THE ICEPICK SURGEON

Thinking of submitting to experimental surgery? This book might give you pause.

“What makes mad scientists mad isn’t their lack of logic or reason or scientific acumen,” observes popular science writer Kean. “It’s that they do science too well, to the exclusion of their humanity.” Cleopatra, the Greco-Egyptian queen with whom the author begins his narrative, wasn’t exactly mad and wasn’t exactly a scientist, though she did experiment on prisoners and handmaids to discover which poisons were most efficacious and investigate when a fetus’s sex could be first determined in the womb. The story comes from Plutarch, who wasn’t a fan, so it may be suspect. Kean is on surer footing with his later, brightly told anecdotes of a host of scientists and para-scientists who merrily crossed the ethical line in the quest for glory and sometimes wealth. One was William Dampier, who had preternatural gifts for navigation and reading the weather and who gave us “the first meteorologically detailed account of a hurricane,” yet he funded his research through buccaneering. Kean then looks into modern “biopiracy,” which implicates the Asian trade in endangered animals for their supposed medical powers, and then the slave trade, with which early scientific research in Africa was thoroughly implicated. The surgery of the title comes with the invention and immediate abuse of the lobotomy, but before we get to that rather gruesome subject, we spend time in the hands of medical murderers, body snatchers, and merchants in the cadaver trade—which is beset by constant shortages that inspire “digging up buried bodies again or swiping them from funeral pyres and selling them on the ‘red market.’ ” Unabomber Ted Kaczynski makes an appearance, having been broken by a sadistic psychological experiment while at Harvard, as does Annie Dookhan, the felonious forensic scientist whose inventions led Massachusetts to overturn more than 21,500 convictions, “the largest such action in U.S. history.”

A mostly entertaining rogues’ gallery of scientists gone bad.