122 D. Koepsell 2001, and successfully created an animal model of the disease, a scientiﬁc feat that had hitherto been deemed impossible. This research has since been criticized as being over-hyped, as the animal models that resulted required extravagant forms of exposure before contracting smallpox, making them less-than ideal subjects for experimentation. The research has further been criticized as being unlikely to lead to any useful discoveries, given that smallpox has been eradicated from the environment and only poses a threat from the current custodians of the virus: the U.S. and Russia, who could have eliminated it once and for all, but didn’t (Preston 2002). In a similar vein, and related to the decision to revitalize U.S. smallpox research, some Australian scientists made quite a stir when they decided to see what would happen if they did some genetic engineering on the mousepox virus. By tinkering with the virus, inserting a mouse gene into the virus itself, they discovered they could defeat any immunity acquired by mice who had been vaccinated, and created a lethal, vaccine-proof mousepox virus with some simple genetic engineering. When U.S. military researchers got wind of this experiment, reported both at a poster-session at a conference, and in a journal article, the repercussions for potential mischief with the smallpox virus were obvious (Preston 2002). There are obvious ethical questions that arise with both the Australian mousepox experiment and the U.S./Russian decision not to destroy the last vestiges of the smallpox virus when the opportunity existed. In each case, to differing extents, one might ask whether the risks of the research justiﬁed the potential beneﬁts. Weighing the scientiﬁc justiﬁcation against the potential risks of the research seems inadequate, however, to convey the ethical quandary posed by this and similar research. It is a quandary posed by research and development of other technologies, notably in the 20th Century, and that was partly responsible for the development of modern principles of research ethics. The question one might reasonably ask is: do scientists owe a duty to humanity beyond the relentless, unfettered search for natural laws? The verdict, at least in the realm of bioethics, has been established to be afﬁrmative… there are general ethical duties that outweigh research itself, and that temper behaviors at least when they directly affect human subjects (Cohen et al. 2004). The Bioethics Example It took some terribly visible ethical lapses by Nazi physicians to begin the discussion of codes of ethics governing human subjects research. The Nuremburg Code was instituted because of the Nuremburg trials, and revelations about the use of concentration camp prisoners for experiments, devoid of pain-relief measures, any semblance of consent (much less informed consent), or any shred of human dignity. The Nuremburg Code served as the founding basis for the evolution of bioethical principles throughout the rest of the Twentieth Century. Principles such as the right of subjects to receiving informed consent before being experimented on, and of being treated with dignity rather than used as mere means to ends, derive from well-known and generally accepted philosophical traditions, but were ignored historically by researchers even outside of Nazi Germany. Well-known examples such as the Tuskeegee syphilis study, the Milgram study (both in the U.S.) and 123