what he called a bodkin, a large needle,

and he decided to see what would happen

if he stuck it into his eye

and pushed it back as far as it would go.

And he saw all these little lights going off,

because if the eye is injured,

it will send little screaming light signals to your brain.

Now, you know, most people probably wouldn't do that.

Isaac Newton was kind of crazy.

IWAN MORUS: On the one hand,

it's perfectly possible to understand

the rationale of what he was doing.

It's a perfectly sensible question:

what does happen to your sight when the eyeball

is distorted in various ways?

But the thought that a good way of answering that question

would be to kind of

push a needle around the back of your eye...

It's just this horrible, horrible thought.

No sane person would do something like that.

But Newton clearly thought that this was

a perfectly sane thing to do.

You know, there lies the mad scientist.

SHATNER: A scruffy-looking dog is found injured

and brought to an animal hospital.

But upon examination, doctors soon realize

this is not a typical canine.

In fact, this four-legged creature

is an entirely new hybrid animal-

a unique combination of domesticated dog

and Pampas fox.

Now identified as a dogxim,

its origins are unknown.

Was it created in nature,

like the coyote-wolf hybrid called coywolves,

or was the dogxim man-made, like the liger,

which is half lion, half tiger?

Our fascination with hybrid creatures

can be traced back for thousands of years,

and many times, these freaks of nature

include strange, unthinkable combinations

that are part animal and part human.

If you go back and look at Paleolithic art,

40,000 years old,

they were painting on cave walls

hybrids of men and birds,

women and bison.

Another famous example is the Sphinx in Egypt.

The body of a lion and the head of a person.

And one of the driving forces behind this was

the idea that it might have been possible,

using magic,

to actually acquire

some of the powers that animals had.

(growling)

SHATNER: While tales of half-man, half-animal creatures

have been part of folklore and mythology since ancient times,

has modern science now reached a point

where human hybrids could become a reality?

This mad notion was the focus of a Russian scientist

with a disturbing vision.

Dictator Joseph Stalin launches

the first Five-Year Plan for the Soviet Union.

Heavy industries like steel, coal and machinery

are the focus of rapid industrialization.

Farmers are pressured to increase their harvests

to support the growing workforce.

And scientists are tasked with figuring out

how to breed stronger livestock.

Leading this effort is a Soviet biologist named...

Ilya Ivanov.

Ilya Ivanov started his career

as a biologist under the czarist regime,

and one of the things that he was very interested in

was the idea of the artificial insemination

of horses and cattle.

So this was a way to take

particular desirable biological traits-

find the stallion who had the traits you wanted,

and if you milked the sperm

and artificially inseminated it,

that one horse can fertilize five thousand mares.

BOESE: Before the 20th century,

artificial insemination was

looked at as something that just would not work.

Ivanov helped to prove that this was not the case.

And he began using these techniques

to create strange new creatures.

He created a zebra-donkey hybrid

called a zedonk

and a bison-cow hybrid called a zubron.

And it was amazingly successful.

He became the foremost expert in the world

on artificial insemination.

But then, he had an even bigger idea.

He thought, could we breed

a human with a chimpanzee?

SHATNER: To most of us, the idea of

a half-human, half-chimpanzee hybrid

sounds, well, insane.

But Ilya Ivanov was convinced

such a combination was possible,

and he became obsessed with the idea

of creating an entirely new species called...

humanzee.

FARAHANY: Ilya Ivanov wanted to create a crossover

between apes and humans.

He called these the "humanzee" experiments.

It was government-funded research.

Part of what people believe he was trying to show

is that humans really did evolve from apes.

And by showing this kind of interspecies impregnation,

it would, in theory, prove that kind of evolutionary link.

As far as we know, Ilya Ivanov

tried this in a lot of different ways.

He tried to get human women

to be willing to be inseminated artificially by ape sperm.

He tried to transplant tissue

from the uterus of a human woman

into an ape.

He was willing to do it in any way that was possible.

BOESE: For one of his experiments,

in the summer of 1927,

Ivanov managed to bring back to the Soviet Union

a male orangutan.

He named him Tarzan.

And he actually managed to find

five female volunteers in the Soviet Union.

One of the women memorably commented that

"I'm willing to volunteer for this

because I feel that my life has no more sense anymore."

So, I think he was somehow tapping into the suicidal women

in the Soviet Union who were just gonna abandon all hope

to participate in this gruesome experiment.

But Ivanov had failed in his attempt,

because the orangutan promptly died.

Soon after that, one of his colleagues

reported him for counterrevolutionary activities

and he got arrested in one of Stalin's purges.

They exiled him to Kazakhstan.

Two years later, he died of a stroke.

That was the end of his research project.

SHATNER: Was Ilya Ivanov's dedication to his delusional hybrid project

simply to prove that human beings had evolved from apes...

...or was there a more diabolical plan

driving the 10-year odyssey to create a humanzee?

Why would a Soviet scientist want to create a humanzee?

Well, we don't really know, but we can take some guesses.

One of those would be that he was trying to

create a super soldier.

When you talk about a chimpanzee,

you're talking about more stamina, more strength.

If you can pull some of those traits into a soldier,

you would have, essentially, a real-life Captain America,

and if you ask me, it's probably what Ivanov was trying to do.

SHATNER: While it's widely believed

that Ivanov's controversial experiments failed...

his work still raises

some very important ethical questions.

Even if Ivanov could create an ape-man in a laboratory,

should he have ever been allowed

to try in the first place?

The humanzee experiments raise so many ethical concerns.

Ilya Ivanov really regarded,

you know, whether it was humans or apes,

not as, you know, beings that required

and demanded our respect,

but really as instruments

for his different scientific experiments.

So, imagine for a moment

that the humanzee experiments had actually succeeded.

We have no idea what the consequences

for the woman would have been. Would it have

destroyed her health?

And how would we regard that species?

Would we think that was a human

that had all of the same rights as a human?

It's almost impossible

to grapple with the full set of implications

of an experiment like that.

Why, for thousands of years,

have humans been so obsessed

with creating hybrid creatures?

One thing that many mad scientists have in common

is that they rarely consider

the consequences of their experiments.

Which was the case with the Harvard professor

whose research into mind control

may have turned one of his students

into a dangerous madman.

SHATNER: Since its founding in 1636,

some of the brightest minds in science

have taught at this esteemed institution...

...including James Watson, a pioneer in the science of DNA,

Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Sheldon Glashow,

and the highly controversial psychologist

named Dr. Henry Murray.

GENTILE: Henry Murray was a psychologist

who, during World War II, worked for the OSS.

The OSS is the precursor to the CIA.

So this is military intelligence.

And what he was trying to find out was,

how far can you push a man before he breaks?

He was testing the limits of soldiers

put under interrogation and pressure.

After the war,

Murray went to work at Harvard as a psychologist.

COBB: During his time at Harvard,

Henry Murray was very interested

in how people respond under extreme stress,

how personality is shaped and changes.

He was committed to do so at any cost.

And if that meant subjecting students

to extreme stress to do it,

then Henry Murray was, was okay with that.

SHATNER: At Harvard,

Murray began a new research project

titled "Multiform Assessments

of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men."

He would experiment

with intelligent Harvard undergraduates

to observe how they responded to extreme

psychological stress.

GENTILE: He wasn't looking for

students that had a sense of self-confidence.

He wanted students that were

feeling isolated, out of place,

having trouble acclimating to college.

He wanted weak people to be part of this experiment

not strong ones,

because the weak mind

is just much easier to break.

So, he conducted very in-depth interviews

with these students that were potentially for the study.

He wanted to know what their values were,

what their fears were, what they believed,

what made them proud, what made them nervous,

what made them ashamed.

And, from there, selected 22 students

to be part of the program.

SHATNER: From 1941 to 1962,

Dr. Murray engaged five groups of 22 men.

Each group committed to 200 hours of intensive testing

from their sophomore to senior years.

After collecting information

about each subject's life, beliefs and values,

they were confronted with

"vehement, sweeping and personally abusive attacks,"

all intended to trigger

crippling levels of stress and mental collapse.

TONY McMAHON: He was using tactics

that he'd learnt working in the intelligence services

during the Second World War.

Murray's methodology was to, first of all,

have a brightly lit room in which he'd create

what were termed "confrontational scenarios."

So, his subjects would be covered in electrodes

and then basically shouted at, yelled at,

and this was hugely distressing.

COBB: In essence, Murray would spend many sessions

just berating students,

and they would use those things

that were dear to those students

to deflate their self-esteem.

To make them feel like they were worthless.

To give them a sense that,

the things that they believe,

the things that define them,

were horrible things.

Even Murray, by his own admission, said

that these were vehement assaults on the ego

with the intention of breaking individuals down.

There was some controversy

and some dissentment among his colleagues

that he was a fringe psychologist.

And when one considers lonely undergrads

and the developmental period in which they're in,

that kind of treatment,

that kind of torture,

it stays with the person.

The students of Murray's experiments, 25 years later,

noted serious negative side effects

of both physical health, mental health, social health

that remained with them.

(yelling)

SHATNER: What motivated Dr. Murray

to conduct such disturbing and cruel experiments

on vulnerable young minds?

Was it a radical act in the name of science,

or was there a bigger force

influencing the psychologist's mad project?

While it's a matter of debate,

some believe Henry Murray may have been

working for the U.S. government's

Central Intelligence Agency.

There are rumors that he was, in fact,

still working for the CIA,

trying to develop techniques of mind control.

I mean, when asked, Murray was quite cagey

about, you know, just what he was trying to do.

Though I do sometimes wonder,

was Murray really capable of

controlling the way other people thought

as a result of his experiments?

SHATNER: Is it possible that Murray's diabolical Harvard experiment

was secretly a mind control program for the CIA?

We can only speculate.

But what we do know

is that one of Murray's test subjects

died in a supermax prison

for a crime spree that caused death and destruction

across the United States.

His name was Ted Kaczynski,

also known as The Unabomber.

Ted Kaczynski was only 16 years old when he was at Harvard.

This is a very,

very impressionable developmental period

and one can't help but think,

what exactly was the role

of Murray's experiments

on Ted Kaczynski's future behavior?

The Unabomber carried out a series of bombings

in which three people were killed

and 23 injured.

And, of course, people have wondered

was it as a result of Murray's experiments

that Kaczynski went on to become

this sociopathic serial killer?

We know that for a fact from his manifesto,

where Kaczynski specifically went after

the American scientific community

and he attacked psychology as a field.

Now, we can't make a direct, exact correlation that,

did this experiment in mind control

cause Ted Kaczynski

to become, essentially, a domestic terrorist?

We can't do that.

But certainly these experiments

built Kaczynski's worldview.

The psychological mind control experiments

conducted by Dr. Murray are distressing,

to say the least.

But there's another mad scientist

whose fascination with electric medicine

led to the creation of manipulative-

and shocking-

experiments.

SHATNER: Cardiologist Dr. Claude S. Beck

is performing open heart surgery...

...when his patient suddenly goes into cardiac arrest.

In that moment, Beck decides to use

an untested invention of his own design

and saves his patient's life by shocking him

with 1500 volts of electricity.

Dr. Beck's invention, called a defibrillator...

...and other devices, like the pacemaker

and the cochlear implant,

has transformed lives through electric medicine.

But while it's easy to see the benefits

electricity has offered medical advancement,

it is not without controversy.

Such is the case surrounding a troubling tool

invented by a brilliant brain scientist

named Jos� Delgado.

Jos� Delgado, I'd say,

is the most flamboyant, outrageous,

fascinating scientist I've ever interviewed personally.

He moved to Yale in 1950.

And while he was there,

over the next two and a half decades,

he did all these experiments involving brain implants.

And he spelled this out in a book

that was published in 1969

called Physical Control of the Mind.

For example, he developed something

called the stimoceiver,

which is a device about the size of a half dollar

that could be inserted inside the skull,

and had electrodes inserted into the brain

that could both detect signals

being passed from one part of the brain to another

and also stimulate the brain

to get various effects.

Through this period, Delgado did a lot of experiments on monkeys.

He had all these monkeys in a chamber,

and there was one big alpha male bully and...

and a bunch of females.

Delgado put a stimoceiver

in the brain of the male monkey,

and when he pushed the lever,

it would pacify the male

and the male would suddenly become

meek and mild and cower in the corner.

There was a little bit of this

kind of mad scientist aspect of him.

Through this period also,

Delgado had been experimenting

not only on animals but also on humans.

So, in the 1950s, he was going

into mental hospitals

and inserting brain implants into mental patients,

most of whom had epilepsy or schizophrenia.

He's trying to show the power of these technologies

for treating severe mental illness,

In his book Physical Control of the Mind,

he was showing that he could control people's emotions.

He could make them laugh,

he could make them feel rage,

just by pressing a button

which was controlling the, uh, the stimoceivers

implanted in their brains.

He wanted to take the technology as-

as far as it could possibly go.

SHATNER: Delgado claimed that his radical experiments with the stimoceiver

showed evidence that human behavior could be manipulated

by applying electricity to the brain.

And to prove it, Delgado created a public demonstration

of his mind control machine

after embedding his device

in the brain of a bull.

Delgado famously went into a ring with a bull.

And the only thing he was holding in his hand

was a radio receiver.

And as the bull charged toward him,

he pressed a button

and the bull suddenly stopped.

And what he was trying to show

was that it was possible to control behavior

of other species through electrodes.

But what it also did was show people

how powerfully the brain can be manipulated

and induce fear in the public

about the possibility of brain control

and external brain control

by what could be seen as a mad scientist.

The problem with his technology is

it isn't designed to suddenly change somebody

from charging at you to stop charging at you.

It's designed to suddenly change behavior

and to make people or species into puppets.

HORGAN: Delgado had a vision

for humanity being reshaped

by these technologies that he was developing.

In his book Physical Control of the Mind,

he said that technologies like the one he was developing

had the capacity to transform human society for the better,

to create this kind of utopia,

but he's describing his patients as though they are puppets.

He can make their limbs move up and down.

He can make them wave their arms and clench their fists.

He can make them laugh on command.

And what-what's creepy is that

often these people thought they were

doing these things of their own free will.

SPENCE: Where does it cross the line

between understanding how the brain works

and then making it work in a particular way?

So, if we could just have a remote control,

and press a button and make them behave in certain ways,

the next question becomes, why not?

BOESE: If we think of what Delgado was doing

to control human movement and behavior,

then that raises the question of

who gets to play God, in that sense?

Who-who, then, gets to control that behavior?

If we are like puppets,

then who is pulling the strings?

The idea of creating an army of human puppets

is certainly unnerving.

But when it comes to conducting diabolical human experiments,

the medical atrocities committed

during World War II stand alone,

and earned one mad scientist

the terrifying nickname...

"the Angel of Death."

SHATNER: The Auschwitz-Birkenau state museum, Poland.

During World War II, it was the site

of some of the worst atrocities in all of human history.

Over one million innocent victims

were murdered here by the Nazis.

And later, survivors would speak

of a sadistic doctor stationed here,

responsible for truly horrific experiments

on the prisoners,

named Dr. Josef Mengele.

MORUS: There's no more notorious example

of the extremes of scientific experimentation

than Josef Mengele at Auschwitz

during the course of the Second World War.

His victims called Mengele "The Angel of Death."

When he came around, they knew they were going to die

in horrible, vicious ways.

SPENCE: Mengele joins the Nazi party in '37.

Early on, he's actually a combat doctor.

He's wounded on the Russian front,

sent back to Germany to recover,

and then reassigned as the chief medical officer

of this prison industrial extermination complex

with an almost unlimited supply of test subjects,

and given relatively free reign

to conduct whatever research it was that he wanted.

That consisted of things like

removing a kidney from a prisoner

and then putting them back in their work detail

to see whether or not they could continue to do that.

He deliberately infected prisoners with various diseases.

But he was very interested in genetics.

One of his favorite things

was to work with children,

particularly sets of twins.

And he would take the twins

and use one as the experiment

and the other as a control.

What is so inexplicable about Mengele

is he could be so kind and warm and gentle

to these children one day,

giving them chocolates, giving them candy,

and the next day, turn around and torture and murder them.

What kind of monster does it take

to do something like that?

SHATNER: What madness causes a man of science

to become a sadistic monster?

Some believe the answer may be found

by examining a secret Japanese program during World War II.

Tucked away in this city of ten million people,

a group of brick buildings stand as a grim memorial.

It is the home of a research and development unit

created by the Japanese during their occupation of China

in the 1930s and 1940s.

And it is the place where thousands of prisoners

were the victims of heinous experiments

conducted under the direction

of Senior Army Surgeon Shiro Ishii.

Shiro Ishii was born in 1892

into a wealthy family, a land-owning family.

His father grew rice and made sake.

Ishii, though, didn't want to follow in Daddy's footsteps.

Instead, he wanted to go into medicine.

He joined the army to become a military surgeon.

Ishii was interested in studying cholera,

epidemic hemorrhagic fever,

bubonic plague- which was one of his favorites-

but he also recognizes

that you can weaponize these diseases,

so he proceeded to examine biowarfare

as an option for Japan.

SHATNER: To test bioweapons for Japan,

Ishii formed a military research group

known as Unit 731.

And between 1937 and 1945,

they performed deranged experiments

on thousands of prisoners of war and civilians.

General Ishii was focused on the military research.

But again, the atrocities are unimaginable.

These were usually Chinese prisoners of war,

but it was really any non-Japanese.

He infected patients with tuberculosis, anthrax,

all kinds of diseases,

just to see what would happen

and if he can find ways to make his soldiers immune

or how to treat them.

And this was his justification.

SHATNER: It is estimated that Shiro Ishii's bioweapons experiments

killed over 10,000 test subjects.

After World War II, both Ishii and Mengele

were never punished for their crimes against humanity.

But ever since their horrific secret experiments

were revealed to the world,

we still don't understand

why these deranged doctors

would do such despicable things.

One answer that Mengele and Ishii both offered

was that they were doing it for nationalism.

They were trying to further, perhaps,

important military aims of their country.

But I think, beyond that,

part of the answer is that

these two were clearly psychopaths.

They enjoyed doing this.

We really don't know what would drive a person

to dehumanize another person.

What happens in their mind?

Do they snap for some reason?

Is there some trauma inflicted upon them as a child?

How could a scientist be drawn

to this type of experimentation?

I think this is one of life's great mysteries.

SHATNER: Sitting on a lonely hilltop

is an imposing stone fortress

that dates back to the year 1252.

Known as Castle Frankenstein,

after the family who first laid claim to this land,

legend says it is the location that inspired

Mary Shelley's world-famous gothic horror novel.

But surprisingly, Shelley's Frankenstein

is not about the original 13th-century family.

(thunder crashes)

It is said inspiration for her mad doctor

would come from tales of grotesque experiments

conducted at the castle centuries later

by an eccentric scientist named

Johann Dippel.

GENTILE: In 1673, in Castle Frankenstein,

was born the perfect man for that name.

That was Johann Konrad Dippel.

He was technically a theologian.

He went to college to study God.

Dippel was a man fascinated with death,

with other people's death, with his own death,

and wanted to prolong his own as long as he could.

He believed that the soul was a physical liquid

inside the human body.

And he procured cadavers, legally and illegally,

to perform experiments on bodies in all kinds of ways.

What it entailed was sticking a tube-

usually made of animal intestine-

into a cadaver,

extracting the fluids from the cadaver

and then transfer it into another cadaver.

The goal being to reanimate that cadaver

with this other one's soul.

MORUS: It makes sense that,

if the soul has a specific, physical location in the body,

then you can kind of extract it, and-

and put it- put it in another body.

So about half a century or so previously,

the French philosopher Ren� Descartes

had developed a view of humans

that the soul has a physical location inside the body.

In case you're interested, your soul is there.

That's where the pineal gland is.

And the pineal gland, according to Descartes,

is where the soul lives.

But nevertheless,

even by the standards of the early 18th century,

if Dippel did indeed carry out

these experiments on the dead,

trying to transfer the soul

from one body to another...

This sounds, from our point of view, mad.

BOESE: Like the famous fiction,

these stories of horrendous experiments...

they serve as cautionary tales

about the pursuit of knowledge.

You really have to ask:

is the way science is being pursued,

is it being done with wisdom

or do we risk creating Frankenstein's monster?

The mad scientist, for me, leaves me conflicted.

We need to push science forward.

We also have to maintain our ethics and our dignity.

But there are experiments that may require us

to forego our ethics,

even if just for a moment,

for the greater good.

And I think that's why the "mad scientist" archetype

will continue to persist.

As long as we pursue the boundaries of science,

we'll always be questioning our own boundaries as humans.

Were Johann Dippel's attempts to resurrect the dead

driven by ambition, curiosity...

or plain old madness?

Maybe it was all of the above.

And it stands to reason that a unique combination

of genius and insanity

may also apply to other great thinkers throughout history.

But no matter how potentially groundbreaking

their outrageous experiments might be...

they serve as a chilling reminder

that the price of progress

is often paid in blood.

Whether it's ego or a warped notion of right and wrong,

what ultimately motivates these mad scientists remains...

...unexplained.

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