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This article aims to clarify the position of the scientist, by studying the desire to know that animates all scientists. This desire, rooted in the incompleteness of the symbolic, which is structurally insufficient to give a full account of the world, aims, among other things, to extract knowledge from the real. However, this desire is not pure. Indeed, the “knowledge drive,” as conceived by Freud in 1905, can also satisfy a jouissance of which the scientist himself is not aware. The history of the sciences is peopled by scientists, both men and women, whose personal life was dramatically overturned by their scientific discoveries, or by the catastrophic consequences of those discoveries. It can also happen that a scientist’s oscillation between desire and jouissance blinds him to the disastrous consequences of his research on himself and/or on the people around him. The scientist may find himself overwhelmed by the effects of his experiments and discoveries. Far from setting out a psychology of the scientist, the authors limit themselves to an analysis of the scientist’s subject position, through examples taken from science fiction.