This is an excerpt from the memoirs of a Mad Scientist. It was the inspiration behind the song “Sorry Alex” on my album Mad Scientist PHD. Click the image below to download from iTunes.

At the beginning of my career as a scientist I was placed in the labs of mental medicine. Our laboratory was dealing with the idea that one can change human behaviour through scientific means. The idea that inducing sickness at the sight of immorality could change his perspective, life force, essentially who he was. This issue, I quickly realized, was not so much a medical one, as a moral one. I was soon to discover over the years, that it always is. Science has many physical answers, but when raises moral questions it can’t answer them.

I can remember one of our first experiments was with a prisoner named Alex (Alexander de Large). This young man had been convicted of many trespasses which were referred by him as Ultra-Violence. He was, they said, the perfect candidate for this test. I thought it unethical to meddle with someone’s internal goings on, but I didn’t say anything as I was fresh out of medical school and there mostly to observe and learn.

As the period of testing commenced, I watched as the boy was forced to see things that made me turn away. He sat there starting to feel ill from the chemicals we had injected him with. As the days passed, his sick feeling didn’t. I remember his request that the Beethoven played through the Public Address System be turned off as he didn’t want it to be ruined for him. The doctors grant him this.

I sat in the back, watching the screen (if I could stand it) and tried to get up the courage to protest this disgusting display of, what I called, “Playing God”. But alas, my friends, as the silly, stupid, bashful, beginner that I was, I kept quiet and let the doctors destroy the fabric of a man’s being, albeit a terrible fabric.

I can’t be anything but sorry to Alex for not stopping what I knew as moral tampering, which couldn’t be right. My heart sank in my chest when I heard that Alex had come across old “friends” and enemies, and that they had beaten him badly. I’m not even sure if he ever stayed reformed, or if the sickness wore off. Because you can’t physically change what is in a soul.