“Villains always have a PhD. Dr Doom, Dr Octopus, Dr Doofenshmirtz, Hannibal Lecter, or Dr No. Even Dr Frankenstein or Dr Evil. Meanwhile, the good guys usually stop at a master’s degree, like Master Yoda, Master Roshi, Master Splinter, Master Miyagi, Shifu, or Luke Skywalker himself. Graduate studies corrupt the soul.”

– Navon Shapurkar on X

Navon Shapurkar might be onto something.

Biological tools are getting incredibly precise and ridiculously accessible. Yet the world expects us to assume holding a pipette automatically grants someone immortal morality. Pop culture logic says anyone spending four-plus years in a lab is two minor inconveniences away from building an underground den and demanding world ransom.

The mechanics of scientific research are completely neutral. The protocol used to engineer a life-saving therapy is identical to the one used to synthesise a localised biological nightmare. Gene editing doesn’t care if you’re trying to cure a genetic disorder or turn someone’s internal organs into liquid. The chemistry is indifferent. So why aren’t more scientists opting for the full supervillain career path? Where are the custom-engineered super-plagues?

To figure out why the scientific community hasn’t collectively pivoted to supervillainism, I cornered a senior microbiology professor who – for reasons involving institutional HR and federal watchlists – requested total anonymity.

He was quick to dismantle the cinematic fantasy of the lab, pointing out that movies don’t always paint scientists as heroes. Dr Frankenstein certainly wasn’t. Real life is far from a black-and-white feature film anyway. In reality, scientists manufacture grenades under the official banner of defence, while another lab down the corridor devotes its existence to perfecting chemotherapy.

The contrast is staggering. One department writes user manuals for explosive hardware; the department next door makes sure people can live comfortably for a few more years. Same background, same funding portal.

Science, as he put it, is fundamentally about development, not preservation. “It’s like building a ship: you can design a vessel for deep-sea exploration, or you can build that exact hull and load it with high-yield explosives. Science simply builds the ship. Humans decide what to put on it,” he said.

Which leads directly to the compliance issue: what actually stops someone from loading the dynamite? Is humanity protected by a moral code, or are biosecurity laws keeping researchers from going rogue?

The professor scoffed at the idea of laws saving the planet. “Morality carries far more weight than law on human behaviour. If an individual or a government is intent on doing the wrong thing, a written regulation will not deter them.” He continued, “Look at modern history: even after international treaties explicitly banned chemical and biological weapons after World War II, those weapons were still developed and deployed worldwide.”

Biosecurity treaties are essentially critical terms-of-service agreements. Everyone clicks ‘accept’ and then countries do whatever they were going to do anyway.

So if global oversight is a paper tiger, what happens on a random Thursday inside the lab? When someone is staring through an eyepiece for nine consecutive hours, are they actively thinking about the global impact their work would have?

“Inside the lab, the focus is immediate and personal. Nobody sits down at their bench at 9:00 am thinking, ‘Today I shall alter the course of human destiny.’ You’re just trying to solve the biochemical puzzle sitting right in front of you, or trying to figure out why an experiment didn’t work again. Those micro-decisions stack up into global realities,” he revealed.

This creates an intense public paradox. To the outside world, microbiology exists in a state of quantum duality: it’s either the discipline curing disease, or it’s the nightmare field breeding invisible doom.

Public fear, he admitted, is justified. He pointed straight to the trajectory of drug resistance, where bacteria are speed-running evolution, outpacing pharmaceutical R&D, and threatening to send us back to medical medieval times. Drug resistance is a massive threat to global health. Understanding those microscopic processes is also the reason modern medicine functions at all.

When pressed with the ultimate stress test of whether unlimited funding and a blank cheque would ever tempt him to step onto the dark side and engineer a bio-weapon just to see if he could pull it off, he didn’t even pause to calculate the evil-to-effort ratio. He remains team “peace and development”, focused on helping people who actually need it.

Science isn’t pure, and it certainly isn’t peaceful by default. If humanity manages to survive the next century, it won’t be because international regulations saved us, it’ll be because the people holding the pipettes keep choosing to find cures instead of building bombs.