The Icepick Surgeon by Sam Kean

 

The premise of this book is the harm scientists can do as they go about acquiring knowledge.   Each chapter discusses a different example of scientific practices that were ultimately knowledge producing yet harmful.  Kean starts with the case of William Dampier a naturalist who traveled the world collecting samples but whose temper resulted in him losing all his worldly goods as well as ending up imprisoned for beating up a naval officer on one of the ships he traveled on.

Other examples abound.  There were the anatomy doctors whose thirst for corpses to dissect led to the crimes of men such as Burke and Harte who supplied bodies by digging them up from the graveyard.  Those who did the first work on electricity such as Tesla and Edison also experimented on animals, electrocuting dogs and even elephants as entertainment for paying customers.  The paleontologists gave us knowledge about the dinosaurs and that epoch in the Earth's development but their knowledge was rife with territorial battles.  

Doctors have done many horrific things in the name of knowledge.  There were the experiments of the Nazi doctors in the death camps.  Less well known but also destructive were the doctors who worked on venereal diseases and gave these horrific diseases to patients so they could study the disease's progression.  The book's title refers to the lobotomies that were forced on mental patients and which left them damaged for life.  Psychologists and psychiatrists have used their knowledge to test how to break down a patient's defenses, which was done to the man who later became the Unabomber.  This field also has much to answer for when dealing with characteristics such as homosexuality or gender issues, which the field first called diseases and tried to 'cure' by horrific methods. 

Scientists err in other ways also.  There are the scientists who sold information to foreign intelligence agencies, both scientific knowledge and military information when they worked on projects for the government.  Some were involved in helping with torture, naming dissidents as mentally disturbed or overseeing such patients' care in asylums.  Scientists in crime labs who scrimp on their work or misreport the conclusions evidence points to are responsible for false imprisonment or conversely, for guilty prisoners going free because all the trials in which they testified are now tainted.

Same Kean has concentrated his career on writing books about various scientific topics.  This book is an interesting collection although personally I had heard of almost all the cases prior to reading this.  I listened to this book and the narrator was very good.  The two men have collaborated on several of Kean's books.  This book is recommended for nonfiction readers who are interested in science and for those who wonder how to balance ethics with the need to discover new knowledge.