“Woe is me,” said Albert Einstein on learning of the bombing of Hiroshima.

    It’s not unusual for inventors, researchers, and developers to rue their creations. Although Einstein didn’t work directly on the atomic bomb, he regretted his role in encouraging its development.

    Similarly, Alfred Nobel, who developed dynamite and other weapons technologies, launched the Nobel Peace Prize to award promoters of peace,which Einstein interpreted his motivation for establishing the prize as atonement.

    As to whether any invention or discovery is intrinsically positive or negative, ask Arthur Galston, whose research led to the development of Agent Orange, an herbicide intially intended to help grow crops but which caused extensive environmental damage as well as birth defects when used in Vietnam.

    He said in 2003, “You know, nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe, is morally neutral and it can be turned either to constructive ends or destructive ends. That’s not the fault of science.”

    Still come apologies from those who feel they’ve created a monster. Here are 10 recent or less known examples of such regrets.

    “我有罪，”听闻广岛遭原子弹袭击，爱因斯坦喃喃说道。

    发明家和科研工作者对他们的发明感到后悔的情形，其实并不罕见。虽然爱因斯坦并未直接参与原子弹的研制，但他认为自己是始作俑者，并对此深感后悔。

    与之类似，炸药和其它武器技术的发明者阿尔弗莱德•诺贝尔设立了诺贝尔和平奖，以表彰和平的促进者，但爱因斯坦认为，诺贝尔这样做其实是为了赎罪。

    至于任何一项发明在本质上是否具有正面意义或负面意义，你可以去问问亚瑟•高仕登，他的研究催生了橙剂，这种高效的除草剂本来是用于促进农作物生长的，但在越战期间，美军却将大量橙剂喷洒在越南游击队藏身的丛林中，不仅导致环境严重受损，还造成了大量畸形儿。

    高仕登在2003年说：“你知道吗，没有哪一件你为科学所做的事，能够保证为人类带来福祉。我相信，任何科学发现都是道德中立的，既可以用于建设性目的，也可以被用于破坏性目的。那并不是科学的错。”

    不过，依然有一些科学家向公众致歉，他们也觉得自己发明了难以控制的“怪物”，以下是10个近期或者不太为人所知的例子。

    1.K Cups

    In 1992, John Sylvain developed the now ubiquitous single-serve, instant brew plastic pods for use with Keurig coffee makers that generated enough non-biodegradable waste last year to encircle the globe 10.5 times. He recently told the Atlantic, “I feel bad sometimes that I ever did it.”

    With his current company Zonbak, he’s in the solar panel business, in hopes of at least partially offsetting his creation’s environmental damage. Meanwhile, Keurig Green Mountain has pledged to create a recyclable K-Cup by 2020.

    1．咖啡胶囊(K Cup)

    1992年，约翰•沙利文与Keurig咖啡公司一道发明了这种一次性的速融咖啡胶囊。它造成的不可降解垃圾每年可环绕地球10.5圈。最近他对《大西洋杂志》表示：“有时我为发明这个东西感到后悔。”

    后来，沙利文创办了一家名叫Zonbak的光伏企业，期望部分抵销他的发明对环境带来的损害。同时，Keurig绿山咖啡公司宣称将于2020年之前生产一款可以回收的K-Cup胶囊。

    2.Mother's Day

    Anna Jarvis initially came up with Mother’s Day after she was devastated by the 1905 death of her mother, with the first commemorative event held at her church and a store auditorium in 1908, using her mother’s favorite flower, white carnations.

    But soon her full-time promotional efforts for the holiday became too successful for her tastes.

    The floral industry cashed in on the white carnation, with accounts being reported of hoarding and profiteering, and expanded holiday offerings to include red carnations for living mothers, reserving white for deceased moms. By 1920 Jarvis grew disgusted with the commercial bent taken on by her day of sentiment.

    According to Mental Floss, she called those selling mother’s day cards, gifts, and flowers “charlatans, bandits, pirates, racketeers, kidnappers and termites that would undermine with their greed one of the finest, noblest and truest movements and celebrations.” She tried to fight the profit-driven promotions by attempting to trademark her creation, but failed, and by the end of her life she was petitioning to rescind Mother’s Day altogether.

    2．母亲节

    1905年，母亲的不幸去世让安娜•查维斯悲痛万分，也让她产生了创建母亲节的想法。1908年，在她做礼拜的教堂和一个商店小礼堂，查维斯为母亲举办了第一场悼念活动，并献上了母亲生前最爱的花朵——白色康乃馨。

    但是很快，她对母亲节的不懈倡导获得了她意料之外的成功。

    花卉行业靠着白色康乃馨狠狠赚了一笔，不时出现一些商人囤积居奇的报道。后来有人开始向在世的母亲送红色康乃馨，而把白色康乃馨送给已故的母亲。到了1920年，由于母亲节已经变得太过商业化，连查维斯自己都开始感到厌烦。

    据《心理牙线》杂志报道，查维斯将那些兜售母亲节卡片、礼物和鲜花的人称作“骗子、土匪、海盗、敲诈犯、绑架犯、白蚁，他们用贪婪玷污了本应是最美好、圣洁、真诚的时刻和典礼。”为了对抗利益驱使下的母亲节促销活动，她甚至试过给母亲节注册商标，但最终以失败而告终。到了人生暮年，她还四处请愿，希望彻底取消母亲节。

    3.Pop-Up Ads

    Last year, Ethan Zuckerman wrote an essay discussing advertising as the default business model of the Internet, in which he also apologized for the pesky creation he helped unleash on the world: the pop-up ad. “I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”

    3、弹出式广告

    去年，伊森•扎克曼写了一篇讨论广告作为互联网默认业务模式的文章。在文章中，他也为当年发明弹窗式广告这样一个奇葩产品表示抱歉：“我写了一行能弹出窗口的代码，然后在里面插了一个广告。我很抱歉，我们的本意是好的。”

    4.Flappy Bird

    Developer Dong Nguyen launched a simple side-scrolling mobile game in May of 2013, which exploded in popularity in early 2014, when it became the most downloaded free game in the iOS App Store. After more than 50 million downloads, Nguyen pulled the game down in February 2014, expressing concerns that it was too addictive and overused. He announced the removal on Twitter, adding “I cannot take this anymore.”

    The game did return on Amazon Fire, but was not released again for other platforms.

    4．疯狂的小鸟

    2013年5月，越南裔开发者阮阿东推出了一款非常简单的横版闯关手游，2014年初登陆iOS应用商店后，瞬间引爆互联网，一跃成为下载量最大的游戏。在下载量超过5000万次后，阮阿东担心这款游戏太令人上瘾，容易被过度使用。2014年2月，他将该游戏下架，并在Twitter上发布了一则声明，表示“我再也受不了了。”

    后来，尽管《疯狂的小鸟》又重新出现在亚马逊Fire平台，但再也没有在其它平台发布了。

    5.Cubicles

    In 1968, a year in which Mad Men characters are regularly depicted taking luxurious naps on their private office couches, Robert Propst proposed a futuristic office style with no real walls or doors.

    His creation, the Action Office, seemed like a good idea at the time: instead of an open air layout, the walls would provide places to pin up work and there would be more surfaces for the cube-dwellers. It was also cheaper.

    But as Propst recalled to Fortune at age 80, "They kept shrinking the Action Office until it became a cubicle,” and later he regretted his role in creating this “monolithic insanity.”

    5．办公隔间

    1968年，也就是美剧《广告狂人》的主角们经常能在私人办公室的沙发上睡一个奢侈午觉的年代，罗伯特•普洛斯特提出了一个颇具未来主义的办公室装修格调，这种办公室没有真正意义上的墙和门。

    他发明的“动感办公室”在当时看来是个很好的主意：有别于以外的开放式格局，这些壁板既是一个能够让人专心工作的空间，也给窝在小格子里的小白领们提供了更多的台面，价格也更便宜。

    不过在80岁那年，普洛斯特对《财富》杂志回忆道：“他们一再压缩‘动感办公室’的空间，使它最终成了一个小格子。”后来他非常后悔自己参与创造了这种“千篇一律的疯狂”。

    6.Comic Sans

    Comic Sans is the whimsical typeface everybody loves to hate, which has inspired the online Ban Comic Sans campaign.Vincent Connare, the man responsible for its existence, created it for a computer education program for children in 1994. But once it was included as a standard typeface in the Microsoft Windows operating system, it took on life of its own, mostly going places a more dignified choice should go.

    It’s become the legacy of Connare, who works at a typography studio and says he cringes whenever he see Comic Sans. "If you love it, you don't know much about typography,” he told the Wall Street Journal, adding, "if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby."

    6．Comic Sans字体

    Comic Sans字体似乎成了人见人恨的过街老鼠，网上甚至还发起过“抵制Comic Sans字体”活动。它的发明人文森特•康奈尔为了促进儿童学习电脑的积极性，于1994年发明了这种字体。但后来该字体被微软的Windows操作系统吸纳为标准字体之一，似乎有了自己的生命，不过它出现的地方往往都应该由一种更庄重的字体替代。

    Comic Sans字体已经成了康奈尔的负担。康奈尔目前供职于一家排版工作室。他表示，每次看见它都觉得糟心。他对《华尔街日报》表示：“如果你喜欢它，那么你基本上不懂排版。如果你讨厌它，你还是不懂排版，而且你应该找一个其它爱好。”

    7.Labradoodle

    Wally Conron, the breeder who created the labradoodle (a mix of labrador and poodle) in the late 1980s, regrets having created a designer dog craze. Last year he told the Associated Press, “I’ve done a lot of damage...I’ve created a lot of problems...There are a lot of unhealthy and abandoned dogs out there.”

    Conron stopped breeding them 20 years ago, but their popularity has boomed. Conron criticized puppy mills with unscrupulous that breeding practices. “Instead of breeding out the problems, they’re breeding them in. For every perfect one, you’re going to find a lot of crazy ones.”

    7．拉布拉多贵宾犬

    20世纪80年代末期，沃利•康伦在拉布拉多犬和贵宾犬的基础上培育出了拉布拉多贵宾犬。但他却为自己引发的育犬热感到后悔。去年他对美联社表示：“我搞了许多破坏……我带来了很多问题……有很多不健康和被遗弃的狗无家可归。”

    康伦早在20年前就停止繁育拉布拉多贵宾犬，但这并未阻碍它非常火爆地流行开来。康伦批评很多犬舍肆无忌惮地培育犬种的做法：“他们不是通过培育解决问题，而是通过培育造成问题。每完成一个完美的育种，背后都有很多疯狂的育种。”

    8.Pepper Spray

    Kamran Loghman was a developer for weapons-grade pepper spray for the FBI in the 1980s. In 2011, speaking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, Loghman expressed his shock at law enforcement’s use of pepper spray on peaceful protesters. He cited the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations at UC Davis, in New York City, and Seattle. “I saw it, and the first thing that came to my mind wasn’t police or students, was my own children sitting down, having an opinion, and their being shot and forced by chemical agents...I feel it’s my civic duty to explain to the public that this is not what pepper spray was developed for.”

    8．胡椒喷雾剂

    上世纪80年代，卡姆兰•洛曼为美国FBI研制出武器级胡椒喷雾剂。2011年，洛曼在《今日民主》节目接受艾米•古德曼采访时，表达了他对执法部门使用胡椒喷雾对付和平示威者的震惊。他提到了加州大学戴维斯分校以及纽约和西雅图等地的“占领华尔街”活动：“我看到了那个情景，我首先想到的并不是警察或学生，而是我自己的孩子坐在那里，想表达一种理念，却被化学制剂袭击和驱赶……我觉得作为公民，我有义务向公众解释，这并不是胡椒喷雾剂被开发出来的本意。”

    9.Emoticons

    Today, the cartoon image icons used in texting and on social media are called emoji and stickers, but they began with a simple set of characters (colon, dash, close parenthesis) used to represent a smiley face. It was popularized 30 years ago by computer science teacher Scott Fahlman, as a way to say in typed communications, “I’m joking.” In 2013, self-proclaimed fuddy duddy Fahlman lamented, "Sometimes I feel like Dr. Frankenstein," he says. "My creature started as benign but it's gone places I don't approve of."

    9．表情符号

    如今经常用在短信和社交媒体上的卡通表情又被叫作“表情符”，它们最初源自用三个简单的字符（冒号、破折号、括号）来模拟笑脸的表情。它是30年前由一位名叫斯科特•法尔曼的计算机科学教师发明的，用来在电脑通讯中表示“我在开玩笑”。2013年，自称“老古董”的法尔曼叹道：“有时我觉得自己就像弗兰克斯坦博士，我的发明起初是良性的，但它后来发展到了我不赞成的方向。”

    10.AK-47

    Mikhail Kalashnikov, developer of the AK-47 automatic assault rifle, found it painful when his weapon was used for criminal purposes, and before he died at the age of 94, in 2013, he reportedly wrote to Patriarch Kirill of the Russian Orthodox church to express his regret about the many deaths his creation made possible.

    “The spiritual pain is unbearable,” reads the letter attributed to him. "...I keep having the same unsolved question: if my rifle claimed people's lives, then can it be that I... a Christian and an Orthodox believer, was to blame for their deaths?"

    Church spokesman Alexander Volkov said, “The Church has a very definite position: when weapons serve to protect the Fatherland, the Church supports both its creators and the soldiers who use it.”

    10．AK-47自动步枪

    在发现他的发明被用于犯罪用途之后，AK-47之父米哈伊尔•卡拉什尼科夫深感痛苦，在2013年去世前，他以94岁高龄写信给俄罗斯东正教主教祈伟义，对AK-47造成的诸多杀戮深表悔恨。

    他在这封信中写道：“心灵上的痛苦无法承受……我始终有同一个未解的问题困扰着我：如果我发明的步枪夺走了很多人的生命，那么我……作为一个基督徒和东正教信徒，是否应该为他们的死负责？”

    教会发言人亚历山大•沃尔科夫说道：“教会有一个非常明确的态度：当武器被用来保卫祖国时，教会支持他的发明者，也支持使用它的士兵。”（财富中文网）

    译者：朴成奎

    审校：任文科