From Erwin Chargaff’s (1977) Voices in the Labyrinth (PDF):
I should now like to introduce you to what I call the “Devil’s doctrine.” It says: What can be done must be done. This innocent-sounding and useful maxim – it abolishes with one stroke all problems of conscience and free will – is of comparatively recent origin. Even during the industrial revolution, when the unholy marriage between science and technology was consummated, the brutalization of the scientific imagination, so characteristic of our time, progressed only slowly. But for some time science has been operating under this doctrine.
Let me give you two examples. The first comes from Leonardo da Vinci. It is often said that he kept his discoveries secret, lest they be misused for warfare. This is not quite true; as a young man he wrote a letter to Ludovico Sforza offering his services and describing his skill in constructing war machines. But what is true is that later in his life, when he kept his copious diary, he sketched a design for a submarine and wrote;
How and why I do not describe my method of remaining under water for as long a time as I can remain without food; and this I do not publish or divulge on account of the evil nature of men who would practice assassinations at the bottom of the seas by breaking the ships in their lowest parts and sinking them together with the crews who are in them.
My second example comes from more recent days. Chlorine gas was known since 1774 and phosgene, COCl2, since 1812. The gruesome effects of these chemicals on the body had been noted, and avoided, by many generations of chemists. They used hoods, they wore gloves and even gas masks when experimenting with these things. Why did it have to wait until 1914 before the idea came to a few chemists that these substances could, and therefore should, be used as weapons? What had happened in these intervening 100 or 150 years? I can pose the question, but I cannot answer it. Since that time, innumerable sophisticated poisons and irritants – and even mutagenic agents – have been squirted at our fellow beings. Never mind whether this is disguised as “insurgency control” or “pacification”; a tear gas smells no better when it is called a “lachrymator.” In our time Virgil’s lacrimae rerum have acquired a new meaning: the things, and not only they, have good reason to weep over this world.