Roman om eksperimenter og etik

H.G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau, first published in 1896

Roman om en biolog, der eksperimenterer med levende dyr i et forsøg på at ændre dem til menneskelignende væsener. I kapitel 14 siger denne biolog i en samtale med romanens fortæller:

”You see, I went on with this research just the way it led me. That is the only way I ever heard of research going. I asked a question, devised some method of getting an answer, and got – a fresh question. Was this possible, or that possible? You cannot imagine what this means to an investigator, what an intellectual passion grows upon him. You cannot imagine the strange colourless delight of these intellectual desires. The thing before you is no longer an animal, a fellow creature, but a problem. Sympathetic pain – all I know of it I remember as a thing I used to suffer from years ago. I wanted – it was the only thing I wanted – to find the extreme limit of plasticity in a ling shape.”

“But,” I said, “the thing is an abomination –“

“To this day I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature. I have gone on, not heeding anything but the question I was pursuing, and the material has … dripped into the huts yonder….”