What else don't we know about the U.S. government's unethical history of experimenting on human beings? A Wellesley College professor investigating the infamous Tuskegee study, in which black American men with syphilis were intentionally left untreated for decades to trace the course of the disease, recently uncovered a similar experiment that U.S. public health doctors conducted in Guatemala during the 1940s. In this horrific study, which lasted two years, about 1,500 prisoners, mental patients, soldiers and prostitutes were deliberately infected with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases, then given penicillin to test the antibiotic's effectiveness as a treatment.
Led by John C. Cutler, who later had a role in the Tuskegee study, the U.S. government-funded scientists selected Guatemala City's Central Penitentiary because prisoners there were allowed to have sex with prostitutes, some of whom already tested positive for syphilis and others who were infected before liaisons. When too few men became infected, the researchers introduced the syphilis bacteria directly into scrapes made on prisoners' penises, abrasions on their arms and faces or, in a few cases, "through spinal punctures." Records show the scientists knew at the time that their experiments were immoral and prohibited in the United States.
