THE CARE AND FEEDING OF MAD SCIENTISTS

BY L. SPRAGUE DECAMP
Astounding Science Fiction, Vol. XLVII, No. 5, July 1951

You could hardly have science fiction without scientists, mad or otherwise. A check of the current 
issues of eight science-fiction magazines shows that about a quarter of the stories deal with scientists, 
either puttering in their laboratories or plunging into trackless wastes on expeditions. As a result, we 
readers have acquired a certain mental picture of how laboratories and expeditions are run.
Well, are they run that way?
Yes and no. The pictures in the stories are sometimes accurate - especially when a scientist writes 
the story - and sometimes not. If they have any consistent fault it is one of omission. That is, there 
are certain practical problems and difficulties in managing scientists and their activities that are 
seldom touched upon in the stories, though any scientist or scientific administrator will weep on your 
neck for hours about them.
To begin with, who or what are scientists? People who practice science. To save type in a chase for 
definitions we might as well include engineers as "applied" scientists, though some of the "pure" 
scientists may object. The two classes are not very different as human types, except that you might 
say that pure scientists are like engineers only more so; or that engineers are more "average" than 
pure scientists.
Now, scientists vary just as other people do. There are wise and foolish ones, sober and dissipated, 
solitary and gregarious, courteous and boorish, puritanical and lecherous, industrious and lazy, and 
so on. They do as a class show certain tendencies. For one thing they are all people of high 
intelligence, because even to be anchor-man in the graduating class at one of our tougher Institutes of 
Technology one has to be up in the top four or five percentile of the whole population; and to get 
through a Ph. D. examination in science puts one up in an even more rarefied stratum. The scientist 
may be a fool about some things, but he must have that basic mental power to become a scientist at 
all; he cannot be a moron in any strict metrological sense.
Being more intelligent than the average, scientists perhaps tend to be more reasonable, rational, 
and judicious than most people. When conflicts of interests or ideas occur among them, there is a 
better chance - but a chance only - of settling the conflict by reason and discussion. All of which 
does not prevent some scientists from getting into love-life troubles, falling for obvious hoaxes and 
swindles, or embracing pseudo-scientific doctrines like Spiritualism and Marxism.
Dr. Sheldon, the varieties-of-human-physique-and-temperament man, thinks that scientists tend 
towards his ectomorphic physical type and cerebrotonic temperament. From what I have seen of 
scientists I am inclined, on a basis of subjective impressions, to agree. The ectomorph is the thin 
man, and the cerebrotonic is the thoughtful, introverted, nervous, self-controlled, subdued 
individualist. He likes to work by himself, prefers ideas to people, and ages well, becoming wrinkled 
and leathery instead of paunchy and jowly. The psychologists class him as a schizoid.
Every time I attend a meeting of the alumni of my college - California Tech - I look around the 
circle of lean, slowly wrinkling men with sober faces behind steel-rimmed glasses gleaming over the 
highballs; note the careful gestures and precise speech, and chalk one up for Sheldon. How different 
from a conclave of salesmen or politicians.
Of course we have here a chicken-and-egg problem: Are they scientists because they lacked the 
physical strength to compete with other boys in sport and combat and thus directed their energies in 
other directions ? Or are they thin and under-muscled because they never had enough interest in food 
to eat enough to fill them out? I don't know and doubt if anybody else does.
Some scientists are interested in arts, games, and sports in addition to their work. Einstein's violin 
is famous and I know several who paint. Others take an attitude of wilful Boeotian ignorance 
towards interests outside their particular field. Many read science fiction because, as one explained: 
"In the stories the experiments always work."
Most of them are sociable in the specialized way that writers and other practitioners of numerically 
small professions are sociable: They like to congregate with the few others of their kind, but find the 
general mass a bore. Most of them make good matrimonial risks if the girl doesn't mind such quirks 
as refusing to come to meals until they have finished some recondite train of abstract thought. 
According to the statistics the sedentary ones like chemical engineers make better-than-average 
husbands, but some of those whose work requires extensive travel and exploration, such as 
anthropologists, are poor matrimonial risks.
The usual accusations against scientists of absent-mindedness, lack of interest in great wealth, and 
a tendency to treat a date with a girl as a problem in advanced sociodynamics, have a grain of truth. 
However, a couple of late science-fiction novels, Stewart's "Earth Abides" and Norris' "Nutro 29," 
each presented a hero evidently intended as a typical scientist. The egregious characteristic of these 
men was, let's say, lack of character. Isherwood Williams and Thomas Hightower are weak, pliant, 
easygoing, irresolute men, content to drift with the tide.
Now as far as my acquaintance with the breed goes, that is not at all typical. For of all men, 
scientists are on the average the world's most stubborn and refractory individualists, usually 
inoffensive, but capable of pursuing any objective on which they have set their sights with the 
fanatical intensity of mania. When people call scientists "mad" they refer to this quality. If that were 
not the case, they would never undergo the long and intense educational process that it takes to make 
a scientist.
Which brings us to the main question: How do you govern the ungovernable? Should you even 
try?
But before we get into that subject there are two other varieties of fictional scientist, common in 
stories but extremely rare in fact, who require comment. One is the rich scientist. Rich scientists are 
rare because a boy born rich is unlikely to develop the necessary drive, while poor scientists seldom 
have either the commercial acumen or the time and opportunity for financial manipulations to get 
rich.
There are exceptions: I once knew a young scientist who inherited a pot of money, built his own 
lab with it, became one of the country's leading biophysicists, and is now an authentic bigshot, 
serving on committees to advise the President what to do with the Atom and so forth.
But for practical purposes the rich scientist is like that other familiar fictional character: the super-
colossal hero seven feet tall, with tawny hair and smoldering ice-blue eyes - and never mind the 
mixed metaphors - broad of shoulder and mighty of thew, who pulverize platoons of dastards and 
"liberates" droves of wenches as easily as we common clods put on our rubbers.
Now, it is not true to say that no such person ever lived. There was one once: King Harold III of 
Norway (1015-1066 ) whose fantastic career out-Conaned Conan. Harold the Roughneck was seven 
feet tall; he did lead his army bellowing battle songs and cutting down foes like ripe wheat with a 
two-handed sword; he did hew his way at the head of the Byzantine Emperor's Varangian Guard 
through the Muslim hordes to Jerusalem and back half a century before the Crusades officially 
began, and so forth. But the type has never been.
The other fictional type is the beautiful lady scientist. As a matter of cold fact most lady scientists 
range from plain to downright ugly, even though Dr. Beebe did have a very photogenic assistant, a 
blond girl ichthyologist, some years back. The reason is simple. Ugly girls tend to go in for science 
just as skinny boys do, because they can compete in this field with their fellow-beings better than on 
more conventional grounds.
Now comes the problem of putting our scientists to work and keeping them at it in an efficient 
manner. Well, where and how do scientists work?
A rather small minority - geologists, meteorologists, biologists, archeologists, et cetera - go on 
expeditions between stretches of office work or teaching. The rest work in laboratories, 
governmental and private. The private laboratories are those of manufacturing companies, 
universities, and other institutions like museums and medical centers, and a few well-fixed 
individuals. A little over a billion dollars is spent yearly on scientific research in the United States, 
half by the government and half by private agencies.
Among private organizations, colleges and universities tend to specialize more in pure science - 
abstract problems about the nature of man and the universe - while the other kinds favor applied 
science - engineering research on practical problems leading to improvements in ways of making and 
using things. However, just as there is no sharp distinction between these two kinds of research, so 
there is no sharp distinction between the organizations performing them. Many colleges and many 
industrial laboratories solve problems in both fields. Some of the laboratories of manufacturing 
companies do much basic research while others concentrate on specific problems.
Moreover these organizations do a lot of work for each other. A manufacturing company, for 
example, may rely upon its own engineers for ordinary design and improvement of its product, but 
resort to a university or government laboratory for advice on drastic new departures and difficult 
problems. The university laboratory likewise may at the same time perform engineering research for 
a manufacturer, research in sociology or economics for the government, and investigation of a 
problem in pure science for itself in order to advance the knowledge of mankind.
The "laboratory" - using the word in its broadest sense - will comprise a group of buildings or a 
single building or a part thereof, with equipment and personnel. This will be divided into parts, 
called "divisions" or "sections" or "laboratories" or whatever, each specializing in some field or 
branch of science. Then each of these subdivisions has two more or less distinct areas: the office 
space where the scientists have their desks - separate cubicles for the higher ups; a general deskery 
for the rest - and stenographers, and a "laboratory" proper where the physical work is done.
A "laboratory" in the last sense is seldom so neat and shiny as it appears in movies about noble 
scientists. Instead it is cluttered with odds and ends of electric cable, tubing, wire, glassware, stands, 
pencil stubs, mechanics' lunches, old technical magazines, ash trays made of discarded scientific 
paraphernalia, and so forth. Let some officious person "clean it up" and the scientists scream that 
they can no longer find anything: "I've been saving that roll of copper-nickel-iron wire for a year to 
use in Project 8663-B, and now just when I have a use for it-"
There is no very serious problem in hiring a young scientist to work in a laboratory. That is one 
reason there are degrees: so that the young scientists come neatly ticketed. Hence if you have work to 
be done in biochemistry you hire a biochemist.
But then the trouble begins. If he turns out to be no good you fire him - but how do you know 
when he is no good? Maybe the problem you gave him was inherently insoluble, so it is no discredit 
to him that he failed to solve it. On the other hand if he fails to solve several problems and then some 
other man succeeds, the first man doesn't look very good. I have known a third-rate scientist who 
would repeatedly turn in nice neat reports, carefully calculated and composed and reasoned - and 
every time the report would be rendered useless by some glaring basic error in scientific 
assumptions.
Then, in most lines of work there is a rough correlation between a man's general work-habits - 
neatness, agreeableness, punctuality, et cetera - and the merit of his work. But with scientists this 
does not apply. Some very good scientists are disorderly people who keep irregular hours and snarl 
at everybody. It takes a good administrator to weigh the worth of the men under him and to see 
through such superficialities as sloppiness of appearance or disagreeable personality.
Well, how do you get a good administrator?
Ah, there's one of the hardest nuts of all to crack. In most organizations, when you wish to choose 
a man to head the outfit or a section thereof, you pick the one in that group who has shown the most 
ability in his assigned work in the past. Now, if your outstanding scientist is also a good 
administrator you're in luck and there is no problem. But this doesn't happen any too often, because 
the qualities that make the best scientist are not at all those that make the best administrator. The 
scientist often cares little for people and doesn't get on well with them; the administrator must be an 
expert on people and must get along with them. The scientist is usually bored to tears by 
bookkeeping, finance, time-checks, organization-charts, and maintenance problems; the 
administrator must seize all these with a sure and confident grasp.
Does it fallow that the man who knows the most about accounting, organization, and the like is the 
best lab administrator?
No, because here you run up against another paradox. A laboratory cannot be closely compared 
with a production; sales, teaching, or policing organization, all of whom can show results that can be 
measured in simple units: dollars, arrests, and so on. A production department produces things that 
can be simply evaluated; a laboratory produces knowledge, and nobody knows what the knowledge 
will be worth until a year or a decade or a century has elapsed.
But the administrator, playing nursemaid to a gang of idiosyncratic geniuses, must justify his fat 
salary. Unless watched he is likely to impose upon the laboratory a degree of regimentation, 
organization, and paper work that actually cuts down the productiveness of the group.
In large organizations there is a natural tendency for paper work to increase with time. Each 
executive thinks of some daily or weekly or monthly report - on hours, progress, equipment, et cetera 
- which, if he could only make everybody turn it in faithfully, would give him a much clearer picture 
of what is going on in his organization. So he institutes this report, but seldom thinks to abolish any 
of the reports established by his predecessors. As a result the paper work increases until the scientists 
are actually spending a fifth or a quarter of their time writing reports.
These contradictions and difficulties are least evident in laboratories that do cut-and-dried 
engineering tests. Such outfits run in a routine manner, with one engineer bossing a gang of 
undegreed technicians, in much the same manner as a production department.
But as soon as any originality or thought is allowed you have "research," and the more research 
you have, the "purer" the science, the greater are the administrative difficulties. The troubles also 
increase with the size of the organization, reaching a maximum in government labs and those of 
great private companies like du Pont and Bell Telephone. [footnote: I said great companies like them, 
not necessarily those two companies themselves.] Though oceans of ink have been spilled on the 
respective merits and faults of capitalism and socialism, from the point of view of the ordinary 
working scientist or engineer, the difference between working for the government and for a large 
corporation could be put in your eye without discomfort.
Experience shows that for profound theoretical research in pure science, men work best when 
working alone or in a voluntary association of two or three brains, and when given the greatest 
possible freedom. On the other hand for solving practical engineering problems, or applying known 
principles, the best results are had by well-organized teams of specialists seeking well-defined 
objectives. University laboratories, which go in more for pure science, therefore tend towards the 
former type of organization - if you can call it that - while industrial laboratories, devoting 
themselves more to practical engineering, incline towards the latter.
The good administrator is the one who can tell what is the optimum degree of organization and 
control for his particular group doing his particular kind of work. He must be able to manage his 
geniuses, to spur them on, and to protect them from uninformed outside interference without 
pampering them to the point where they take advantage of his liberality - as some scientists, like 
other people, will do if encouraged.
He must watch out, for instance, for the scientist who has been working for a long time on a 
problem and is hesitant to apply the crucial test for fear it will prove that he is on the wrong track, 
and who therefore goes on indefinitely refining his apparatus and devising subsidiary tests and 
generally fiddling around. The administrator must prowl around the laboratory enough to keep track 
of what goes on without driving his charges wild by constantly breathing dawn their necks. He must 
be able to ask for clearly defined results without imposing upon the scientist his ideas of how the 
results should be obtained - and at the same time be ready to offer sound advice if asked, or to take 
corrective action if the scientist obviously has got off the track and is getting nowhere.
One authority recommends that a good laboratory administrator should be somebody like a patent 
attorney, who has had plenty of contact with science without himself being primarily a scientist. 
Another suggests: "All administrators should be women, of the aggressive but motherly type. I think 
they would possibly do a very good job, being willing to provide for their mad little creatures in 
return for a kind word now and then, and no ego build-up."
As a practical matter the administrator, even if not primarily a scientist, should have a pretty good 
grounding in science, so that he shall be able to judge his juniors' results and make intelligent 
suggestions when asked. Also, many technical people get huffy when asked to take orders from 
nontechnical people, whom they regard as virtual illiterates.
Well, then, suppose you pick your administrator from the ranks of nonscientists who still know 
enough science for the task. What do you do to reward the scientist who has worked long and well 
for you and who in a more conventional organization might reasonably expect to be promoted to 
command of the group? For while most scientists are not extravagant hedonists with violent 
power-complexes, they do - like other people - like to live reasonably well, and their egos demand at 
least some satisfaction in the form of promotion and pay-raises.
Sometimes, as I said, a good scientist is also a good administrator, in which case there is no 
problem. But sometimes you have to cook up a scheme for raising a scientist's pay and  rank without 
actually putting him in charge of a department. You call him a "consultant" or a "senior engineer" or 
something, and reward him by giving him more freedom and less paper work instead of the reverse, 
which is the normal lot of the executive.
As an example of the absurdities inherent in this paradox, there was a world-famous physicist who 
worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II. To give him a rank 
commensurate with his standing in the field the United States Government had to hire him at one of 
their top rates, which meant that when the organization chart was drawn up this man was Number 
Three in command at Los Alamos. Ordinarily this meant nothing; Numbers One and Two ran the 
place and let Number Three sit in his chair and cerebrate. But the time came when Numbers One and 
Two were both away at once and our hero found himself acting director. A maintenance man came in 
to see the director and gave the physicist a long report on some perilous fire hazard that he had 
found, which should be attended to at once. When the maintenance man had finished, the physicist 
looked at him vaguely and said:
"But that has nothing to do with physics!"
And thereupon he rolled up his eyes and withdrew his soul once again into the Nirvana of the 
higher mathematical physics.
The scientific administrator's lot is a pretty exacting one. He has to go as far as he can to give his 
scientists optimum working conditions, but he can seldom go so far as they would like. They would 
like laboratories stocked with unlimited equipment which they could simply pick up in the stock 
room and walk off with, without even signing a receipt, and a minimum of supervision and reports. 
Then the administrator would not know what was going on, and when Congress or the Front Office 
or the Faculty Committee came around to ask what his geniuses were doing to justify their expense 
he would have a tough time answering - which would not be good for next year's appropriation.
Or he might find that one of his bright boys had gone off into some line of work that happens to 
fascinate the scientist but that has nothing to do with the over-all objectives of the organization.
On this last point, a tot of trouble would be saved if the administrator would make it quite clear to 
the scientist when he hires him, just what is expected of him. If the man is employed to do dull 
routine tests on hydraulic valves he should be made to understand that fact clearly, and if he doesn't 
wish to test hydraulic valves he does not have to take the job. But if the scope of the job is not made 
clear the scientist may get a bright idea for an improvement in rotameters and neglect the valves for 
his wonderful new discovery. And then trouble pops and the administrator is caught in the middle 
between the outrage of the scientist who is insulted by the lack of appreciation of his genius and the 
equal outrage of the man who is paying to have valves tested and expects just that.
Another thing the administrator has to watch out for is over-organization, a disease that flourishes 
in large organizations in general and governmental departments in particular. We all know something 
about the general principles of organization; authority must be congruent with responsibility, fields 
of authority must be sharply demarcated, objectives must be clearly stated, and so on. And we know 
something about line versus staff organization and organization charts.
Now, there are people who love those little charts with their lines and boxes as a pig loves mud. If 
given a free hand they will think up so marry interlocking relationships and lines of authority and 
committees, and ordain so many committee meetings and consultations and memoranda in 
octuplicate, that the organization will be paralyzed by sheer complexity. No organization will work 
very well if it is so complicated that even those running it can't understand it.
To give an example, during the late war I once had charge of the War Production Committee of the 
Naval Air Material Center in Philadelphia. This was the governmental equivalent of a labor-
management committee in private industry, and was supposed to process suggestions for increasing 
production. Somebody in Washington set up the most elaborate scheme you ever saw, according to 
which several hundred people in the shops and laboratories were to be organized into five levels of 
committees. The shops elected the first set of committeemen, who in turn elected the second from 
among their number, and so on.
As this was too complicated to be workable we simplified it to a mere four levels and went ahead. 
We had three hundred sixty committeemen working about one hundred fifteen hours a week on WPC 
work, plus five full-time employees - including Lt.-Comdr. de Camp - and three part-time officials 
spending another two hundred fifty hours a week on this activity. And most of the "work" was sheer 
waste motion. The useful part of it could have been done by a mere handful of people spending a 
fraction of the time, while the rest actually produced instead of talking about production. [footnote: I 
am happy to say that some months before the end of the war, the admiral and I agreed to abolish the 
whole monstrosity, and I was allowed to go back to gadgeteering.]
Over-organization is especially pernicious in dealing with scientists, who mostly like to work by 
themselves and who to some extent became scientists so that they could do so.
And speaking of line and staff organization, there are two ways of handling the minimum routine 
work and paper-shuffling that must be done. One is to divide it or rotate it among the scientists, so 
that each gets his fair share of drudgery. The other, which is better if the organization is big enough 
to afford it, is to setup service departments to handle such matters. A scientist is not normally 
expected to clean the floor under his desk; you hire a janitor for that. By the same token you can take 
much routine letter-writing; material-ordering, and the like off his shoulders by providing expert 
help.
On the other hand he will probably have to do a certain disagreeable minimum of drudgery no 
matter how he hates it and no matter how well-organized the laboratory is. For instance, he will have 
to write his own progress reports, or at least dictate them, because nobody else knows enough about 
his particular work to do so intelligently. And if you don't make him turn in progress reports, he may 
die on you, leaving a mass of mysterious wires and tubes whose meaning nobody knows.
Even a "pure" scientist, relieved as far as possible of administrative and routine tasks, will have to 
learn something of administration in order to manage his assistants. True, some very special 
scientists like mathematicians work without assistants - without any equipment save a pencil and 
paper and some reference books.
But most laboratory scientists as they rise in their field are given bigger projects that require the 
help of extra hands and brains. A young scientist may start out all right until he reaches the point of 
having six or eight assistants. Then he runs into trouble because he has to get along with one 
technician who is a chronic loafer, another with a sneering-disagreeable personality, another who 
steals laboratory equipment to sell, and so on. Then, despite his lofty boasts of neither knowing nor 
caring about the black art of human relations, he has to learn it or else.
So much for laboratory scientists. There remains the matter of scientific expeditions. Here you 
need not worry much about paper work and over-organization, because the ordinary expedition is too 
small. It may comprise anywhere from one person to a few score; expeditions whose personnel runs 
into three or four figures, like the Navy's recent reconnaissances to the Antarctic, are very 
exceptional. And a few score people is still small compared to the six hundred-odd researchers of 
General Motors Research, or du Pont with more than eighteen hundred scientists and an even larger 
number of technicians.
Expeditions, however, have their own peculiar troubles - troubles not often brought out in the 
stories. The bigger the expedition and the more remote and rugged the place it is going, the more 
acute the difficulties will be. These troubles are personality conflicts, and any expedition of more 
than a half-dozen members is likely to have them.
For one thing exploring attracts not the prosaic, steady, average type of person, but the aggressive 
and unconventional individualist. When you crowd a lot of people of this type, of varied 
backgrounds, together for long periods, suffering from equatorial heat or polar cold, tempers get 
short and personalities grate. Faults of character that would be overlooked in civilization show up 
with glaring distinctness. Moreover if the conditions are to be rugged, the leader must pick 
comparatively young persons to stand the hardships, and being young they have not developed the 
self-control and tolerance that might enable an older group to get along.
A candid account of many expeditions would reveal a distressing story of feuds, hatreds, mutiny, 
and outbursts of temper. The leader of such an expedition is in a difficult position. When a man turns 
out to be no good after it is too late to send him home, he can't simply shoot the twerp. All he can do 
is relieve him of all duties connected with the expedition. And then he has the character underfoot for 
months, sulking, intriguing and plotting absurd revenges.
But when the explorers get home they feel ashamed of having acted in such a childish manner. 
Hence in writing up their experiences - or, more usually, having a ghost do it for them - they tend to 
gloss over their personality troubles, and so most written accounts of expeditions give a deceptive 
effect of sweetness and light.
One of the most famous American expeditions of the last thirty years operated in a far country for 
several successive years, and one year the scientists actually threatened to strike if two of their 
number were not excluded from further participation. These two, while pleasant enough ordinarily - I 
met both of them - became hogs when the supply and variety of foods was restricted. Thus when the 
jelly was passed at dinner one of them would take all of it. Another member almost caused a 
massacre because he ribbed and kidded a young native government official attached to the 
expedition, until the young man left in a fury and reported to his government that the group was 
really a secret military expedition.
However, from what I have been able to gather, most of the personality-troubles are caused, not by 
the scientists, but by the other personnel: aviators, mechanics, photographers, and so on. Scientists 
are by and large fairly easy to get along with if you don't expect too much of them. Their general 
tendency is to concentrate on their own recondite researches and to pay little attention to each other 
and none at all to other human beings.
All these troubles are compounded when an expedition is mixed as to sex, for after a few months 
in the jungle or on the Greenland ice cap even the average lady scientist looks good. More than one 
such mixed expedition has come home tearing its collective hair trying to figure out how to effect 
assorted trades of husbands and wives. When one mixed expedition was sent out some years ago, the 
people who managed it seriously considered sending the men across the ocean in one ship and the 
women in the other, to defer as long as possible the evil day when sex would rear its beautiful head.
If an expedition must be mixed, it probably works best when it is small and consists entirely of 
married couples. If the director brings his wife but does not let anybody else bring his, you have a 
source of friction. And if you mix married couples, single people of both sexes, and married people 
without their mates, you are asking for trouble.
But anybody who tries to manage people or activities for any purpose is asking for trouble, which 
is no adequate reason for giving up a worth-while project. A successful expedition or laboratory is 
not one that has no personality or administrative troubles, but one that achieves its objectives in spite 
of them.

THE END

