Science and Creepiness

I have mentioned the SCP Foundation before, and perhaps hinted as to how much I adore the series. It is only recently, however, that I have begun to understand why made-up reports about fictitious entities, contained by an equally-fictitious organisation, have such a draw for me. It's because of when I sit down to write a report about my lab-work, or plan an experiment, I could just as easily be writing about a SCP object.

I wouldn't say all researchers in all scientific disciplines could say this, but in my case, working with infectious disease, it certainly applies. We have physical containment levels for what we work on. There are often special requirements for different organisms, pertaining to handling, containment and maintenance. While there is usually enough information to culture the organism, and prevent it or modified strains from escaping into the environment, there is frequently a lot which is not known. That, of course, is the reason for experimentation.

We often have to do things we would rather not in order to find answers. I have infected and then killed several mice in the course of my experimentation. Did I enjoy it? Of course not. But it had to be done - there's that ugly phrase again - for the greater good. It's not on the level of utilising Class D personnel, or any sort of human experimentation for that matter, but it is still unpleasant, and often difficult to morally justify.

There are always the nasty surprises - the person who breaks a flask of infectious bacteria and acquires the corresponding disease shortly afterward, the person who ends up in a room with a leaking nitrogen dewar and suffocates before they know it - all the times when a mistake was made during the most unfavourable circumstances. There are incident reports, and they are every bit as impersonal as the artificial ones in the Foundation's collection.

Perhaps most pertinently, these organisms can be utterly terrifying. Look up bacillary dysentery, or meningococcal disease, or gas gangrene. These are real-life horrors.

In handling a pathogenic organism almost every day, when the precautionary measures are known by heart, it all becomes routine. When it becomes routine, one stops imagining the worst that could happen. Why imagine, when the worst has never happened, and when paranoia leads to a waste of resources?

Horror fiction on the other hand, makes it a point to explore the worst that could happen, in the process exposing the fallacy of considering a dangerous object, which hadn't done anything harmful yet, to warrant no more caution than a harmless object. When I mentally wrote out a SCP entry for the bacterium I work on, and realised it would qualify for Euclid class, it was a shock. Had I truly become so familiar with a dangerous, dangerous pathogen, that I no longer considered it threatening? Did I really think that it could not have any nasty surprises hiding up its prokaryotic sleeves, even there are many things about it which are poorly understood? Was I so really so arrogant, that I no longer feared a bacterium which causes an often fatal disease?

The entries in the SCP series are written to be entertaining, which is why their properties are so exaggerated. It's understandable, that the more dangerous objects have to have such bizarre, obviously undesirable effects in order to be accessible to a lay audience. But if you think about it, a bacterium like, for example, Clostridium tetani doesn't need to liquefy a patient's insides or cause projectile haemorrhaging. It's already frightening for what it does naturally. 

The SCP Foundation showcases the creative fiction of some excellent writers. Are we really so arrogant as to think that Nature can't possibly be more creative?