Russian history of science begins with a question: Why did the Kievan Rus’, the medieval Slavs to whom modern Russians look as the origin of their culture, neglect the scientific sources of Byzantium, with which they were in close contact? Some Kievan monks and literati from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries did translate Greek texts from the great libraries of Constantinople. As a result, Byzantine influences prevailed in Kievan culture in liturgy, theology, political ideology, and art. Why was science not one of the objects of attention of the Kievan Rus’? Strikingly, during the Middle Ages the Kievan scholars translated no complete work of ancient Greek science, even though the Byzantine libraries were rich in these sources.

The historical past and the present political environment exert heavy influences on discussions of biomedical ethics in all societies. These influences undermine efforts to construct an optimal method of closure that might work equally well in different places, at different times, and on different kinds of issues. The recent discussions about biomedical ethics in the United States (think, for a moment, of abortion and of in vitro fertilization) are incomprehensible outside the context of American social, political, and religious history. Any analysis of how those discussions arose and how they may be closed that does not pay attention to cultural and political factors is certain to go awry.

In this essay I will attempt to show how several controversies over biomedical ethics in the Soviet Union display characteristics resulting from the specific culture and politics of that nation. I will then analyze the ways in which closure on these issues occurs in the Soviet Union, utilizing the typology of different types of closure developed by Tom Beauchamp (chap. 1, this volume). I will conclude by inquiring into the relevance of the Soviet example for the consideration of closure debates in other nations, particularly the United States.

Biomedical ethics in the USSR

In a recent article about discussions of recombinant DNA research in the Soviet Union, I pointed out that the major concerns of leading American and Soviet biologists were different, at least during the formative years of the debate in the early and middle 1970s. The greatest American concern at that time was the possibility of pathogenic organisms being accidentally produced by recombinant DNA research and then being allowed to escape from the laboratories.