A grayscale range of hats are often used to qualify moral standing of computer hackers. There are the virtuous white hat hackers who discover and patch holes in security systems but not surprisingly there are malicious black hat hackers who hack for profit and spite!

In between lies the ambivalent league of grey hat hackers who dabble in both affairs. They aren't afraid to break a law to get a point across about security to administrators. This edgy type of hacker anonymously creates far more social impact than the white hat hacker, advancing security nonetheless. 

Similarly, in between the everyday scientist and the mad scientist lies a new breed of researcher with similar objectives to the grey hat hacker. They aren't afraid to break a law or an ethical norm for the advancement of science.

Allow me to illustrate a scenario where grey hat scientists could make significant impact.

As we speak, hackers are in control of millions of home computers in botnets. Not to alarm you, but there's a chance that your computer compromised and being rented out for password cracking, spam, and other nefarious online business.

It has been speculated that the magnitude of computing power distributed across these zombie computers is enormous! Meanwhile, distributed computing projects such as Folding@Home, a project where people donate computing cycles to fold proteins, is slowly making progress. I agree that it's unethical to access another persons computer and install Folding@Home without their permission, but should a breakthrough in the understanding diseases caused by mis-folded proteins, wouldn't your idle screensaver time be worth it? 

Forced computation has been attempted before. A SETI@Home virus began to spread in 2003 to put unused CPU cycles to use in home computers. If you aren't familiar, the SETI project aims to discover extra-terrestrial life by analyzing radio telescope data. Sign me up for that virus!

Although distributed computing is a rather tame example compared to the ethical boundaries that will have to be crossed in order to advance fields like bio-engineering. There will surely be an uprising of grey hat scientists who choose to loosen their moral obligations, perhaps anonymously as hackers have done, in order to make scientific progress. 

The grey hat scientist follows a consequentialist philosophy. Put simply, that the ends justify the means. I'm not saying I subscribe to this philosophy, but I'm curious, especially in biology, as to if our culture will be able to keep up with the breakthroughs in research. Otherwise scientists will be forced to undermine laws and ethics to continue research and the age of the grey hat scientist will be at hand!