[][][][][][][][][][][+][][][][][][][][][][] [] [] [] T H E [] [] M A D S C I E N T I S T ' S [] [] P R I M E R [] [] [] [][][][][][][][][][][+][][][][][][][][][][] [] [] [] By the late, great, [] [] [] [] THOMAS C. RAINBOW, Ph.D. [] [] [] [][][][][][][][][][][+][][][][][][][][][][] Role models are important to us scientists. By and large, we are an intellectually insecure group, and it helps to emulate specific individuals. Many of my colleagues, for instance, grew up wanting to be Marie Curie or Albert Einstein. Occasionally, someone will want to be Loni Anderson, but this can usually be treated. Me? Well, I have some problems modeling my career after a guy like Einstein. I mean there was something wrong with the man. Here was one of the greatest scientific minds in history, who could have very easily built an atomic bomb in 1910. (Stealing the U-235 from Marie Curie.) He could have then blackmailed Europe for billions, made Isadora Duncan his queen, and ruled the world. With his incredible knowledge of special and general relativity, he could have built hyperspace drives, dimensional transports, anti-matter rays, and conquered the galaxy. He could have teamed up with the Klingons and become master of the universe. Instead, he gave away his findings, published them in a non-paying scientific journal with a readership about 0.0001 percent that of this magazine. He then accepted a low-paying faculty position, where he had to teach undergraduates, no less. And they called him a genius. My scientific heroes are more practical men: the hideous Dr. Phibes, the abomidable Dr. Moreau, the depraved Dr. Jekyll, the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, the inhumane Dr. Frankenstein, the perverted Dr. Lex Luthor, and the criminally insane Dr. Victor Von Doom. Men who'd rather turn an undergraduate into a Hostess Twinkie than to teach him or her second-semster physics. Men who would conquer the world in a trice if it weren't for meddlsome do-gooders like James Bond or the Fantastic Four. Such talented, competent individuals are often referred to as "Mad Scientists," a term undoubtedly concocted by envious, less intelligent peers. While my colleagues dream of winning Nobel Prizes and accepting endowed chairs at Harvard, I dream of building a shrinking ray and putting the entire city of Pittsburgh into a bottle in my laboratory. Or better yet, to put Harvard in a bottle, a dirty one that has left-over soda in it. In the old days, to be a Mad Scientist merely involved doing your Ph.D. work with Dr. Jekyll and a post-doctoral fellowship with Dr. Frankenstein. Afterwards, you'd accept an assistant professorship in the Demonology department at the University of Transylvania, and happily spend you evenings turning undergraduates into Hostess Twinkies. Now, it's harder. Dr. Jekyll is an executive vice president of Genentech. Dr. Frankenstein won a MacArthur fellowship and is writing the "Amateur Scientist" column for Scientific American. And given the current shortage of academic positions, it's tough to get an assistant professorship at the Trenton State College of Mortuarial Science, let alone at the University of Transylvania. Also, the bottom has sort of dropped out of the Twinkie market. Does this mean that the Mad Scientist will soon go the way of the Trilobite, the pterodactyl and the "Newlywed Game"? Nope, let me describe how any bright young Ph.D., who has a latent desire to transfer his or her roomate's mind into the body of a hamadryad Baboon can make a well-paying, satisfying living as a Mad Scientist. But first, let me finish my experiment, heh! heh! heh! Twinkies, anyone? Getting Started First of all you have to be mad, or at least sort of leaning that way. Ask yourself some key questions: Do you look at your roommate and say to yourself "My! Wouldn't he make a handsome baboon!" Have you ever tried to order an anti-matter bomb from a Sears catalog? Do you experiment on your pets? If the answer to any of these is yes, or better yet, "Yes!-Ha!-Ha!-You-Fool!-Soon-the-Universe-will-be-mine!," then, congratulations, you qualify. Second, you have to be a scientist. Usually, this means having a Ph.D. One gets these little initials by going to graduate school. This is a 3-5 year apprenticeship where you do research under the supervision of a scientist. It culminates in the writing of a zillion (10^arrgh!) page thesis about your research. The most critical part of your Ph.D. thesis is the width of the margins. The margin requirements of my university were used by the Physics department as an extremely exact test of the predictions of General Relativity. Deviate by as much as an angstrom and it's back to the seventh grade. Flunking the margin requirement is why Lex Luthor turned to Evil. Also, all pages must be consecutively numbered (ascending order, wise guy!) and free of pizza stains. There are no pop-up pictures of Luke Skywalker or centerfolds of Marie Curie and forget about selling the right to ABC for possible use as a made-for-TV movie, unless it has something to do with incest or child-molesting. Do you really need a Ph.D. to be a scientist? Not always. Outside of numerous honorary degrees, Einstein never had one. Science is basically a meritocracy. If you could perform as a scientist without a Ph.D., then, generally, you would be accepted as a scientist. As in the case of Einstein, who worked on physics in his-off hours when he was a patent clerk, this would mean publishing articles in obscure scientific journals (Journal of Obscurism, Obscure Results, Obscure) which typically have readerships that number in the high twos or low threes. Anyone can publish in these journals. No Ph.D. required. They work like this: Send the articles to the editor. He or she sends it to the scientific advisory board, and if they approve the science, you're in. Some important facts about these journals: They are not available at your local newsstand or supermarket check-out counter, so don't bother to ask for the Journal of Molecular Neuroendocrinology or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences at the same retailer where you by Family Circle or Gent. Nor will you be paid anything for publishing an article in these journals. In fact, often you pay them to offset the cost of printing. The prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is required by law to say "The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by page charge payment. This article must therefore be hereby marked advertisment in accordinance with 18 U.S.C. paragraph 1734, solely to indicate this fact." The one time I published something in PNAS, my more jovial colleagues suggested that I might be arrested for false advertising. Ha. Ha. Ha. Pretty funny for a bunch of future Twinkies. Although it's not absolutely necessary to have a Ph.D. to be a scientist, for those of us who aren't Einstein, it's a faint bit of solace in the otherwise dismal appraisal of our likely contributions to human knowledge. Besides, "Mad Mister Rainbow" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Let us assume that the modern Mad Scientist will have a Ph.D. Frankly, if I got one, you can get one. What else do you need to become a Mad Scientist? Well, you'll need money. Lots of money. For example, I run a small laboratory that deals with mundane-type questions about brain-chemistry, the raison d'etre to someday cure neurological and psychiatric diseases. It's expensive. It takes roughly $100,000 a year to operate my lab. About 60 percent of this goes for salaries, and the rest goes for consumable supplies and chemicals. In order for me to do my research, I need about $100,000 worth of equipment. I also need a laboratory, with chemical- resiliant table-tops, fume-hoods, distilled water, etc. My laboratory is about 800 square feet. It was built recently, at a cost of about $100,000. Just to keep a punky operation like mine in business requires $200,000 in start-up costs and $100,000 a year for operational expenses. As I'll discuss below, Mad Science is likely to be even more expensive. Some of my money comes from private foundations and some from my university , but the majority comes from the U.S. Government, specifically from the National Institute of Health. I get this money by submitting outlines of proposed research to the National Institute of Health. The last one I wrote was about 20 single-spaced pages long, with the esoteric title "Computerized Densitometry of Neurochemicals." The research proposal is reviewed by a committee of scientists. If they think it's worthwhile, and if the NIH budget is in good shape that year, then I'll get my $100,000. This might be 2 x 10^-4 of the total NIH budget. It goes without saying that my chances for research funding would be a lot smaller if I wrote a proposal with the title, "Molecular Biophysics Underlying Transmogrification of Ivy League Undergraduates into Common Emuscables: Ding-Dongs, Cupcakes, and Twinkies." Well, could we, say, write a conventional goody-goody science proposal, and then, uh, liberate the money for Mad Science? Once we get our $100,000 grant; what's to stop us from ordering a baboon, a mind-transfer machine, and a big banner to greet our roommate that says "HELLO MR. MONKEY!!", instead of all those dull old test-tubes? Regrettably, the money is administered by my university, and the restrictions on its use are pretty severe. To get the research grant, you have to give the scientific review panel a detailed budget. Legally, I can't buy anything that's not in the budget, which is unlikely to have money set aside for a mind-transfer machine. What if the university were in on the scheme? You could imagine that the University of Transylvania would be only too happy to buy me all the mind- transfer machines I wanted. The problem there is that the government will occasionally audit universities to make sure that they don't misapply research funds, Usually, they're looking for abuses like using my research grant money to buy new sherry glasses for the English department, but they would certainly notice if a couple of mind-transfer machines were bought under the counter -- those things are not going to be cheap. If the university is caught misusing federal research funds, it can lose all of its federal funding. For the University of Transylvania, this would mean a cutoff in such things such as the Remedial English program for Vampires, the combined Pre-Schooler Day Care Center/Werewolf Hot Lunch Program, the combined Home For Wayward Girls/Werewolf Hot Lunch Program, and all sorts of other worthy projects. This would result in a serious decline in the quality of life at the University of Transylvania, defined as a good portion of the faculty being killed and eaten by werewolves. Let us say that it is unlikely that we can obtain funds for Mad Science from such government science agencies as the National Science Foundation or the National Institute of Health. Well thank God for the Defense Department! These days, they have more money for research than any other portion of the government, and they have traditionally backed Mad Science. I would call particle beam weapons and laser battlestars mad science, wouldn't you? Consider what will happen when the DOD is made aware of the presently-growing Twinkie gap. There is a very real possibility that millions of Americans could end up as TV snacks for borchst-breathed, devil-faced commies, who would just love to turn little Jimmie or Susie into a small yellow cream-filled cake wrapped in cellophane! what's the solution? Billions to start a crash program in the molecular biophysics of emuscable transmogrification, leading to development of an American Twinkie ray. And lucky me, sitting here with a grant already written on that very same topic, and undergraduates galore waiting to become the very essence of junk food. I get my grant, the Defense Department gets its Twinkie ray, and lots of pre-med jerks wearing Walkmen and listening to the Police become small yellow cream-filled cakes. The only problem is that the Defense Department tends to classify everything. Make any progress in building a Twinkie ray, and you'll spend the rest of your life in that mythical underground research lab in Nevada, living on nothing but bread and Twinkies. Any orginization that wants to conquer the world itself is not going to be stupid enough to let you beat it to it. You may as well get research support from the Mafia, which probably has almost as much money. Let us rule out the Defense Department as a source of funds, unless the Mad Science we want to do is the conventional kill-lotsa-commies kind. That leaves two places, both of which look good. The first and easiest is your own money, assuming you're rich. That $100,000 a year that it takes to run my lab is bus fare for guys like Donald Trump or Steven Spileberg. Let's say that the net worth of Steven Speilberg is 100 million dollars, probably an underestimate, given the success of his movies. Let's say that his yearly income is 10 percent of his net worth of 10 million. Therefore, $100,000 woulf be one percent of his yearly income. He could take an R&D tax-credit on the money, so he'd actually only be spending half this amount, or 0.5 percent of his yearly income. An average starting salary for an assistant professor at my university might be $30,000. One-half of one percent of this would be $150, about the price of a home video game. Therefore, it's about as taxing for the likes of Steven Spielberg to finance my lab as it is for the like for me to buy a home video game. According to Forbes magazine, which publishes an annual list, there are roughly 1000 people in the United States with net worths in excess of $100 million. As I alluded earlier, true Mad Science will be considerably more expensive than a paltry $100,000 a year, but having Spielberg-esque bucks certainly makes it a lot more affordable. What if you're not worth $100 million, and you have no immediate prospects of directing the next Indiana Jones films? Well, then, just like the old alchemists, you get a patron. For example: Scene: The slovenly, closet-sized office of Dr. T. C. Rainbow. Papers are scattered everywhere. Any remaining space is occupied by half-drunk cardboard cups of vending machine coffee. Somewhere the phone is ringing. RAINBOW: (clawing throught the papers) Damn it! Shit! Crap! Where the hell is that thing? (He finds it, knocking over several cups of coffee in the process) Hello? Professor Rainbow's Office. (The theme to "E.T." can be heard over the phone) RAINBOW: Steverino! how's show business, baby! Give any good meeting, ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! SPIELBERG: Shut up, you asshole, and listen! Plan "C" is now in operation. Pauline Kael just trashed "indiana Jones and the Blood-Demons of Gore." Baboon her! RAINBOW: Anything you say, Stevie baby! Bet you're calling from the old hot tub with some starlet, eh? Give any good meetings, ha! ha! ha! SPIELBERG: Asshole! (He hangs up) RAINBOW: (Searching the floor, spilling yet more coffee) Let's see, where did I put Plan "C"? Ah! Here it is! (Blots coffee from document and reads aloud) "Human-Hamadyrad Baboon Mind-Transfer Expermiment. S. Spielberg to pay all costs. Do not exceed projected box-office grosses from E.T., Indiana Jones, and Star Wars sequels and/or $10 billion." Okay, Steverino, let's make a lower primate outta that New Yorker dame! When I get through, she'll be writing her reviews in banana-flavored ink, ha! ha! ha! (He exits to his laboratory.) Yes, well, coffee-cups aside, could such a thing be done for even 10 billion dollars? This, I think, is the whole crux of being a Mad Scientist. You have to be able to do things that are 10-100 years more advanced than current technology. I believe that mond-transfer is theoretically possible (see "The Feasibility of Mind Transfer" June '83, IAsfm). Basically, it requires a more detailed knowledge of the human brain than we now have, the ability to mintor and manipulate individual synapses in a human brain, plus a very sophisticated computer to handle the 10^15 bits of information in a human brain. I estimated that the necessary scientific information and technology would become available in 20-50 years. On what did I base this estimate? Well, things have changed a lot over the past twenty years. In 1964, there were no microprocessors, no consumer electronics to speak of, no coronary bypasses, no CAT scans, the genetic code had only been broken for a couple days, "quark " was just a strange word from Finnegans Wake, the steady-state theory of the Universe seemed to be right -- a very different place with respect to science and technology. Now if we go back to 1934, there were no computers of any kind, no solid state electronics, no television, no molecular biology, no birth control pills (shudder!), large parts of the United States were without electricity or indoor plumbing... No wonder Indiana Jones roamed the world -- there wasn't much else to do To use an example of Arthur C. Clarke's, what if an advanced piece of 1980's technology would suddenly materialize in the 1930s? Say, an Apple //c computer or a compact-disk stereo-system. Computers? Lasers? Light-emmiting diodes? nothing on the inside but a bunch of wires connecting to strange little roach-like boxes, containing thin wafers with very complicated patterns engraved on them? After examination by the top 1930s scientists, like Einstein, it is more likely that they would conclude these things originated 500 years in the future, rather than 40 or 50. The point is, simply, that science and technology tend to grow exponentionally -- the more you start withm the faster rate of change. Given the normal course of thing -- a certain, non-declining fraction of the GNP going to research and development, a certain percentage of the population becoming scientists and engineers -- you will inevitably wind up with things like mind-transfer machines. Now, to become a Mad Scientist, we have to accelerate this process, targeting for rapid development in certain areas that have particularly fiendish applications. Presumably, we could do this by spending large amounts of money. If I really had a billion-dollar blank check, could I develop a mind-transfer machine? Well, not by myself, but maybe I could assemble a team of scientists and engineers that could. Sort of a fiendish version of the Manhattan Project -- the Greenwich Village Project or the Newark Project. One problem is that it's hard to motivate scientists when they're not working on self-generated research problems that are intellectually interesting. The solution to this is that classic American motivator -- money. Pay us enough and we'll do anything. Let us say we want to assemble a team of 1000 brain and computer scientists, preying upon the available university talent. We offer them salaries of $100,000 to $500,000. They would sign up in seconds. I mean, that's the kind of money M.D.'s make! As long as we preserve the "academic" lifestyle -- you can wear whatever you want, you can stay up all night and sleep late, there's no real boss -- Harvard will have to import Ph.Ds from Uganda to teach Neurobiology! The cost of this would be $100 to $500 million a year. Figure an additional $100 to $500 million for equipment and facilities, locating the project in some high-tech area like Silicon Valley, so everyone could go to San Fransisco and spend their money. Also we'll probably need an additional $100 to $500 million or so per year to pay the salaries of administrators, secretaries, janitors and the like, and to pay for consumable supplies. Total cost is somewhere between $300 million and $1.2 billion, well within the expected box office receipts of the Spielberg- esque movie sequels. How long would it take before Pauline Kael is swinging through the trees? Maybe three to five years. The project will build upon itself, with the final aspects of the mind-transfer process depending on the results collected in the initial stages. It may take six months to a year to do these experiments. Then, based on the results of the first experiments, additional experiments would have to be done. To save time, much of the work would be done as parallel, independent projects, but at some point, it would be necessary to combine the findings. What we're attempting to do is compress all the desultory scientific and technical developments that would happen as a matter of course over the next twenty to fifty years into one three to five year intensive session. If it does take as long as five years to perfect the mind-transfer process, then the cost will go as high as five billion dollars, about ten thousnd times my own research budget, but still affordable for a Spielberg billionaire. And after Pauline Kael is playing on the veldt, there's John Simon, Andrew Sarris, and those guys on Sneak Previews. Maybe they'll all end up in the same baboon troop in the outback of Kenya. If, of course, they don't end up in biomedical research, ha! ha! ha! And then, Steeverino could mind-transfer with Ingmar Bergman, and make "Indiana Jones and the Seventh Seal"! Indiana Jones finds some knight playing chess with Death. He uses his bullwhip on Death, and he and the knight go off and have an adventure! This could be followed by "Raider of the Lost Cries and Whispers"! In this one, Liv Ullmann is tending bar in Nepal with her Swedish sisters. One of her sisters is always crying. Indiana Jones comes, grabs Liv Ullmann and goes off and has adventure with her! The sister dies! Another ten-billion-dollar box- office gross! Evil Geniuses Even more important than money, however, is to be a genius. An evil genius could drastically shorten the time-table of any mad science development project. I am thinking of the guys in comic books that can make shrinking rays out of the innards of an Apple //c. In science, a genius is someone who is essentially clarvoyant. Einstein is one example. God knows how he thought of special and general relativity, but he was absolutely right. Nor is it so obvoius that if he hadn't thought of it, someone else would have. Newton was another example. In one year, when he was twenty-four, he invented calculus, came up with three laws of motion, worked out the law of universal gravitation, and discovered that white light is actually a mixture of different colors. When I was twenty-four, I think I discovered that chocolate syrup is suprisingly good on Haagen-Dazs Elberta Peach ice-cream. Such extremely intuitive scientists more or less have a tap into the mind of God, as opposed to the rest of us, who seem to be connected to a sewage-treatment plant in upstate New Jersey. Someone like Einstein or Newton single-handedly will advance science by almost a century. Imagine how quickly we could build a mind-transfer machine if a person with Einstein's abilities were interested in Mad Science. How many such individuals are there? Well, physicists will often place Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell in the saem class as Einstein of Newton, Newton was born in 1642, Faraday in 1791, Maxwell in 1831 and Einstein in 1879. The latter three were born roughly fifty years apart, while there's a 150 year gap between Newton and Faraday. Let us make the big assumption that these intervals reflecct the frequency in which an intuitive genius is born. We will further postulate that an intuitive scientific genius results from having a uniquely complicated brain, determined largely by an individual's genes. The frequency at which such individuals occur depends on the size of the world's population, and the fraction of the world's population that could legitimately expect to become scientists. In Newton's time, that population consisted almost exclusively of upper-class European males, total number, maybe, ten million. Therefore, there is one intuitive scientific genius per ten million people. The larger population of the nineteenth century, and the ability of the middle-class to become scientists would explain why the births of Faraday, Maxwell and Einstein were more closely spaced. Therefore, if the population of the techonogically developed world is roughly 500 million people, then, approximately, there are 50 intuitive geniuses out there. What's your estimate of the percentage of humans that are in some way corrupt? being an optimist, I'd say it's as low as 50 percent. That means that there are twenty-five potential evil geniuses in the world. Makes you kind of nervous, doesn't it? Maybe at this very moment, they're about to orbit their dreaded Twinkoon ray, to convert us all into small, yellow cream-filled baboons. More likely, they're breaking into some highly-protected computer system, wasting their awesome potential for evil to steal the latest video games. With one or two of these guys on our side, plus that tenbillion dollar check from Steven Spielberg, every film critic in New York will soon be a new form of junk food. Twinkoons, anyone? Professional Standards Like any other high-powered profession, Mad Science need some sort of accreditation and certification procedure. I mean, we can't have any old osteopath who can buy a secret underground lab, and take out an ad in the Yellow Pages, call himself or herself a Mad Scientist, can we? at the minimum, a Mad Scientist should be able to: a) Make a shrinking potion from the contents of the average junior college chenistry laboratory, or Deluxe Gilbert of Lionel-Porter Chemistry set, b) Build a matter-transmitter device or a fourth-dimensional ray from the materials obtained from an Apple //c or other popular personal computer, c) Mutate a common household pet and/or an undergraduate into a Giant Turtle Monster and attack Tokyo, d) From selected items in the Edmund Scientific catalog, construct a mind-transfer machine, and place minds of effete, serious- minded New York film critics into bodies of non-effete, full 'o' fun baboons, e) Again, from selected items in the Edmund Scientific catalog, build a Twinkie ray, shine on entire campus population of Harvard University, f) Make 2 x 10^6 glasses of chocolate milk, and g) Invite entire city of Boston, Massachusetts for a TV snack. Also, you have to master the cackle. A proper, well-articulated cackle is essential to the mad scientist. Its hah!-hah!-hah!-HAH!-HAH!-hah!- hah!, and not HAH!-hah!-hah!-hah!-hah!-hah!-HAH! or HEH!-hah!-hah!-hah!-HEH!. Also, it's usually followed by "You fool! Your intellect is but that of a snail darter compared to mine!" Or, "You fool! Soon all of Harvard will be mine to consume. I shall eat Steven Jay Gould while watching the MacNeil-Lehrer Report! Cackle! Burp!" Another important point is never experiment on yourself. That is what undergraduates are for. Test that matter-transmitter device on yourself and you'll be known as "Flyface" to your colleagues. The more you think that neat, new potion is going to make you immortal, the more likely it is that you're going to become a giant Turtle Monster. Sometimes, it's really hard to anticipate all of the subtle cide-effects. Unless you want the National Guard firing Stinger missle at your scaly back as you lay your eggs in Battery Park, stick to giving Jimmie-Bob and Carol-Sue extra-credit for doing volunteer work in your lab. Finally, you must keep a detalied list of all the people you're going to get. I've taken to using one of those microcomputer data-base managers. It's really the only practical application I've found for the thing. For example a certain science-fiction editor has now rejected three of my stories. Twinkie, anyone? There is also the review panel that recently turned down my grant. Baboon- burgers, anyone? Add to this: the Margin Lady, the Associate Chief Librarian at my medical school (Overdue! Shriek! Overdue), numerous teen-agers who tried to re-arrange my face, liver, pancreas and sigmoid colon, lotsa dumb girls who wouldn't go out with me (pink Twinkies!), George Lucas (he's trying to compete with me), everyone who's implied that my science is less than Nobel-Prize winning quality -- I'll get them all! You too! Go ahead, tell me what you really think about this article. Say it. Nothing's going to happen to you. It's not as if my encephalographic cerebral-cortex scanner is working, after all. It's not as if it's hooked up to the Very-Large-Array Raio Telescope in New Mexico, and is capable of picking up a gopher's thoughts from 50,000 km away, much less yours. So, go ahead, tell me. But first, if you have a dog or some other household pet, you may want to lock it a room somewhere. Dogs love Twimkies, after all. Hah!-hah!-hah!-HAH!-HAH!-hah!-hah! after all.