Frank Olson was a bioweapons expert working at the special operations division of the Army's Biological Laboratory at Fort Detrick in Maryland.
The severity of HCPS, the absence of effective treatment, its appearance in outbreaks and in case-clusters, and the potential use of hantaviruses as bioweapons have stimulated work toward hantavirus vaccine development.
Most work on bioweapons have been done by governments looking for something controllable, because wiping out humanity is not militarily useful.
The American Society of Microbiology, which published the mousepox paper, has introduced a policy of challenging the authors of provocative papers to consider their wider implications.Plenty of scientists have squared work on bioweapons with their consciences in the past, and 9,000 of them used to work in the Soviet biological weapons programme.
Thousands of scientists are now working with bioweapons agents, many for the first time.
Similarly, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Department of Agriculture will continue to regulate laboratories working with potential bioweapons.
The bizarre case, which sparked a massive investigation and captured the White House's attention, highlights the increasingly tense legal climate surrounding researchers working with potential bioweapons.
Lepyoshkin and others who worked on the Soviet bioweapons program say it is most likely that some of these surviving local rodents were exposed to the weapons-grade bubonic plague bacteria and survived that too.
If the government is saying that the perpetrator was probably an American, it's hard to imagine how it couldn't have been an American who worked in a government-supported bioweapons lab.
If they shunned interrogation methods some thought might work, and an undetected bomb or bioweapon cost thousands of lives, where would the moral compass point today?
