Donald A. Henderson and Frank Fenner

Donald A. Henderson led the World Health Organization’s Global Smallpox Eradication Program that successfully eliminated all natural outbreaks of the disease and left the world with only two known stocks of the smallpox virus, one in the United States and the other in the Soviet Union (later Russia). In 1999 and again in 2002, both the United States and the World Health Organization postponed the scheduled destruction of these last repositories. In the following viewpoint, published in 2001, Henderson and coauthor Frank Fenner of the John Curtin School of Medical Research at Australian National University call for the destruction of all known stocks of the smallpox virus. They argue that retaining stocks for research is unlikely to yield practical results and is not worth the risk of some...