The problem these days is not so much “mad scientists” as people who are mad at science.

Where did the Mad Scientist trope come from anyway? Arguably it was Mary Shelley’s horror novel Frankenstein, published in 1818. Science fiction classics like Jules Verne’s The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) kept up the theme and the “Golden Age” of science fiction provided many more examples.

In these novels, scientists either tampered with things better left alone or succumbed to a lust for power. Death rays and the precursors of gene splicing abounded. The outcome was mostly dreadful, except for those few gallant hero scientists who managed to save Earth from a deadly plague/alien/monster/giant something.

While the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s were the heyday of mad scientists in fiction, those years also constituted a time when real scientists were heroes. The atomic bomb ended WWII in the Pacific. Polio was conquered. The “Space Race” that led to many scientific breakthroughs began, thanks to the Soviets and their Sputnik (1957).

Back then, scientists were revered.

Later on, not so much.

The conflict between science and religion heated up. Of course, there was conflict going way back – before Mary Shelley warned us about “playing God.” Galileo and Kepler removed us from our “God-given place” in the center of the universe, and Darwin implied that we were just another animal. The Earth suddenly became billions of years old,  circling a mediocre star.

Then there was fallout, both literal and figurative, from the atomic bomb. Medical science gave us thalidomide. NASA used up billions of dollars, with no obvious monetary payoff down the line, and some people decried the space program for spending money that could be used for problems on Earth.

And all that led to changes in the general public’s attitude toward science.

By the ’60s. medicine was under fire from those who found Eastern philosophy and natural healing just as good or better. Physicists were condemned for the same atomic bomb for which they had been lauded. Science didn’t seem like such a good deal after all.

And there’s some truth to the complaints. Many scientists believed that math, physics, and chemistry were all. If it didn’t have numbers attached to it, forget it. Psychology, sociology, anthropology, and most other -ologies were “soft sciences,” barely sciences at all. Hard sciences ruled.

Slowly, the ground under science shifted. Now science has become to many people the enemy, the domain of elitists and narcissists and people who feel they are entitled by their intellect to run the world.

Of course, the stereotypes from early science fiction had something to do with that.

But the Average Man (and Woman) had a bone, or at least a fossil, to pick with science and scientists. Again, science was denying what the general public believed.

Increasingly, people believed in the efficacy of non-Western medicine, or at least the non-efficacy of Western medicine. Science believed in genetics and stem cells and cloning.

People believed in the spiritual realm. Scientists believed in the measurable.

People believed in religion. Science believed in science.

You can see where this is heading – right back to the days when people thought science meant the reanimation of corpses, invasions of bug-eyed monsters, and the creation of death rays. Because what, after all, is the distance between growing human organs and creating Frankenstein, between cloning a sheep and making a half-man-half-fly, between a laser-guided missile and a death ray?

And many scientists are arrogant, dismissive of popular opinion, and unwilling to engage in dialogue with opposing viewpoints. “Because I said so,” seems to be enough for them. “Real” scientists look down their noses at “popularizers” who look to educate the public about science.

Unfortunately, everyone is shouting and no one is listening.

Personally, I am a sometimes science geek as well as a word nerd, thanks to high school chemistry and physics, college astronomy, and lots of nonfiction reading. I don’t think science knows it all, and it’s a long way from figuring it all out. I also think that psychology and spirituality and art have a lot to teach us about the human condition and our place in the universe, STEM classes and careers notwithstanding.

But the pushback against science scares me. NASA is wasting its time chasing UFOs. Streaming channels that used to be devoted to science now feature ghost chasers and treasure hunters. I’m not saying that science never stumbles, but it provides the best answers we have to some of the problems that plague us, including plagues.

I don’t advocate returning to a time when science was the be-all and end-all of thought and education, or to the time when fictional science made scientists suspect. I just think science deserves more respect than it’s getting now.