Scientists’ Moral Responsibility and Dangerous Technology R&D 123 others, prompted the development and institutionalization of bioethical principles in both professional codes and federal and state laws (Childress et al. 2005). Simply put, before the ‘‘common rule’’, the Belmont report, and similar codes in European nations speciﬁcally applied through laws and regulation the principles enumerated in the Nuremburg Code, human subjects continued to suffer in the name of science. We might speculate as to why scientists would fail to apply commonly-held ethical principles, such as truth-telling, seeking consent, and preventing foreseeable harms, but motivations are ultimately not the issue. The fact is, it took creating institutions intended to oversee human subjects research in order to ﬁnally begin to systematically prevent such abuses. It is very likely that many of the scientists over the ages who have mis-used humans subjects in the course of their experiments never intended to cause undue harms,, or justiﬁed any harms by the potential for greater rewards from their study. A prime example is the completely un-consented to use of a child by Edward Jenner, the inventor of the smallpox vaccine. Jenner’s work involved deliberately trying to infect a child, without adequate controls, animal studies, or consent. Fortunately, his hypothesis turned out to be accurate, and the use of cowpox to vaccinate the child prevented his death. Jenner’s work saved countless millions, but his ethics was clearly wanting. Such a study today would not have been possible given that animal trials would be useless without a proper animal model for smallpox (Childress et al. 2005). It is likely that Jenner and other scientists similarly situated never meant speciﬁc harm, or at least that they justiﬁed the potential for harm to a particular subject by the potential for life-saving new treatments for many. What cases like this illustrate, however, is the fact that science has at times proceeded as though ethical concerns were an after-thought, or even completely tangential to the scientiﬁc enterprise. Even after the Nuremburg trials, scientists fell into the trap of weighing more heavily the value of potential beneﬁts to be gained from research over individual duties of upholding dignity, providing informed consent, justice, and beneﬁcence. Now, Institutional Review Boards and Ethics Committees provide oversight where human subjects are used in research, and help to give guidance to scientists who might make similar errors. But not all research involves direct use of human subjects. Rather, some research has only potential, future impact on populations, ecosystems, or even humanity as whole. No regulatory body requires vetting of that sort of research. The example of the development of bioethical principles and institutions intended to apply them suggests that sometimes, scientists do not self-regulate when it comes to ethical behaviors. It suggests nothing about motivations, however. It seems likely that ethical lapses are generally caused by lack of introspection, rather than maleﬁcence. This lack of introspection may be exacerbated by the prevailing attitude among philosophers of science and scientists themselves, namely: scientiﬁc investigations ought to proceed without limit, and only politicians, technologists, and engineers are to blame for the unethical applications of scientiﬁc discoveries through technologies. But as is clear in the example of bioethics, and numerous documented examples of ethical lapses by researchers conducting human subjects experiments, sometime bad things are done in the name of science itself, well before the application phase of a new technology. 123