"What, this old thing?"
It’s not unusual to open a newspaper, or catch the end of an evening news bulletin, only to be presented with the latest ‘findings’ of some team of government funded scientists somewhere – findings which, to the average person, seem like an utter and unforgivable waste of time and resources.
Equally as often, you’ll hear those same people complaining about how millions of pounds of their tax money is being chucked at speccy nerds in white coats, who’ve got nothing better to do than try to find out exactly why cornflakes go soggy in milk, or determine which type of biscuit is the best for dunking in tea.
I used to be the same. Whenever I read that hundreds of thousands of pounds had been frittered away on determining that faraway objects are hard to see*, or that a few million had been spent on finding out if swallowing two or more magnets could be detrimental to your health**, I’d wonder aloud if the people conducting these studies shouldn’t think about going out and getting proper jobs instead.
More than that, though, I’d wonder about the people handing out the grants. What were they thinking? If someone asked me for a big wodge of cash so they could prove once and for all that you can, in fact, teach an old dog new tricks***, I – like most sensible people – would tell them to sling their hook.
I was watching the first James Bond movie, Dr No, when my perspective on the situation changed.
For those who haven’t seen the film, the eponymous Dr No is a scientific genius who lives on a remote island. He’s also – and I think this is a fair assessment – a raving mental case. Oh, and he’s got metal hands. I forget why.
As I observed Dr No’s eccentric schemes, I thought to myself now here’s a proper scientist. No cornflakes or magnets for him. Oh no. Dr No used his scientific skills and knowledge wisely. He built an unconvincing robot dragon! He constructed an atomic powered ray gun! He gave himself metal hands! (I forget why).
Dr No was a small man (even smaller with his hands off), but he had big dreams. He didn’t care about training an elderly Beagle to fetch, or looking at objects in the middle distance! No, Dr No wanted what all good mad scientists want – to use his atomic ray gun to hold the world to ransom!
Of course, there was no way Bond was going to be having with that, so the good doctor ended the film half drowning, half dissolving in the cooling vat of a nuclear reactor. To be honest, he was sort of asking for it, even if Bond was a bit out of order making fun of his metal hands earlier on in the film, when Dr No was still being quite nice.
The Robo-Dragon. Seriously, you're fooling no-one. It's a shark, if anything.
But anyway, as I was thinking about the film, a thought struck me. What if all scientists are a bit like Dr No? What if every single person working in a scientific field has both the desire and capability to construct an atomic powered ray gun with which to shoot aeroplanes and rockets out of the sky?
And even if scientist aren’t inherently all evil, (and I find that very hard to believe) they are all inquisitive. An inquisitive nature is one of the main requirements of the job, just below the lab coat and unflattering glasses. So, even if they don’t have any intention of blowing the world to smithereens, it’s probably quite likely that if they were left to their own devices, scientists would do just that.
That’s when I realised – I wasn’t the first person to have come to this conclusion. Those people at the grant offices must’ve realised long ago that the world’s scientists need to be kept as busy as possible at all times. That’s why they have that bottomless pit of money. That’s why they assign stupid, nonsensical projects to scientific teams across the globe, accompanying the brief with a cheque with a lot of zeros on it. It’s that or we end up with someone creating a galaxy-swallowing black hole in their basement, or turning everyone in Norway into indestructible lizard-people.
So, when I read today that a team of scientists in Canada have been doing proper actual research into how mankind would fare in the face of a zombie holocaust (‘not that well’ was the finding), I didn’t tut or shake my head. I nodded my silent approval, and said a quiet ‘thanks’ to whoever had funded the study.
You see, the person leading the research is called Professor Robert Smith?. The question mark at the end of his name isn’t a mistake – he put it there so as to avoid being confused with Robert Smith, the lead singer of The Cure.
Now, while I admit that adding unexpected punctuation to your name so as to avoid being mixed up with that bloke from The Cure isn’t in the same league as having metal hands and building a robot dragon, it’s headed in the same direction.
I can well imagine the scenario: Someone at the Canadian Scientific Grants office got wind of the fact that this Robert Smith?, this madman-in-waiting, was really, really interested in zombies. Sensibly, they decided that it’d be best to pay him a large sum of money to go away and try to rate our chances against the living dead, rather than just leaving him to muck about with some chemicals in his underground lair, and actually bring about a full-scale zombie holocaust. I think it was the right decision, and regardless of how many trillions of dollars the study may have cost, I doubt anyone can say it wasn’t money well spent.
So, next time you read that time really does appear to go faster when you’re having fun, or that unhealthy people can’t run as far as healthy people can, don’t despair. Don’t complain. If it wasn’t for important research like this, we’d all be up to our eyes in death rays.
* “Why is it easier to see someone close than far away?” - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Feb. 2005
** “Multiple magnet ingestion alert,” Radiology, Nov. 2004
*** New research funded by the National Institute of Aging found that older beagles fed a healthy diet and given plenty of exercise performed nearly as well as younger ones on cognitive tests. Seriously, there’s a National Institute of Aging?!
