ABSTRACT
This chapter presents historical cases in which British scientists associated with biological weapons research, primarily scientific advisors, attempted to defend their work. The biological warfare research programme enjoyed a high priority in defence policy and a substantial injection of funds immediately after the Second World War, work at the Microbiology Research Department (MRD) was dogged by recruitment problems. Moral economy is a term adapted by historian Robert Kohler to describe how, in laboratories, the 'unstated moral rules define the mutual expectations and obligations of the various participants in the production process'. In science fiction, 'The Stolen Bacillus' appeared in H. G. Wells's first book of short stories, published in 1895, in which an anarchist steals a sample of cholera bacilli from a bacteriologist. Finally, defensive research is invoked as a neatly circumscribed moral category, although it is mirrored by the counter argument that defensive research forms a far less tidy empirical category.
