Scientists’ Moral Responsibility and Dangerous Technology R&D 121 The Scientiﬁc Firewall It has long been a staple of ethical debate regarding scientiﬁc research that science is open and free, and only engineers need worry about the applications to which they put scientiﬁc discoveries. The canard goes: science is ethically neutral, and there is in fact an ethical duty to investigate all natural phenomena, so therefore, no scientist need stiﬂe his or her own research. The next step of this argument is to assert that while science ought to be utterly unfettered and free, technologists, engineers, and politicians are both practically responsible and morally culpable for the uses to which any scientiﬁc discovery is put. This argument works best with ‘‘dual-use’’ scientiﬁc subjects, like bioweapons, nuclear ﬁssion, and fusion (Atlas and Dando 2006). The tremendous possible peaceful uses of thermonuclear technologies argue well for most scientiﬁc investigation regarding the underlying sciences. But is this true for all sciences, do they all have ‘‘dual-use’’ features that insulate scientists from moral culpability when doing basic research? Consider the recent, real-world example of smallpox. By 1977, a world-wide concerted effort led to the successful eradication of smallpox in the natural world. Its only host is humans, and in the years since its successful eradication, no naturally-occurring infection has been documented. This was one of the most successful and heralded scientiﬁc and technical enterprises ever. The smallpox virus was virtually extinct, except for some notable stockpiles. The two nations that spearheaded the eradication, coordinated by the World Health Organization (WHO), were the United States and the Soviet Union. Each maintained frozen stockpiles of smallpox samples following the eradication, ostensibly for the purposes of doing scientiﬁc research. Then things got out of hand. While WHO and others debated whether the remaining stockpiles ought to be destroyed, some scientists chimed in against the plan. They argued that stockpiles ought to be kept so that further research on smallpox could be done. Some even argued against the eradication of a virus species on moral grounds. The decision to destroy the stockpiles was delayed, and then the stockpiles began to be exploited. There is evidence, including the statements of former Russian president Boris Yeltsin, that during the Cold War, the Soviet Union deﬁed the Biological Weapons treaty and weaponized smallpox, producing it in bulk, and making it more deadly by ‘‘heating’’ it up, essentially making it less vulnerable to existing vaccinations and anti-viral drugs by exposing it to evolve more robust strains (Preston 2002). In the process, stores of smallpox apparently left at least one of the two designated repositories, and now the genie is likely once again out of the bottle. Once again, in 1999, the world’s two custodians of the only known stockpiles of smallpox were on the brink of deciding to destroy the stockpiles (inasmuch as they were believed still to solely exist in the hands of Russian and U.S. scientists) when again some scientists chimed in with a chorus of objections. There were also scientists, some of whom had worked on the original Eradication, who argued for the ﬁnal destruction of smallpox everywhere. In the U.S., President Bill Clinton was convinced by those who favored preserving the stockpiles, and the window has now ﬁnally closed. The Centers for Disease Control and others working with the U.S. Dept. of Defense engaged in some controversial studies with smallpox in 2000 and 123