A ranking of scientists whose lives were tragically cut short

The book. Life in the mythical ivory tower of scientists is not always rosy. It even happens that it turns to tragedy: murders, accidents or suicides. According to Peter Zweiacker, who lists them in his book, there have been more than fifty deaths since Antiquity, if we also count inventors, engineers or doctors who do not live in research laboratories as such. Authentic mathematicians, physicists or biologists nevertheless figure in this macabre and non-exhaustive pantheon.

The author goes so far as to add a chapter listing the “disqualified”, whom the reader might have been tempted to include in this particular list, but whom a precise analysis rejects. Exit, therefore, celebrities like Pierre Curie, run over by a tram, but not really working, or Jean-Paul Marat, who, before being a journalist and conventional, prided himself on optics and fought against Newton, but that Charlotte Corday did not kill to defend the theory of the English scientist.

To lighten the gloomy litany of the disappeared, the author opted for a casual and very ironic tone. Sometimes to the point of excess, renaming the famous Soviet Trofim Lyssenko “Zinzin”, to leave no doubt about the credit he grants to the man who led to the death of many of his fellow biologists, banished under Stalin, until the 1950s. The playful tone in which he speaks of the Chernobyl accident, poison gas or the final solution will perhaps be difficult to pass.

Another history of science

This lightness is coupled with a propensity for digressions on astrology, trombidions (mites), the economy of need… Informative detours that provide surprise effects, the ax falling when you least expect it. The author also takes malicious pleasure in wringing the necks of a few legends from the history of science and does not hesitate to state several hypotheses about cases which complicate his delicate undertaking of rigorous classification.

The balance sheet? Twenty-three suicides, 21 murders and 9 accidents (at least). This last category is the least ambiguous: a biologist diver is eaten by a shark, vulcanologists die during an eruption, a physicist is electrocuted trying to recover the energy of lightning…

This is not the case with suicides, which are more difficult to associate with the exercise of a profession, even if the author is convincing in his demonstrations. The mathematician Kurt Gödel, whose obsession with logic led him to starve to death, deserves this place, unlike his colleague Alan Turing, who could not stand the chemical castration he was condemned to follow because of his homosexuality, banned in his day. In this batch, we also find many inventors or industrialists ruined, misunderstood or wronged.

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