WASHINGTON — U.S. scientists deliberately infected prisoners and patients in a mental hospital in Guatemala with syphilis 60 years ago, a recently unearthed experiment that prompted U.S. officials to apologize Friday and declare outrage over “such reprehensible research.”
The discovery dredges up past wrongs in the name of science, such as the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study in this country that has long dampened minority participation in medical research.
Uncovering it gives “us all a chance to look at this and — even as we are appalled at what was done — to redouble our efforts to make sure something like this could never happen again,” said Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
The NIH-funded experiment, which ran from 1946 to 1948, was uncovered by Wellesley College medical historian Susan Reverby. It apparently was conducted to test whether penicillin, then relatively new, could prevent some sexually transmitted infections. The study came up with no useful information and was hidden for decades.
“We are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement Friday.
President Barack Obama called Guatemala’s president, Alvaro Colom, later Friday to apologize. Guatemalan Embassy official Fernando de la Cerda said his country hadn’t known anything about the experiment until Clinton called to apologize Thursday night.
The U.S. government ordered two independent investigations to uncover exactly what happened in Guatemala and to make sure current bioethics rules are adequate.
The researcher behind the experiments
Dr. John Cutler, a U.S. government researcher, led the Guatemala project from 1946 to 1948, in which 696 men and women were exposed to syphilis or in some cases gonorrhea — through jail visits by prostitutes or, when that didn’t infect enough people, by inoculating them.
The test subjects were offered penicillin to see whether the medication could prevent sexually transmitted diseases, but it wasn’t clear how many were infected and how many were successfully treated.
Cutler also was involved in the infamous Tuskegee study, which from 1932 to 1972 tracked 600 black men in Alabama who had syphilis without ever offering them treatment.
