128 D. Koepsell ought not to be invoked. All of which brings us back to the scenarios presented at outset, and the problem of ice-nine as described by Kurt Vonnegut. Do the principles of beneﬁcence, dignity, or justice provoke any ethical duties on scientists while inquiring into natural laws? Are these duties, if any, different in so-called ‘‘dual-use’’ cases than for instance in the case of nightmarish scenarios like ice-nine? Smallpox, Ice-Nine, and Dangerous Things Almost anything can be considered ‘‘dual-use’’ if we want to be technical. A nuclear bomb could be used to level a city, or to create a canal. Smallpox research could be used to develop new cures, new therapies, antiviral medications, or new biological weapons. Even ice-nine could serve a dual use, providing ice to skate upon in the middle of summer, or destroying the entire eco-system. For that matter, the most seemingly benign inventions could, given sufﬁcient creativity, be put to questionable or immoral uses. Printing presses can produce great works of art, or hateful screeds. The dual-use debate, then, may be a bit of a red herring. We are concerned with the ethical implications of certain types of scientiﬁc research, and the capacity for a certain discovery or technology’s dual-use is not what matters. Instead, we should ask under what conditions a scientist ought to refrain from either investigating some aspect of nature, and under what conditions he or she ought to disseminate certain knowledge, regardless of whether the science in question has both a beneﬁcial or harmful use. Let’s reconsider the issue of smallpox and its near-eradication. The global public-health initiative to eradicate smallpox was nearly successful. Its ﬁnal success was abandoned, and now, despite the fact that smallpox does not exist ‘‘in nature’’ it still exists, and poses a real threat to humanity. That need not have been the case. Because smallpox has no other vectors for its survival apart from human hosts, when it was ﬁnally eradicated from all human hosts its extinction could have been guaranteed. But for the fact that the U.S. and Soviet Union insisted on maintaining stockpiles of the virus, we would not need now to worry about the use by rogue states or terrorists of stolen quantities of smallpox. But for the efforts of the U.S. and the Soviet Union to ‘‘study’’ the use of smallpox in bio-warfare, and the mass-production and subsequent loss of control over the remaining stockpiles of smallpox virus under Soviet science, smallpox would be but a distant memory of nature’s capacity for horror and destruction. Scientists cannot be held immune from the moral implications of having preserved stockpiles of the virus. Some made arguments based upon the value to science posed by continuing study of the nearly- extinct virus. Their arguments won the day, even if there may have been ulterior motives on the part of the two sponsoring governments maintaining the last known samples. Do any ethical principles mitigate against either the active encouragement of, or complicity with the decision to retain the last remaining smallpox samples? Let’s consider ﬁrst the Belmont Principles. As it turns out, one of the big obstacles to conducting any legitimate science with smallpox is that it has no animal vectors. The Nuremburg code, and subsequent codes of biomedical ethics, require that human subject research be preceded by animal research. To do useful, beneﬁcial research using smallpox would require a human subject, and no researcher could ethically employ human subjects in smallpox research. Not only 123