• In Rurouni Kenshin, Megumi Takani lost her family in the war, and was trying to move on with her life to study their trade (medicine). She was promised an apprenticeship, but ended up being forced to produce opium (and concoct stronger and more addictive varieties of the drug, such as Spider's Web) for Kanryu Takeda.^note This was slightly changed in the anime: she did become the apprentice of a Tokyo doctor, but her mentor (aka the one who produced opium) was killed and only then Megumi was caught up in Kanryu's web. More than once, she has attempted suicide over the guilt, but Kenshin convinced her to pick up her medical studies and focus on healing as many people as possible.

• Doctor Will Magnus, creator of the Metal Men, is kidnapped during 52 and taken to Oolong Island so he can build a new Plutonium Man for Intergang against his will. He's even less happy when they take his medication for his manic/depressive bipolar disorder with delusional episodes (since going off his meds last time was what caused him to create the first Plutonium Man), but he ultimately outsmarts them and brings down their whole scheme. It happens to him again in Batman/Superman: World's Finest when he and multiple other scientists and industrialists (including Green Arrow and the second Blue Beetle) are abducted after Professor Ivo's upgraded Amazo Turned Against Their Masters and plotted to trigger a Robot War.
• Asterix:
  • Getafix, druid of Asterix's village, is kidnapped quite often for his knowledge of the Super-Strength magic potion. This plot goes back as far as the very first album.
  • The plot of Asterix and the Big Fight is kicked off by one such kidnapping attempt being foiled... because Obelix accidentally clobbered Getafix with a menhir during the fight.
  • In Asterix and the Golden Sickle, Obelix' cousin Metallurgix is kidnapped because of his talent for making high-quality golden sickles.
• Astro City: One issue has a scientist abducted by the supervillain the Bluejay, who ensures his cooperation by also kidnapping his daughter. They're both saved by Kittyhawk, a cat with superpowers, who distracts Bluejay long enough for her owners to show up and thwart him.
• In Athena Voltaire and the Immortal Power, Werner Lang is a German researcher, but would no longer be working with the Nazis if he had any say in the matter. However, the Nazis want his research, and Athena is sent to rescue him.
• Green Lantern: The villain Hector Hammond did this in his debut appearance. After discovering the meteor that uplifted Gorilla Grodd, he abducted a bunch of scientists and exposed them to it so he could use their newfound Super-Intelligence for profit, plagiarizing their work and passing himself off as a Howard Hughes Homage. After he's busted by Hal Jordan, he escapes prison and decides to cut out the middleman and use the meteor on himself to get revenge on Hal, becoming the monster people know him as today.
• Iron Man: Iron Man's origin story has him being captured by the warlord Wong-Chu during what was originally The Vietnam War (changed to the fictional Siancong War as of the time of writing) and being forced to make weapons for him in return for receiving medical care for a near-fatal heart injury he sustained when he was captured. However, with the aid of fellow captured scientist Ho Yinsen, Tony turns the tables on his captors by using his time to build his first-ever suit both to free himself from captivity and keep his heart beating.
• Rising Stars: Cathy Jean Holmes with her Healing Hands and the Technopath Named by the Adaptation Susan Day in the Novelizations provide a superpowered variant of this in Book Two when Critical Mass kidnaps them and forces Cathy to bring armies of patchwork monsters to life and Susan to launch missiles at her enemies.
• Spider-Man: An interesting play on this trope appears in Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man #57. The scientist in this case (Marla Madison) actually agrees to help once Will o' the Wisp's situation is explained, forcing Spider-Man to instead focus on fighting off the Brand Corporation's guards.

• Dick Tracy:
  • Professor Roloc Bard spends his introductory arc chained up in a basement and being forced to mass produce the mind-altering gas that he created for people with nervous conditions but that gangsters use for confidence games.
  • Headache started out as a willing conspirator making crooked slot machines, but when he tries to retire to make honest products and spend time with his family, he ends up locked up in his workshop under guard. He offers to train a replacement for the syndicate, but they don't want to risk him ending up working for a competitor.

By source material:

• A Fandom-Specific Plot for Phineas and Ferb involves at least one of the titular duo being kidnapped and forced to use their talents for evil. This usually necessitates a rescue by Perry.
• This appears in quite a few Transformers fics:
  • In the Transformers: Prime fic A Day in the Life of Dr. Rafael Esquivel, PhD, the Decepticons are infected with nanites that are slowly eating them alive. Soundwave, the last mech standing, kidnaps the (now adult) Raf to find a cure for the nanites. ^note This fic was written fairly early in the show's run, thus explaining why Cybertronians are still on Earth and why Breakdown is still alive.
  • Optimus on Earth: Just like in canon, Sumdac is kidnapped by Megatron to serve as his reverse-engineering expert while he tries to build a space bridge. He nearly kidnaps Bulkhead, too, but in this fic the Autobots manage to Out Gambit Megatron.
  • wires and cloth: Knowing that Bulkhead is a space bridge expert, the Decepticons force him to start constructing bridges for them.

By title:

• Fantasy variation in The Parselmouth of Gryffindor, where the Alizor King wants to keep Hermione and her friends prisoner so that they'll teach him magic.
• Two Halves: After losing Stockman, Shredder has Donatello kidnapped so he can continue Stockman's work, even placing a bomb in Donnie's shoulder to make him cooperate.

• April and the Extraordinary World: One of the reasons why scientific progress has been retarded is that renowned scientists such as Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi mysteriously disappear just as they are becoming famous. The scientists are being held prisoner by the Big Bads to work on their secret project.
• The Boxtrolls:
  • Snatcher's been told that he can only become a White Hat (one of the town's leaders) if he kills every last Boxtroll (a species that the townspeople hate and fear due to their belief that Boxtrolls eat humans). He, however, knows that Boxtrolls are actually peaceful creatures, and incredibly skilled engineers. So, for ten years, he kidnaps every Boxtroll he can and forces them to build machines for him. Once he has all of them and the machines are built, he attempts to crush them to death with the very machine they built, although they managed to escape in the nick of time.
  • The flashback in the middle of the movie heavily implies that Herbert Trubshaw (Eggs' biological father) was the first one Snatcher went to, intending to take baby Eggs hostage in exchange for Trubshaw's cooperation. Trubshaw instead got Eggs to safety (with help from Fish). Upon realizing that exploiting the public's fear of the boxtrolls would work just as well, he kept Trubshaw prisoner for ten years and told everyone that the boxtrolls ate the man and baby.
• In The Great Mouse Detective, Ratigan rather unusually kidnapped a toymaker, in order to build a life-size automaton double of the queen. To be fair, he was unlikely to find an actual roboticist in Victorian London.
• My Hero Academia: World Heroes' Mission: Eddie Soul was a genius engineer whose abilities were used by the terrorist group Humarise to create the Trigger Bombs, devices capable of causing people's Quirk factors to overload and kill them. He'd been blackmailed with threats to his children, though he eventually managed to devise a way to neutralize them, and allowed one of his colleagues to escape and get the info to the heroes, albeit at the cost of his own life.
• In Stitch! The Movie, Jumba is kidnapped by his old partner Dr. Hamsterviel as ransom for his 625 experiments. Closer to the spirit of the basic trope, in Leroy & Stitch, Jumba is kidnapped again, this time in order to create a new genetic Super-Soldier ("Leroy") for Hamsterviel to make an army of clones of.

• In The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Lord John Whorfin demands that Buckaroo surrender to him or Penny Priddy will be killed. After Buckaroo does so, he's tortured to make him tell how to complete the missing circuit in Whorfin's oscillation overthruster.
• In Bullshot, Professor Fenton is kidnapped by that Hun swine Otto von Bruno for nefarious purposes.
• In Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, after failing to get his hands on the eponymous flying car, Baron Bomburst of Vulgaria imprisons several inventors and orders them to design a flying car of their own. The baron's Bumbling Henchman Duo also try to capture Caractacus Potts, the Bungling Inventor who built the original Chitty, but they mistakenly abduct his father instead.
• The opening scene of The Dark Knight Rises shows Bane kidnapping Dr. Leonid Pavel, a Russian nuclear physicist, from a CIA transport plane, which he then crashes. He later forces the doctor to convert a prototype fusion reactor into a neutron bomb.
• Fascisti su Marte: In a flashback the narrator says that the rocket with which Barbagli's men have flown to Mars has been built with the help of a local scientist, Ettore Majorana. Said help is not voluntary though, since he's seen being tied up and having a sack on his head while being carried by Barbagli's men.
• In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003), the Fantom captures German scientists and their families. He forces the scientists to build advanced technology (like tanks and assault rifles) and reverse engineer the secrets of the League's members by threatening their families if they don't cooperate.
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015): Nuclear scientist Professor Udo Teller has been kidnapped by a criminal organization consisting of Italian fascists. They try to force him to build a nuclear bomb, and hand over the more efficient process for refining uranium that he invented, which would allow the nation that has the process to build nuclear weapons at a greater rate than those that do not.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • In Iron Man (2008), Tony Stark and Dr. Yinsen are abducted and told to build the Jericho missile by the Ten Rings or be executed. They Take a Third Option.
  • In The Avengers (2012), astrophysicist Dr. Erik Selvig is kidnapped and brainwashed by Loki to help build a portal device powered by the Tesseract.
• Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol: A Russian nuclear scientist's family is taken hostage to force him to work for Cobalt.
• No Time to Die has Dr. Valdo Obruchev — a Russian scientist who defected to MI6 — being snatched by a SPECTRE commando team because Blofeld wants to get his hands on the weapon he's making. In a subversion, Obruchev is actually working for the real Big Bad of the movie, and plays along because it's convenient for their plans.
• The Pink Panther Strikes Again has the now-evil and insane Dreyfus capturing a scientist (and his Beautiful Daughter) to build a disintegration ray.
• Rogue One: Galen Erso is forcibly recruited by the Empire to design the Death Star. Initially, he refused to cooperate (they killed his wife and attempted to kidnap his daughter to force his compliance) but after realizing they would still eventually complete the project without him, he changed his mind. Pretending to be a broken man, he secretly used his position to sabotage the Death Star by sneaking in a critical flaw that could be exploited to destroy the station.
• In The Super Inframan, Princess Dragon-Mom kidnaps the scientist in the film who created Inframan. This leads to an unintentionally hilarious scene of the scientist on a boat, being taken to Princess Dragon-Mom's hideout, surrounded by the film's hilariously silly-looking monsters.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze has Shredder and the Foot Clan kidnapping a scientist that was involved in the development of the Ooze responsible for transforming the Turtles into their present state so he could force said scientist to create an army of mutants. The scientist reluctantly obliges, but uses infant animals and contaminates the ooze so that they retain a child-like intelligence resulting in Tokka and Rahzar. After being rescued by the Turtles, the scientist works with them to formulate an anti-mutagen based on the contamination so that the two mutants can be turned back to normal.
• The Viral Factor does this twice in a row; in the prologue, a Norwegian virologist named Dr. Kenner was abducted by insurgents and needs to be rescued by Man Jon and his team, only for Man Jon's superior, Sean Wong, to be revealed as The Mole working for a different terrorist group where he betrays his entire team to the death and kidnaps Dr. Kenner himself. Sean would meet up with his terrorist superiors later in Kuala Lumpur with Dr. Kenner in tow, intending to force Kenner develop a highly-contagious Synthetic Plague, but a botched escape attempt leads to Kenner getting hit by a truck — at which point Sean kidnaps another virologist, one Dr. Rachel Khan who's the head of research for the Malaysian CDC branch, forcing her to continue Dr. Kenner's research.
• In Wild Wild West, Dr. Loveless captures America's top scientists in the fields of physics, hydraulics, and explosives and forces them to build an 80-foot-tall Spider Tank that can belch out fireballs.

• In the Dr. Watson At War series by Robert Ryan, the villain cons a British scientist into kidnapping himself, by posing as a sympathetic intelligence officer who's come to warn him that he's about to be involved in a homosexuality scandal, but he'll take him away to a "safe and secure location" where he can continue his work while the government works to repress the scandal.
• In Piers Anthony's Prostho Plus, a group of space aliens with poor hygiene kidnap a dentist.
• The Rise of Renegade X: In the first book, Damien's Mad Scientist mom kidnaps Sarah's dad to force him to make a hypnotism device for her after reading about how "Dr. Kink" has invented such a device. Actually, Sarah herself is the one who invented that device, and her dad has no idea how to duplicate her experiment. Damien points out to his mom that she really should have realized that sooner, as the elder Kink is a biologist and not an engineer.
• The Shadow:
  • Realm of Doom: Thumb Gaudrey runs kidnapping as a regular racket and one of his early victims is Felix Dort, a scientist who had less money than Thumb thought but whom he is keeping alive to inspect objects for hidden messages and build a valuable motor that Thumb can market to launder the money from his kidnappings. Unfortunately for Thumb, Dort plants microscopic messages on the installment payments of his ransom installments to spread warnings about the racket and seek help.
  • Shadow Over Alcatraz: Zanigew needs four inventors for his plot and takes them and their technology one by one while using each inventor's work to capture the next one. A failed rainmaker is abducted first and his fog device is used to hide his approach on the penthouse of a sleeping gas scientist. That man's gas is used to knock out a fog breaker researcher, whose device is used in turn to push sleeping gas forward at an unnatural speed so it will go past an electrical field the fourth scientist built to protect his estate (and that the villain wants to steal) too quickly for anyone to realize the threat and don gas masks or fight back.
• In the Snarkout Boys books, Uncle Flipping is a Mad Scientist who in every book is kidnapped by the bad guys so that his inventions can be used to further their evil schemes.
• A twist in The Tightrope Men by Desmond Bagley, which takes place from the point-of-view of a man brainwashed and altered by plastic surgery into taking the place of the kidnap victim. In a Dramatic Irony, his ordeal is All for Nothing, as the scientist is drowned when the speedboat used to kidnap him strikes another vessel in the dark and sinks. The doppelganger then has to continue playing the role to find out who was behind the kidnapping.
• In Twig, Sylvester and Mary are forced to work without Lillian, their Academy supervisor in the prison-town of Warrick. Faced with a frustrating lack of access to bioscientific solutions, they perform a home invasion on three local scientist/guards and force them to help manufacture poison gas and enhancement drugs at knifepoint.

• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: In the series' third episode, Dr. Hall is kidnapped by Ian Quinn so he can create a gravitonium device capable of manipulating gravity (a device Quinn wants to use for mining). It turns out to be a massive Batman Gambit set up by Hall himself, who'd learned Quinn had built a gravitonium device and would use it. So he set everything up to make it look like Quinn pulled this trope, then played along when Quinn asked/ordered him to finish the device. Hall's real plan was to bury the device under the earth so no one could use it.
• Alias: Omnidisciplinary tech guy/Gadgeteer Genius Marshall is kidnapped for information twice. The first time he says he can recreate the computer code they're looking for, and uses his coding skills to send a message to SD-6. He's kidnapped again for similar reasons in the Grand Finale.
• In The Americans, the Soviets kidnap dissident and physicist Anton Baklanov so he can help create a stealth airplane for them.
• In one episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Spike kidnaps Willow and Xander to force then-novice witch Willow to cast a love spell on Drusilla.
• Doctor Who:
  • In "The Time Warrior", a Sontaran who crash-landed in Medieval England kidnaps scientists from his future to make them repair his spaceship.
  • In "The Ghost Monument", the Doctor finds a message in an Abandoned Laboratory from the scientists who used to work there, who were kidnapped, and their families held hostage, and forced to build horrific weapons for their captors.
  • In "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror", Nikola Tesla is targeted for abduction by the alien Skithra because as Insufficiently Advanced scavengers, they refuse to develop the skills to repair their stolen technology and, stuck at the early 20th century, judge Tesla the best mind on Earth to be able to repair their ship and weaponry.
• Jeremiah: Devon and his friend Paul Weil are virologists who didn't start out kidnapped, but once they realize how psychotic the Valhalla Sector is and want to leave, they have to try and do so at gunpoint.
• In the 1970s and '80s Kamen Rider series, a highly common plot of the week is a scientist being forced to build some Doomsday Device or plague or whatever, either by kidnapping the scientist (and it's his kid who runs into the Rider by dumb luck) or the scientist's loved ones (then it's the scientist who runs into the Rider by dumb luck). Note to scientists: if you ever get kidnapped by any Nebulous Evil Organisation run by the disembodied voice of Gorō Naya (and there's a lot of 'em!), do not expect them to actually keep their deal.
• The Last Ship: Throughout season 1 and early season 2, both the Russians and a renage Remnant of the American government briefly capture Doctors Rachel Scott and Quincy Tophet amidst their work on the Red Flu devestating the world and try to use them to just cure their people. Rachel and Quincy quickly escape or are rescued whenever this happens, although Quincy eventually ends up mortally wounded.
• Revolution: Rachel Matheson spends eight years as a prisoner of the Monroe Republic, as they try to unlock her scientific secrets. They also try to kidnap her husband when they finally find the rest of her family, only to kill him by mistake. They do catch her son though, using him to force Rachel to spill the beans about where to find the rest of her old team. She gives outdated addresses for most of them, but Monroe does catch Bradley Jaffe and his daughter, leaving Jaffe and Rachel to compete to be useful for a few episodes in case Monroe decides he can afford to kill one of them.
• In Walker, Texas Ranger, a geneticist named Susan Lee (played by Julia Nickson) falls under this trope not once, not twice, but three times she's appeared. In her first appearance, "Higher Power" (Season 5), she's kidnapped by a Chinese warrior named Chang who seeks instead to kidnap her son, Davey, who is the reincarnation of Master Rin's former master, Lama Dolgin. Then, in "Heart of the Dragon" (also in Season 5), she and her father, Dr. Henry Lee, are kidnapped by a Chinese gang led by Jiang Chu, when they're intending to kidnap Henry's student, Henry Wu, who has stolen an ancient Jade Dragon from them hoping that it'll heal his sister, who was left in a coma after their parents were killed by a drunk driver. Lastly, in "Warriors" (Season 6), she — and later, Davey — is kidnapped by a gang of conspirators bent on world domination to use her research and both their DNA to create and clone a race of powerful Super Soldiers.

• Possibly the Ur-Example is the genius inventor Daedalus from Classical Mythology, who was kept prisoner by King Minos both for his further work and to keep the secrets of his former work, i.e. the Labyrinth.

• In the Champions supplement The Blood and Dr. McQuark, the brilliant scientist Dr. McQuark is kidnapped by the villain group VIPER and forced to create new technology for them. He pretends to go along with them while hoping for rescue. Just when VIPER's patience runs out, Dr. McQuark is rescued by the superhero Radion.
• In the GURPS Supers supplement Supertemps, when Harold Wilkesom created a prototype of a weapon that could silently throw metal playing cards, he was kidnapped by the villain group TRADE and forced to continue his research on it. When he learned he would be killed when it was complete, he used the prototype to escape.
• Sometimes in Shadowrun, an extraction job is helping a scientist who wants to change to a new company. Sometimes, it's this trope — kidnapping somebody from their current employer because somebody else wants their knowledge and/or skills.
• Villains & Vigilantes: Characters are only allowed to have a certain number of insightful ideas (Invention Points). Villains therefore kidnap scientists and other experts and force them to use their Invention Points to create new technology for the villains' use.

• ANNO: Mutationem: Completing the optional side-mission for Dr. Doyle's backstory ends with a scene showing Doyle desperately sending data to an unknown source before soldiers from The Consortium breaks into his lab and take him in with the reason they want him shrouded. Doyle is never seen again after this.
• The climax of Another Code R is Ashley attempting to save her father from Ryan, who kidnapped him to strong-arm her into getting full access to Another's abilities.
• Arcanum:
  • There's an in-universe short story about some poachers who tried to hunt the mythical Stillwater Giant. They had planned to kidnap a gunsmith to maintain their weapons, but settle on the story's narrator, a chemist, instead.
  • Late in the game, this is revealed to be a key component of the Big Bad's evil plan: he enslaved the Black Mountain clan shortly after their banishment, and has forced them to construct a technological portal which will rip a hole in the Sealed Evil in a Can he's trapped inside.
• A coercion version occurs in BlazBlue. Litchi Faye-Ling, a talented scientist who used to work for the even more genius Kokonoe, has a certain breakthrough research. The bad guys, Hazama, want that, so they coerce her to joining 'on her own will' by dangling the cure for her actual target, her friend-turned-monster Lotte Carmine/Arakune, someone she feels it's her duty (out of grief and guilt) to save. It's clear that she dislikes the prospect of working with the bad guys with aims for world destruction, but she ends up having to do it, unless she wants danger to happen to Lotte if she just leaves him be without her supervision (they also have him in custody).
• Captain Skyhawk: Every fourth mission has you rescuing an apparently kidnapped scientist from an enemy battle station.
• Subverted in Classified: The Sentinel Crisis. Your mission revolves around your attempts to rescue Dr. Landau, the Sentinel program's developer, who's been abducted by Balkan insurgents who want him to recreate the tech for them. When you manage to find him, it turns out that Landau is a defector secretly working for the Big Bad.
• Command & Conquer:
  • Occurs semi-regularly in the Command & Conquer: Tiberian Series, the most notable examples being Dr. Ignatio Moebius and Dr. Alphonse Giraud. Thing is, Nod scientists are treated very well and have practically limitless resources, so it is not uncommon for kidnapped scientists to pull a Face–Heel Turn, which is implied to have happened with Dr. Giraud.
  • In the campaign of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the Pacifier (an Anti-Infantry / longest-ranged-artillery-in-the-game amphibious Hover Tank) was built by FutureTech with some degree of input from captured Soviet scientists. Why the Soviets don't try making their own once the scientists are rescued is unexplained.
• In Evil Genius, the player can kidnap specialists — including scientists — and interrogate them to unlock new minion types.
• Fallout 2: Downplayed with Vic the repairman, who is first found being held captive by slavers using him to construct a radio, except that it wasn't so much that he did the job unwillingly as that he'd been paid for it, failed to get it right the first time and was held prisoner until he could finish it properly.
• Professor Nakazawa from Ferocious, who's roped into Alistair Kane's plans to develop a Synthetic Plague that would wipe out an entire island's population of benevolent dinosaurs... because his family is being threatened.
• Dr. Fielder from Hour of Victory is a benevolent Danish geneticist kidnapped by a Nazi Insane Admiral to create a biological weapon, and one of your missions have you retrieving him from the Nazi's fortress in the Austrian Alps.
• inFAMOUS:
  • The Trash-Men kidnap engineers to help them interfere with the power supply and construct their giant tower of junk.
  • In inFAMOUS 2, Dr. Wolfe, the inventor of the Ray Sphere is kidnapped and forced to work for Bertrand.
• Mega Man:
  • Used partially in Mega Man 4. While he is not the victim of the kidnapping himself, but rather his daughter, Dr. Mikhail Cossack is blackmailed by Dr. Wily to build him an army of robots to defeat Mega Man and take over the world. Played straight in Mega Man 5 with Dr. Light.
  • Mega Man Battle Network 5: Team Colonel and Team ProtoMan begins with Dr. Yuuichiro Hikari kidnapped by the Nebula syndicate for the duration of the game.
• Happens all the time in Metal Gear, including (but not limited to):
  • Dr. Drago Pettrovich Madnar in Metal Gear 1, original inventor of the eponymous battletank (or at least a more compact version of the concept).
  • Dr. Pettrovich again in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake. He's faking it this time.
  • Otacon in Metal Gear Solid, whose plans for a defensive missile system are used to build a nuclear-equipped Walking Tank.
  • Emma Emmerich, the former's sister in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, who engineered one of the Patriots' AIs.
  • Nikolai Sokolov in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, a Soviet scientist who defected, but was rekidnapped by Colonel Volgin so that he can finish the Shagohod.
  • Dr. Naomi Hunter in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, who has been abducted by Liquid Ocelot and forced to continue her bioengineering research to put Liquid's insurrection into motion.
  • Dr. Huey Emmerich in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, who is kidnapped by (and is actually quite happy to work for) Skull Face, who forces him to build a new Walking Tank.
• In Metroid Dread, Raven Beak kidnaps Quiet Robe after the former kills the latter's tribe. He needs Quiet Robe alive long enough to learn how to control the Metroids.
• Prof. Theo, the inventor of the robotic cleaning maid Marina Liteyears, in Mischief Makers. The premise of the game involves Marina and Theo visiting Planet Clancer, and when Theo ends up kidnapped by an evil empire, revealed to be led by his brother, Leo, Marina sets out to rescue him.
• Happens within the first 20 minutes of Pokémon XD: Gale of Darkness. Professor Krane is kidnapped by a couple of Cipher Peons to forcibly help with their Shadow Pokémon research.
• The Big Bad of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future has a team of kidnapped scientists and forcing them to work on his Evil Plan after tricking them by saying they're stuck in the future and won't send them back home until the project is completed.
• One named Dr. Rahman shows up in Silent Ops, abducted by Natalia Petrovich from a high-tech research lab in Hong Kong by the villains because they need his help in developing a Synthetic Plague. Turns out besides kidnapping him, they also had Rahman's teenaged son as well; after Dr. Rahman help the villains complete the virus research, unfortunately Natalia isn't willing to fulfill her promise and executes Rahman's boy while he's Forced to Watch... and then kills Rahman anyways for good measure.
• Supreme Commander: Dr. Sweeney, a "quantum theorist" is kidnapped off-screen by the Cybran during the first operation in the UEF campaign. While rescuing him was not in the initial objectives of the fourth operation, he's found when searching for a solution to the issue of Cybran hackers breaching UEF systems non-stop and rescued with a brief escort. A briefing to the third mission in the Cybran campaign has Dr. Brackman, the inventor of symbiont technology and proverbial father to the Cybran Nation, mention that Sweeney was taken to assist QAI in creating the Quantum Virus, designed to collapse the Quantum Gate Network by overloading the gates, which will prevent FTL travel and keep symbionts safe from slavery and genocide that UEF and Aeon Illuminate, respectively, have in store for them.
• In the TwinBee series, more often than not the plot is set in motion with Dr. Cinnamon being kidnapped.
• World War Polygon: WW2 Shooter has the abducted German scientist Dr. Albert Zweistein, held by a ruthless Nazi colonel who's forcing Albert to develop a warhead that's going to be used to wipe out London, against Zweistein's will. As you bust him out of his cell, Zweistein informs you the warhead is completed and will be launched soon, but he'll lead you through the facility and help you disarm it.
• Will You Snail? features Amelia, an AI researcher who was captured by a corrupt government (known only as The Regime) under false accusations of terrorism so she could develop an AI supercomputer for the purposes of war and surveillance. The Regime forced her to sleep in a prison cell and threatened her family in order to get her to comply with their demands.

• The heroine of Starship Promise is held prisoner by a couple different antagonists who force her to work for them. On at least one occasion, she builds a secret failsafe into the device she's forced to work on.
• In Virtue's Last Reward's backstory, Alice's father was kidnapped along with several other scientists and forced to research human cloning for the Free the Soul cult.

• Charles in Antihero for Hire.
  "Think: Your power suits keep them alive and give them the edge. Back them up with bipedal weapons platforms and actually expendable robot troops. And of course... something to transport them to battle... What do you think? You in? (Note, this is a rhetorical question as I'm forcing you in under pain of murder. Sorry for any confusion)"
• In the crossover comic between Flare and Spying with Lana, the two heroines work together to rescue a Belorussian scientist from the Corrupt Corporate Executive J. Reginald Butte.

• Big Hero 6: The Series: In the "City of Monsters" two-parter, Liv Amara's clone Di attempts to kidnap Wendy Wower and later successfully kidnaps Hiro for the purpose of curing Liv of her life-threatening condition.
• In Castlevania (2017), Hector the Forgemaster is not so much kidnapped as manipulated into working for Carmilla. Once he's irrevocably on her side, she drops any pretense of diplomacy and treats him like an animal while still expecting him to create an army for her.
• In an episode of Chip N Dale Rescue Rangers, the Mad Scientist Professor Nimnul was kidnapped by a mob boss so he could use Nimnul's shrinking ray to go on a crime spree. Ironic in that Nimnul was already evil, but he still hated not being given credit for the crime spree.
• Terran Prof. Algernon from Exo Squad was captured by the Neosapiens early in the war and constructed a number of fantastic weapons for them (most notably, the GRAF Shield) until his recapture by the Exofleet. Being somewhat of a Mad Scientist, however, he is rather indifferent towards his employees and cares more about lab equipment than about who uses his inventions and to what ends.
• Actually used by the good guys once in Gargoyles, when Goliath kidnaps Sevarius to find a cure for the mutants he'd created. Elisa calls him out on it and in the end Xanatos rescues Sevarius anyway. It's never made clear whether the serum Sevarius made was truly a cure or would have been a poison.
• All the time in Inspector Gadget. It seems like half of M.A.D.'s plans involve kidnapping scientists, although the unwilling ones are just about never shown actually working.
• In Invader Zim, there is an entire race of kidnapped scientists... whose inventions always seem to go horribly wrong for some inexplicable reason.
• A common occurrence in Kim Possible, due to the fact that the titular spy is the daughter of a rocket scientist (her father, James) and a brain surgeon (her mother, Ann):
  • Played with in "Number One", Duff Killigan's first (and only, as a solo villain) episode. Killigan kidnaps a scientist who had developed a top-secret missile-defense system... a technology that is now obsolete and readily available on the Internet. The golf-obsessed villain was actually after the now-retired scientist's quick-grass-growing formula.
  • Subverted in "Attack of the Killer Bebes", where Dr. Drakken's eponymous robots kidnap multiple scientists, among them Kim's father (though they actually got Ron impersonating him). It turns out Drakken's doesn't want their expertise (which, in a subversion of Omnidisciplinary Scientist, are pointed out as irrelevant to the situation), he's seeking revenge on his old college friends after they mocked him over his scientific skills way back when.
  • Dr. Wanda Wong in "The Truth Hurts". She is kidnapped by Dr. Drakken and Shego, demanding she reveal her scientific secrets to them, threatening to make her talk with a Truth Ray, but the Ray hits Kim and Ron instead while they rescue her. At the end of the episode, when Mr. Dr. Possible's bosses come over for dinner and Kim is unable to keep everything her father said about them to herself due to her having been hit by the Ray (one has a bad hairpiece, one is a crashing bore, and one is an annoying know-it-all) in spite of her attempts to avoid blurting it all out, Wong is revealed to be the board chairwoman of the space center, and clears up the whole issue when the other board members refused to believe Kim.
• Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2023): Mimi, aka the original Moon Girl, is kidnapped so she can rebuild the portal device, as Maris knows where her family lives and is willing to hurt them should Mimi refuse to help him.
• The Simpsons: When Mr. Burns tries to capture the Loch Ness Monster in "Monty Can't Buy Me Love", he kidnaps Professor Frink for help.
• In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Welcome to the Chum Bucket", Plankton — tired of going to the trouble of stealing the Krabby Patty formula — "kidnaps" SpongeBob (albeit in a completely legal way, since he tricks Mr. Krabs into betting SpongeBob's contract in a card game) to work at the Chum Bucket and make him one.
• Star Wars Rebels: "In the Name of the Rebellion, Part II" has Ezra, Sabine and Chopper rescue a group of technicians who were kidnapped by the Empire during a mission with Saw Gerrera. The technicians decide to join the Rebellion at the end, and it is heavily implied that they were kidnapped to work on the Death Star.
• Tangled: The Series: In "Cassandra's Revenge", Cassandra is after a scroll that contains an incantation that will allow her to control the mysterious black rocks. Said scroll is written in a long-forgotten language, with the only one capable of translating it being Varian. She abducts him and forces him via Truth Serum to translate the scroll, then uses him as bait to lure Rapunzel to her.
• The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoons have had this happen a few times. Most of the time, the abducted scientist is Baxter Stockman. A notable example happens in the 2012 episode "Mikey Gets Shellacne", in which Dogpound and Fishface become desperate to be human again and kidnap Stockman to try and make him change them back.
• This has happens at least once per series in the Transformers TV shows:
  • There are several episodes of The Transformers in which the Decepticons capture or steal from human scientists to further their own goals.
  • An important plot point in Season 2 of Transformers: Animated is that Professor Sumdac (both as revenge for reverse-engineering Megatron's head and because he's the most intelligent human in the show) is held prisoner by the Decepticons so he can help them construct their space bridge. When it's revealed that Bulkhead is the expert on space bridges, the Decepticons kidnap him, too.
  • Towards the very end of Transformers: Prime, Ratchet is kidnapped by Soundwave and taken aboard the Nemesis due to his inventing synthetic Energon. Megatron manages to coerce him to help them create a stable formula (although Ratchet is trying to escape the entire time and manages to turn Predaking against Megatron).
• Serling Roquette from Young Justice (2010) was kidnapped in order to produce a nano-robotic "fog" capable of stealing information and destroying the computers that held it. She's freed within the episode and later is instrumental in producing Cure-Tech.

• Florida man kidnaps scientist to make his dog immortal.
• Los Zetas, a major Mexican crime syndicate, has been known to kidnap telecoms engineers to build and maintain their communications network. Unlike their usual kidnapping victims, ransoms are not offered, and the victims are believed to be killed when they have outlived their usefulness.