Look, I can see you glancing back and forth between myself and that glossy cover on the newsstand. Let me save you the time and $5.99. Yes, that’s me slathered in butter because I was trying to become so frictionless that I could slide on my belly all the way from my Harvard University laboratory to Yale. It was quite painful and the butter ended up attracting fire ants which stung me mercilessly. It was certainly a low point in my career, which is why I find it especially upsetting that it’s been immortalized by this infernal magazine.
What many people don’t know is that failure is a normal part of science. Sure, in retrospect genetically engineering a potato two stories tall in order to create a potato battery large enough to power every clock on campus wasn’t the most obvious way to create a renewable source of energy. But it’s definitely not my fault that a local fraternity stole the potato and immediately turned it into vodka.
And if we’re being honest here, what kind of person finds joy in reading about every single failure committed during a scientist’s career? When Ben Franklin was electrocuted by a bolt of lightning while performing his famous kite experiment, was he featured as a two-page spread followed by various opinion pieces, letters from the readers, and political cartoons? Of course not, so why did I get so much publicity the time I tried to disprove the existence of chemtrails by showing what a real mind control chemical would look like, only to accidentally turn the entire state of Virginia into mindless zombies.
Sadly, this would all be much more bearable if still had the respect of my peers. For the life of me I will never understand why Nobel Prize winning scientist Dr. James Watson, who helped discover the structure of DNA, decided to come out of his decade long retirement for the sole purpose of guest editing this specific issue of Scientific Experimental Disasters That Could Have Been Prevented. He even made a point of announcing that I was the first scientist to ever be inducted into the magazine’s hall of fame for my construction of a planet-sized palm leaf that would gently fan Earth in order to prevent global warming, but instead caused massive tidal waves and devastating hurricanes.
Look, I realize that print media is dying, and from what I’ve been told, just being mentioned on the cover of SEDTCHBP can increase sales by threefold. But there has to be a limit, right? Surely I’m not the only scientist who has ever designed hangover cure that uses Redwood Tree bark, but which turned out to be more addictive than cocaine and resulted in the tree’s extinction plus thousands of overdoses.
Then again, I guess I shouldn’t let this whole situation bother me. After all, once I finally create a race of super intelligent, super strong mutants to take care of America’s aging population, all of my past failures will be forgotten.