In late September this year a conference in Oslo threw doubt on the idea of a steady increase in interest, and work, in bioethics in the old empire. Totalitarianism appeared once more to be raising its ugly head. The conference was funded by the Norwegian government and involved mainly Scandinavians and East Europeans. It was extremely well-organized and produced fascinating discussions, but also some major surprises. We heard old-fashioned, hard-line, Communist views. A former East German professor, for instance, gave a lecture on the importance of Marxism as the basis of moral philosophy, prompting other East European participants to remark that it was over twenty years since they had last heard such a performance. Evidence of a different sort of totalitarianism came from Poland and Slovakia, both of which are becoming theocracies. In Poland, abortion is now virtually banned, the code of medical ethics[1] shows strong Catholic influence, non-Catholics in universities find increasing difficulty in having posts renewed, and pressure is put on medical students to attend lectures on only Christian medical ethics. The Slovakian institute of bioethics in Bratislava has helped to run two enormous pro-life events in the last two years and is funded by the Roman Catholic church. The paper that most aroused the Oslo audience, however, was read by Zbigniew Szawarski. A former professor of medical ethics in Warsaw who has lived under two totalitarian regimes (the Nazi and the Soviet), Szawarski compared the ethos of science in the Western tradition and in the empire. In the Western tradition the principal values of science are truth; the freedoms of communication, of access to literature, of travel, and of choice in research; universalism and solidarity; objectivism and impartiality; autonomy and responsibility. The revolution, however, had a dramatic effect on the ethos of science, bringing the term Soviet Science into common usage. Its characteristics were nationalism, the use of ideology as the basis of science, conformity to authority and the principle of political loyalty, and an incredibly complicated bureaucracy. While there had been some variation from such a picture, in medical research there were still virtually no public controls on investigators.[2] An unexpected response to this paper came from some younger East Europeans, whose political awareness had not developed before the early 1980s. They felt it was too negative about science. Many of those aged over forty, however, suggested the opposite: that Szawarski had been too polite. …