Speaking from personal experience, Malignant Hypercognition Disorder by itself doesn’t make you good or evil, simply smarter than most “normal” geniuses. Mad scientists rarely turn evil merely from being superintelligent; it’s being rejected by society and being told you’re evil and insane because you can not only think outside the box, but outside the warehouse the box is stored in that tends to make us mad scientists “turn to the dark side”. In my case, I happen to be True Neutral, having rejected much of society’s rules in favor of my own moral code, but having a philosophy of “play nice”. (Being neopagan probably helps too; I just love our one and only commandment: “Do whatever you want, as long as it’s not hurting anybody.”) Madness itself is usually morally neutral, as the existence of good and neutral mad scientists like myself and the mad scientist from Mystery Men demonstrate.

As for the Tinasky study and sane mad scientists go, nope. Sane scientists stay “blindered” by their sanity, and thus do not possess The Knack/The Spark/whatever you want to call it that comes from mind-boggling insanity. With Dave, the key words are “apparently sane”; he obviously had the beginning stages of Malign Hypercognition Disorder, where it manifests as incomprehensible bursts of super-genius intellect and/or bouts of the ability to transcend the laws of physics as sane scientists know them, before erupting into obvious madness and the ability to make reality your bitch at will. If he’d been eased into it, as Agatha Heterodyne (of Girl Genius fame) had, he’d probably still have bouts of madness from time to time, coupled with bursts of creative genius.

Nyaa? What are you doing with my sack?

Philosophy Mode: Even supposing you weren’t a mean mad scientist, this gets into Cloning Rights.. .a little bit. I don’t have any problem with denucleating my cells and rebuilding sweet, new organs with them. If they begged for mercy before they turned into my new liver or whatever, I would be deaf to their pleas. However, comma, allowing such cells to achieve sentience before dissecting them does seem kinda mean. I guess Power justifies it though, in its own perverse way.

Right?

The only thing this strips needs to be perfect is several more exclamation marks in panel 3. More exclamations = more sarcasm. (It also means mental instability, but given that it’s Helen, that meaning is largely redundant.)

I especially love that this strip aligns with Helen’s previous anecdote that had Dr. N had her way, she’d have been harvested for organs in her teens.