Crazy Advisors

If you've been to grad school or know someone who has, you probably have heard those urban legends of crazy advisors. Actually, I guess they aren't urban legends. I knew some at my school (not my advisor thankfully!). These crazy advisors are die-hard, always-at-school-and-expect-you-to-be-there-all-the-time-as-well professors. Well, in the last couple of months I've come across two stories about crazy chemist-advisor stories. One was about this Italian physicist named Eligio Perucca. He was featured in a C&E News article. He definitely isn't well known. His work on dyed crystals and induced chirality has been overlooked, and he is better known for his "personaggio bizarro" as the Italian university history recorded. He wrongly has been accused of being anti-Semitic when he worked during the 1940's. After reading the things people said about him, I'm not surprised he was thought of as anti-Semitic. Here are a couple of things his peers have said about him:
Perucca was a "perverse and extremely spiteful man" and "terrible physics professor."
The misery he brought on students is so crazy, it's funny. Here's an excerpt from the article about one cruel happening:
"...Perucca [asked a student] during an oral exam to describe the Carnot cycle. The flustered student did poorly. So Perucca instructed the student to draw a circle on the blackboard and then another circle and then a couple of lines. Finally, Perucca informed the confused student that he had sketched not the Carnot cycle, but a Carnot bicycle, and to get on and ride away because he had just failed the exam."
I couldn't make that one up!

Then during our Friday Film Series a couple of weeks back, we watched a film about the quest for absolute zero. The film highlighted the work by the chemist Dewar. Dewar is famous by inventing the Dewar flask which is still used today to hold extremely cold substances like liquid nitrogen. Apparently, Dewar and Perucca could have been buddies. Dewar was so set on reaching absolute zero before anybody else, he worked his lab assistants to death. Well not to death, but to the point of losing an eye! Dewar wasn't really concerned with safety so glassware frequently would blow up in his lab. On one occasion, his assistant lost his eye. (Throughout the rest of the film, this poor guy was wearing an eye patch!) Then that assistant actually kept working for him until he finally reached his limit and quit. Leaving the building he apparently told Dewar, "I will never set food again in this institute until you are dead." And as the legend goes, he didn't come back until Dewar had died.

It's kinda comforting to know that crazy advisors have been around since Science began. And a little scary.