Oh hell no.
Mad scientists are the shit. I want one for Christmas.
If Dupont had a few mad scientists on the payroll we wouldn’t be still tinkering around with safer ways to make gunpowder and would have moved on to safer ways to build anti-matter death rays by now.
Make no mistake about it, there are different kinds of sciences just like there are different kinds of medicines.
A football physician, for example, can have a player with a broken arm on the field playing a full contact sport by the second half.
A basketball physician, on the other hand, can’t get a player with a sprained finger back on the basketball court in less than 3 weeks.
Science is no different. Some scientist take a little thing like cancer and seem to never make any headway in finding a cure, while others are busy growing brains in Petri dishes capable of flying a virtual fighter plane.
In Florida, Thomas DeMarse, professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida, and certified mad scientist, built a “living computer” from 25,000 neurons extracted from a rat’s brain and arranged them over a grid of 60 electrodes in a Petri dish.
Mad Scientist you say? How can I call him a certified mad scientist?
Well, he connected a brain, which he built himself, and placed in a Petri dish to electrodes. What more does it take to make him a mad scientist?
Once he had electrical juice flowing again the living cortical neurons he took from the rat began to “reconnect themselves, forming a living neural network – a brain”.
They said that gradually the brain in the Petri dish learned how to fly an F-22 jet flight simulator even in simulated adverse flying conditions.
Ok, now I’m officially appalled.
Here comes the part where all Mad Scientist try to quell our natural offense to what is clearly a transgression against nature by romanticizing the possibilities of a better humanity as a direct result of their work.
Ok, here it goes.
”We might be able to use brains like these to fly unmanned aircraft.”

That’s it?
That is all we get out if it? Smarter remote control cars and planes? Maybe we aren’t asking the right questions to Dr. Frankenstein here.
How much does this guy think TYCO is going to pay him for a paten on a rodent brain controlled remote control plane?
Then again, maybe he is shooting for something much bigger than TYCO. Maybe he thinks Boeing will be interested in pilots that you could fit in your wallet? The real question is, dose anyone out there really think someone is going to buy a ticket on a 747 piloted by a brain floating in a jar?
Its just like the World Trade Center, you can build it again if you want to, but who is going to work there?
Why do we need this?
Well he had an answer for that one too.
Although computers can perform certain tasks extremely quickly, they lack the flexibility and adaptability of the human brain and perform particularly poorly at pattern recognition tasks.
Maybe flexibility and adaptability to that degree wouldn’t necessarily be a good thing.
It seems that we aren’t going to be satisfied until life as we know it is taken over by artificially intelligent machines.
I just hope there are some mad scientists out there surgically attaching gorilla nuts on mice that are working on our side.