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For Science
Doctor Venture's "Ooo-Ray" blew up a model city, and even melted all the little people and stuff. Awww...
Snake: Let's change the subject. Did you invent Metal Gear?
Otacon: Yes, as a weapon of love and peace! It fires flowers and rainbows and turns incoming warheads into puppies and butterflies!
Snake: Sounds about right, if by "flowers and rainbows" you mean "nuclear missiles."
Otacon: Oh no, how could it be that I've invented a weapon specifically for the purpose of filling everyone with warm fuzzy joy and never once realized that it was better suited for dropping nuclear weapons on faraway nations!?
Snake: My guess would be it's because you're a big idiot.
—Metal Gear Solid Thumbnail Theater

That's why scientists have written papers with boring titles such as 'Will Relativistic Heavy-ion Colliders Destroy Our Planet?', the rebuttals to which were basically, "Let's turn them on and find out!"
—5 Scientific Experiments Most Likely to End the World, Cracked.com

Battlecry for the Mad Scientist, the Morally Ambiguous Doctorate, and even good aligned Gadgeteer Genius and Campbellian Hero. This is one of the classic motivations for many a Science Is Bad movie, the researcher will seek knowledge for its own sake rather than to better the world; usually this simple curiosity will evolve into "ambition" and "hubris" before long, as caution and restraint are thrown out the steel-barred window. Or used as raw materials.

When a scientist says he does something For Science! what this usually means is they simply don't care about the answers to several important questions regarding their research, like:
  1. How can I make money off of it? (What? It's a legitimate question!)
    • As a corollary: Where will I get money to fund my research?
  2. Does it have any potential applications?
  3. Where will I get willing test subjects?
    • Usually, this results in strapping an Innocent Bystander to an operating table, or experimenting on himself. Occasionally, serves as the Back Story for a Super Hero (willing) or Phlebotinum Rebel (unwilling).
      • Scientists testing on themselves are frequently known to go mad from the process, creating instant supervillains. Spiderman's villain gallery is replete with examples (Doctor Octopus, Lizard, the original Green Goblin... basically any scientist who gets introduced by name is a heartbeat away from filling this slot)
  4. Are these experiments ethical?
  5. Will it rise up against humanity and/or eat me?

Usually, this nonchalance leads to Reed Richards Is Useless as they file away their inventions under "Forgotten Phlebotinum" rather than seek to commercialize them. At it's most benign, they'll only threaten to do minor experiments on friends; if they get volunteers or luckily capture one, the effects will be quirky and temporary rather than deforming Biological Mashups.

These benign inventors may end up in service of the Corrupt Corporate Executive, and will be so happy to have funding they don't ask where the money comes form— or what their discoveries are being used for. Expect them to go "you promised you would use my discoveries for good!" to his "Oh, but I am!"

It can also lead to Jumping Off The Slippery Slope as an inventor slips into full blown, cackling mad science as sanity and ethics are deemed "irrelevant" or hindrances to their work. Other times, the answers they come up with to the above questions will lead them to a life of supervillainy as they get research funds by robbing banks, get test subjects by kidnapping, and out-and-out make things solely for destructive purposes... or because they can.

There is some truth to this - many scientists and especially mathematicians do what they do for the fun of it rather than more practical concerns - but that's little different to the rest of academia.

Remember, Science Is Bad. Contrast For The Liberal Arts!

Examples

Anime
  • Washu from Tenchi Muyo is just eccentric enough to pull off wanting to experiment on Tenchi without crossing into villainous water. Plus she's so darn cute!
    • In the original script she was the villain, and Kagato was just an illusion created by her. But then the creative team decided she was far too fun a character to kill off, so the anime world got its greatest scientific genius, and got to keep her.
  • Dantalion from Shakugan No Shana is a typical Mad Scientist who doesn't care if any of his experiments succeed or fail or even destroy existence (likely a fail), so long as something interesting happens. Generally disliked by his fellow Demonic Invaders for his reckless and unpredictable experiments, some on his own kind, some resulting in powerful artifacts turned against them and Flame Haze. But he's such a fun character...
  • Major motivation of the Big Bad in Steam Boy. The movie leaves some ambiguity over whether he's right.
  • Mahou Sensei Negima's resident Mad Scientist Satomi Hakase, in order to discover the secret behind robot love at the expense of her very-much-in-love creation Chachamaru, tried to hack the Robot Girl's memories to find out exactly who she was in love with. This resulted in a Tears From A Stone moment for the ridiculously human robot and a Rocket Punch for her creator.
  • Shou Tucker, the "Sewing Life Alchemist" in the Anime of Fullmetal Alchemist made a chimera out of his daughter and his dog because he could and he was under pressure by the military to do something awe-inspring with his alchemy or else his funding and favor would be cut. In the manga, it's hard to say whether or not there was any curiosity involved. Either way, he's a complete monster.
  • Dr. Jail Scaglietti from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, who has an unquenchable thirst for knowledge related to Lost Technology which was imbued him into him by his creators so he can be their pet Mad Scientist.

Comic Books
  • In X Men 41, there's a scientist who invents a nuclear-powered machine that both creates earthquakes and irradiates the ground. His colleagues think he's nuts for inventing such a dangerous weapon, but he assures them it will only be used for the benefit of mankind.

Film
  • Day Of The Dead has Doctor Logan, who becomes so obsessed with teaching the zombies good manners, he kills the soldiers guarding them to gather food with which to use positive reinforcement training on the zombies.
    • He didn't kill them - at least that wasn't directly stated. He just put their corpses into good use. Naturally, the soldiers weren't very happy when they found out.
  • Danger: Death Ray! (Spoofed by Mystery Science Theater 3000) featured the inventor of the titular Death Ray insisting that he'd built it only for peaceful purposes. It's a death ray. What sort of "peaceful purposes" you could find for a device which has absolutely no use other than blowing stuff up is left as an exercise to the reader.
    • Truth In Television, though: Inventor Nikola Tesla claimed to have invented an energy weapon for "peaceful purposes", predating the concept of "Mutually Assured Destruction" by decades. Tesla, however, had at least the sense to market the thing not as a "death" ray but as a "peace ray". I Am Not Making This Up, but then, Tesla was insane.
      • To be fair the the Teleforce weapon[1] he proposed required such a large powerplant and worked at ranges that they could only be used to defend nations not attack. Of course as well as energy weapons we mustn't forget the time he almost demolished neighbouring buildings while experimenting with resonance frequencies, or the time he secretly hijacked the radio project he was supposed working on for JP Morgan as part of a plan to give free electricity to the world by drawing on the vast untapped power of the Earth's ionosphere!>
    • To be fair, Alfred Nobel originally invented dynamite so that it would be safer to handle and for construction purposes such as blowing out tunnels and clearing debris. However, once people started figuring out how to use it as a weapon, Nobel created the Nobel Prizes out of regret.
      • To be less fair, he also turned the Bofors company from mainly producing iron to making cannons and chemicals for firing them.
  • So Bad Its Good MST 3 K classic The Beast of Yucca Flats involves Tor Johnson killing people in the name of "progress". Exactly what kind of progress you get from strangling people and not looking at the camera is never made clear, but nobody ever accused The Beast of Yucca Flats of being a good movie.
    ''Flag on the moon. How did it get there? Progress.
    • As I understood it, the murders are linked to "Progress" because the Beast was created by an atom bomb explosion. It makes more sense with Godzilla, I guess.
  • In the movie Bats, Obviously Evil Mad Scientist Dr. McCabe initially justifies creating the titular (killer and super-intelligent) bats with the words "I'm a scientist. That's what we do. Make everything a little bit better". It's later hinted that it was a secret government project, but still you have to wonder why the protagonists accepted that justification so well...
  • In the fan-film Return of the Ghostbusters, Designated Antagonist Dr. Konstantine tells TV audiences that if the amulet he has discovered does, as theorized, hold the powers of Egyptiptian god Anubis, he'd like "to harness the power as a weapon... For the benefit of mankind, of course."
  • In Aliens, Burke intends to bring a couple of aliens back to Earth so they can potentially be weaponized. He apparently intends to collect specimens by leaving Ripley and Newt in a locked room with two face-huggers on the loose.
    • More a case of FOR PROFIT! Or in Burke's case, the need to cover his rear for causing the loss of a terraforming colony with "a substantial monetary value".
  • The Three Stooges short "We want our Mummy" has the trio as detectives hunting for a missing archeologist and the lost Tomb of King Rutentuten, and will be paid $5,000 dollars for their commitment to science.
    Moe: "For Science!"
    Larry: "For Science!"
    Curly: "For 5,000 Bucks!"
  • Somewhat subverted with Dr. Serizawa in the original Gojira. He states that his discovery of how to create the "oxygen destroyer" was purely for research and believes it can be used to benifit humanity....But ONLY if it's used for something other than a weapon, since he fears that exposing his discoveries to the world may lead to another war.
    • He eventually does use his scientific discoveries for the good of mankind by Using the Oxygen Destroyer to kill Godzilla.

Literature
  • Dr. Qwi Xux in the Star Wars Expanded Universe embodies this trope: she's the genius scientist behind the Death Star, the Sun Crusher, and the World Devastators...but she has no idea that they're weapons, and simply takes joy at the creation of works of scientific genius. This is lampshaded when Han points out that the names probably should have been a clue.
    • Qwi did actually have peaceful uses for her inventions in mind: the Death Star could be used on uninhabited planets and thus their ores mined much more easily, inexpensively, and safely, the Sun Crusher could be used for planned detonations of unstable old stars that might otherwise supernova unexpectedly and be a hazard to navigation, and so on. She's still a bit flummoxed at trying to explain the names, with the best she can do being "Well, they were just code names!" It was less that she was just doing science for science's sake, and more that she was so in love with science and so massively naive that she didn't pick up on what she was actually doing.
    • The big problem with Qwi Xux was that she was a Kevin "Wall Banger" Anderson character. As any fan of Dune or Star Wars could tell you, Anderson couldn't find a good plot on a brightly lit piece of graph paper with two rulers and a magnifying glass.
  • Greg Egan's novel Schild's Ladder - The freak lab accident that gives birth to a galaxy-shattering kaboom occurs because the scientist wanted to test an obscure physics theory. This being Greg Egan, it's completely subverted by making the resulting Negative Space Wedgie a good thing.
  • Tanya Huff's novel Blood Pact has a villainous Department head (female) who is testing bacterian reanimation of corpses (to rebuild organs) and to get a subject for her experiments murders Vicki Nelson's mother and takes the body away. She is assisted by a genuine Mad Scientist for whom the death of the other assistant means only a disturbance in the data.

Live Action TV

Music

Tabletop Games
  • Gond, the deity of invention in Dungeons And Dragons, is the one the Forgotten Realms have to thank for gunpowder, primitive firearms, grenades, and all the other joys of scientific progress. Somewhat unsurprisingly, most players choose to ignore the existence of his creations, if not the deity himself. Given alignment is True Neutral.
  • The Adeptus Mechanicus of Warhammer 40000 has set loose more than one Eldritch Abomination in their pursuit of even a fragment of a Standard Template Construct.
  • Sort of a motto for the Sons of Ether in Mage: the Ascension, particularly for the ones branded Mad Scientists by their peers.

Video Games
  • This is the motivation - or at least the excuse - of Caulder/Stolos from Advance Wars: Days of Ruin; indeed, until the last chapter it's his only real characteristic.
    Caulder: Have you ever watched yourself die? It's FASCINATING!
  • In Metal Gear Solid, Otacon wanted to design giant robots because it would be cool, basically. Why the US military wanted to make the robot capable of launching nuclear weapons untraceably is anyone's guess.
    • There's some bit of Truth In Television to this, as various arms developers have indeed been experimenting with tanks with legs, on the principle that they can move on certain terrains other heavy vehicles can't, often leave less impact on said terrain (and thus would be harder to trace), and can be positioned for firing more easily. Having your nuclear option small, mobile, and relatively unrestricted by terrain is a pretty big tactical advantage. (Oddly enough, one of this troper's friends, who is very big into military robot shows, continues to blanket-dismiss the Metal Gear mechs as "ridiculous".) (This may have something to do with Nuclear Subs serving the same role as Metal Gears, except better.)
  • The Half-Life mod Science & Industry added a suicide-bomb weapon in one update, and it didn't take long for the customary cry before detonating one to become "FOR SCIENCE!", giving it pseudoreligious overtones.
  • This is the defining characteristic of the University of Planet in Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri. Upside: incredibly fast progress up the Tech Tree. Downside: unethical experiments inspire the lower classes into mob riots. They're portrayed as Neutral Neutral, though, considering there are even meaner people in Planet.
  • Vernon Von Grun from City Of Villains.
    • "Laugh with me! MHUA HA HA HA HA *COUGH* HAHA HA!"
    • Then there is his mentor, Doctor Creed, and his boss, Doctor Aeon.
    • His name is a pun on Wernher von Braun, see Real Life Examples.
  • Aperture Science - "We do what we must because we can." (Most of their projects turn out to be comedic scientific overkill, such as creating a fuel system de-icer that is also an artificially intelligent supercomputer and inventing a device that bends the laws of space-time for "potential shower curtain applications.")
    • To be fair, the founder of Aperture Science was pretty much insane from mercury poisoning when he started the company.
    • Black Mesa aren't exactly that different either. Pretty much everything that goes on there isn't so much for the benefit of mankind as a whole but for the sole purpose of tearing physics a new one. Give me one good reason why they gave their theoretical physicists fairly comprehensive firearms training if the result of their insane meddling was going to be naught but sunshine, puppies, and candy.
  • Pseudo-real-life example: A bunch of scientists held a conference in the World of Warcraft. Naturally, their battlecry was "For Science!"
  • In Apollo Justice Ace Attorney Wesley Stickler uses this as his justification for underwear theft, of all things.
    • Said panties happen to be a part of one character's magic show.
  • In Impossible Creatures, "For science!" is one of Dr. Lucy Willing's unit acknowledgment quotes. She's more of a Wrench Wench than a mad scientist, but it does take most of the campaign to convince her that the Mix And Match Critters technology is too dangerous to exist.
  • This is the raison d'etre of Dr. Odine in Final Fantasy VIII, who doesn't care who he works for or what his inventions are used for as long as he gets to keep researching and inventing things. When he discovers that his research will eventually be developed into a working machine, which in turn is what's allowing the Big Bad to project her consciousness back in time and wage war in the present, his reaction is to be thrilled that his ideas will be put to use.

Web Comics
  • A related battle cry from xkcd: Stand back! I'm going to try science!
  • Any and every spark in Girl Genius will have at least some amount of "For Science!" in the nature. While their morality will vary all over the spectrum, this is a unifying characteristic; it even helped hook up one of the Heterodyne boys with the Mad Scientist's Beautiful Mad Scientist Daughter.
    "Don't tell me you fear the experiment?"
    "I fear the result - but the experiment, why, that is Science!"
    "For Science, then!"
    "For SCIENCE!"
  • Riff in Sluggy Freelance, is a mad scientist with awesome inventions who still lives with roommates in on-again off-again lower middle class poverty, all from not being able to make inventions that aren't destructive or useful in day to day life. This is parodied in the strip to the point his "Nice Earth" counterpart has won the Nobel Prize for focusing his inventions on peaceful and productive uses. Of course, why he doesn't sell any of his various ray gun designs to the army...
  • Irregular Webcomic sends up Myth Busters For Science tendencies on a fairly regular basis. Examples here and with "for science" used literally here and here, replete with a footnote reference to this very page. But one has to keep in mind that Nazi science is one step further and Nazi science sneers at TV tropes.
  • Skewered expertly-or something-in Real Life Comics, when Tony tries to help Greg move.
  • A flashback in Dresden Codak demonstrates Kimiko's Gadgeteer Genius potential:
    Young Kimiko:I must find a thing called 'biscuits'. ... I will do science to it.

Western Animation
  • On The Venture Brothers, Professor Richard Impossible conducted an experiment that blew up in his face. It granted him incredible stretching powers, but left his family with painful and hideous mutations. Not only is he completely unsympathetic of their plight, but he grossly neglects his wife and son and treats them like prisoners most of the time. He has flatly admitted that he believes science to be much more important than his family.
    • Impossible is a thinly-veiled parody of The Fantastic Four's Reed Richards, who has slipped into this trope from Reed Richards Is Useless more than once (most recently during Civil War).
    • Parodying an evil Reed Richards also occurred in the "Heroes" episode of Batman Beyond. This Troper figures it's his resemblance to J.R. "Bob" Dobbs."
    • Doctor Venture himself does highly unethical science either for profit, or just because he can. One season two episode shows his to do list includes such things as "Spit in God's face". The page pic itself is from the pilot episode, where he believes the "Ooh-Ray" has nothing but peaceful applications, much like Tesla's "Peace Ray" (you should he keep in mind his character was different in the pilot). And then there's his "Joy Can"...
      Dr. Venture:I might have used a few unorthodox parts.
      Dr. Orpheus: Just name one.
      Dr. Venture: (mumble)
      Dr. Orpheus: What?
      Dr. Venture: An orphan.
      Dr. Orpheus: Did you just say... AN ORPHAN?!
      Dr. Venture: Yeah, a little... orphan boy.
      Dr. Orpheus: It's powered by a forsaken chiiiiiiild!?
      Dr. Venture: Kind of, sort of, I mean, I didn't use the whole thing.
  • Lampshaded in an episode of Danny Phantom, when Danny asked his dad how much he would get paid for helping out in the lab. "I pay you to mow the lawn. This you'll do for the love of science!"
  • Self proclaimed Evil Genius Jumba Jookiba from Lilo And Stitch seems to have created his genetic experiments just for the heck of it. Although he delights in describing the evil applications of his creations, he seems to have no grand plans for them. In the original movie, he notes that he never gave Experiment 626 (Stitch) a higher purpose.
  • In Disney's Gargoyles, there may have been commercial applications for the Gargoyle genome, the procedure to create Mutates, or cloning, but Dr. Anton Sevarius only seemed interested in research and experimentation for its own sake.
  • In the pilot episode of Time Squad, the titular squad has to deal with a horde of flesh eating robots created by Eli Whitney (seriously). When Otto asks Whitney why he did this, he replies "I wanted to do something to help mankind". How rampaging flesh eating robots could accomplish that is a question not even Whitney himself could answer...
  • What a fine day... FOR SCIENCE!
  • An episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles has an unknown villain break into a lab and steal genetically-engineered termites that also eat metal, concrete, and plastic. When April interviews the scientist who made them, she asks just what purpose the termites were supposed to serve besides the obvious destruction, and gets a blank look in response.
    • Given the land-fill problems several countries have, how are termites that eat non-biodegradable refuse such as plastics not potentially useful?
      • Depends on what they shit...
  • This seems to be the motivation behind half of Professor Frink's inventions in The Simpsons.
    Grampa Simpson: What the hell is that?
    Professor Frink: Why, it's a death ray my good man, behold.
    Grampa: Hey, feels warm, kinda nice.
    Frink: Well it's just a prototype, with proper funding I'm confident this little baby could destroy an area the size of New York City.
    Grampa: But I want to help people, not kill them!
    Frink: Oh, well to be honest, the ray only has evil applications. You know my wife will be happy, she's hated this whole 'death ray' thing from day one.

Real Life
  • Paraphrasing from badly remembered, possibly apocryphal, sources: When JFK was asked why America was going to the Moon, he answered "Why not".
    • "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
  • This is related to the famous reply George Mallory gave when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: "because it's there". He would later die in the attempt, and nobody knows for sure whether he did manage to reach the summit.
  • Wernher von Braun, the scientist who worked on JFK's Apollo project had in the past made the V2 missile for the Nazis. Why? For Rocketry!
  • One of the most horrifying examples in real life of this is Josef Mengele, the infamous Nazi scientist who performed "experiments" at Auschwitz, and had a particular fascination with twins and other "abnormals", who he researched in order to find scientific proof of racial inferiority. He was known to perform amputations and major surgeries without anesthesia, and once sewed two twins together to make artificial Siamese twins. Said one prisoner of him, "Nobody ever questioned him — why did this one die? Why did that one perish? The patients did not count. He professed to do what he did in the name of science, but it was a madness on his part."
    • There's a sort of counterpart to Mengele: a group of Jewish scientists, who after being locked in ghetto, wrote a paper on effects of malnutrition on human body. They hid it in a milk can, so it survived the war.
  • For the time being, the experiments using the Large Hadron Collider will mostly be for satisfying scientific curiosity (namely searching for the hypothetical Higgs boson). Whether any practical use can be made from such a discovery (which would provide insight to the quantum nature of mass) remains to be seen. There are also those who claim that the experiments are unethical, due to the potential for creating miniature black holes which could destroy the planet, but these fears are mostly groundless (REALLY!).
    • Cosmic radiation performs the very same experiments at higher energies regularly. So yeah.
      • The idea that a miniature black hole could destroy the world is quite absurd, really - the whole reason why the black holes are so dangerous is that they are supermassive. That is, that they have at least the mass of one star collapsed in a superdense package. The entire mass of Earth couldn't produce a black hole worth mention; unless the science manages to get the mass of a star out of nothing, the idea of planet-destroying black hole coming out of nowhere is quite ludicrous. Black hole isn't a cosmic vacuum cleaner - the only thing that 'sucks' is the enormous gravity, impossible to produce in Earth conditions.
    • A lot of theoretical research tend to suit this trope, at least at first. When one asks why special relativity was useful in 1905, or Democritus' concept of atomism in classical Greece, one finds that the greatest practical results came decades or even centuries later. A particular meta-example would be Bacon, whose most noted practical accomplishment was how to create practical accomplishments in research. Or immortality.
  • "There is no such thing as good knowledge of bad knowledge. There is only knowledge. Morality is when you decide not to use it. - This Troper 's Science Teacher, who were probably quoting someone else.
  • Cracked.com's list of 7 Kickass Sci-Fi Cancer Cures starts with drilling holes in a man's head and firing fiber-optic anti-tumor lasers into his brain. While he's *conscious*.
  • There was a concern that the first A-Bomb tests would trigger nitrogen fusion and ignite the entire atmosphere, wiping out all life on Earth. Teller first brought it up. "In Serber's account, Oppenheimer mentioned it to Arthur Compton, who 'didn't have enough sense to shut up about it. It somehow got into a document that went to Washington' which led to the question being 'never laid to rest'." By the time the test was done, this outcome seemed vanishingly unlikely (nitrogen does not fuse easily). Further discussion here.
  • One of the pioneers of head transplants, Robert J. White, appears to have fit this mold perfectly. Even a completely successful transplant would leave someone as a head grotesquely stitched onto someone else's shoulder, with no motor control, severely limiting its practical use.

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