Sam Kean - The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science

A ccording to legend, the first unethical science experiment in history was designed by none other than Cleopatra.

At some point during her reign (51 to 30 BCE), a question arose among Egyptian scholars: when can you first tell whether babies are male or female in the womb? No one knew, so Cleopatra enlisted some maidservants in a fiendish plan.

This wasnt the queens first foray into medical science. According to ancient sourcesand modern historians back this upCleopatra took a lively interest in the work of her court physicians. She also invented a dubious cure for baldnessa paste of scorched mice and burnt horses teeth, which was blended with bear grease, deer marrow, reed bark, and honey and massaged into the scalp until it sprouted. More ominously, the Greek historian Plutarch reported that Cleopatra experimented on prisoners with poisons. She started with tinctures and chemicalsprobably derived from plantsand graduated to venomous animals. (She even pitted different venomous beasts against each other in combat, fascinated to see whod win.) This knowledge came in handy when Cleopatra ended her own life by letting an asp bite her breast, which shed observed to be a relatively painless death.

As bad as poisoning prisoners seems, her experiment with fetuses surpassed that in depravity. We dont know the source of Cleopatras obsession herewhy she cared about the answer so much. But whenever one of her maidservants was sentenced to death (an apparently common occurrence), the queen ran her through the same procedure. First, in case she was already pregnant, she forced the maid to swallow one of the noxious substances she knew about, a destructive serum that purged the womb. With the slate now clean, Cleopatra had a manservant forcibly impregnate the maid. Finally, at some predetermined time later, she had the maids belly torn open, and the fetus inside fished out. Accounts differ on the results, but Cleopatra could reportedly distinguish males from females by day 41 after conceptionthus proving that sexual differentiation began early. All in all, she considered the experiment a success.

Now, the only historical mentions of this horror come from the Talmud, and on the face of it, the accounts are suspect. Cleopatra had scores of enemies who spread propaganda about her, and its hard to think of a story that would demonize her more effectively than this. Furthermore, according to what doctors now know, the results dont make sense. Six weeks after conception, fetuses have eyes and a nose and little finger nubs, but theyre only a half-inch long and dont have genitalsmaking it impossible to distinguish males from females. (Genitals form during week nine, when the fetus is two inches long.) So even laying aside the propaganda, its doubtful whether Cleopatra performed this experiment.

Legend or not, however, many generations of people believed this storywhich says something important. Cleopatra was powerful and hated, and the ghastly vividness of the tale gripped peoples imaginations. We expect tyrants to do horrifying things. But even beyond that, something else about the account rang true. There was an archetype lurking there, something deep and scary that was recognizable even back thena person who takes things too far and lets their obsessions get the best of them. What we now call a mad scientist.

The madness of a mad scientist is a peculiar one. Theyre not muttering gibberish or buttonholing you about loony conspiracies. To the contrary, they think quite logically. Here, Cleopatra experimented only on maidservants sentenced to death. If they were going to die anyway, she apparently reasoned, why not have them serve some useful purpose in the meantime? This decided, she made them take an abortifacient, to ensure that any prior pregnancies didnt confound her results. She then recorded the exact date of the rape-insemination, to nail down her answer to the day. If we judge this solely as an experiment, Cleopatra did everything right.

Judged by every other standard, of course, Cleopatra did nothing right. She grew so obsessed, so blinkered, that she abandoned all notions of decency and compassionignoring the gore and the shrieks of pain, pushing ahead no matter the human cost. No, what makes mad scientists mad isnt their lack of logic or reason or scientific acumen. Its that they do science too well, to the exclusion of their humanity.