LANGUAGE/ЯЗЫК: English/английский | Russian/русский

The Soviet Union's biological weapons program was started in 1928 and continued until the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in the early 1990s. Due to its scale and technological sophistication, it is said to have been twenty to thirty years ahead of the United States' bioweapons program, which ended in 1969.

In creating this Web site and the documentary film featured here, we were primarily interested in the psychological and social issues faced by the scientists who developed biological weapons. Many of them had taken the Hippocratic Oath. From the ethical point of view, it is important to understand how they reconciled the deadly aims of their work with the humanistic ambitions of their science.

We hope that our work will contribute to the discussion of the potential for misuse of the life sciences for state, terrorist, or criminal purposes.

Sonia Ben Ouagrham-Gormley
Slavomir Grunberg
Slava Paperno
Kathleen M. Vogel