Yves here. Corruption has become so pervasive in the US that we tend to think of it as driven by money considerations (career advancement is one manifestation). This study of scientists who’ve become so enamored by their supposed discoveries that they resort to destructive conduct doesn’t mesh tidily with our contemporary notions of unscrupulousness. The abusers profiled in The Icepick Surgeon are more hubristic….maybe even meglomaniacal…entranced by their own distorted vision of conquest. They aren’t included in this book, The Icepick Surgeon, but it isn’t a stretch to think that the doctors that devised America’s enhanced interrogation techniques, as in torture, are cut from similar psychological cloth.