Two official investigations have begun into an unpublished study from the 1940s in which a US researcher deliberately infected Guatemalan prisoners and soldiers with syphilis and gonorrhoea.
Both were ordered last November by President Barack Obama after the study came to light through investigations by Susan Reverby of Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
The president apologised to the Guatemalan people in October after Reverby revealed that the late John Cutler, a US public health service medical officer, conducted a study between 1946 and 1948 on soldiers and prisoners in Guatemala in which he tried to infect the men by exposing them to prostitutes already infected with gonorrhoea or syphilis.
When few men became infected this way, Cutler and his colleagues tried to infect them by inoculations into their urethras, through skin injections or exposing the foreskin to infectious material. Around 1500 study subjects were involved, and none was told of the purpose of the study or asked for his consent.
"What happened was clearly terribly wrong, and we want to get the facts and record out there for the public to know," said Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and chair of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which will oversee the investigations. She was revealing progress to date in Washington DC in a series of public hearings earlier this week.
Valerie Bonham, executive director of the commission, told one meeting that she expected a full report towards the middle of the year, and that she and her 12 reviewers had already trawled through 477 boxes of relevant archives and documents.
-Big questions
The full report will focus on four big questions, said Bonham. First, what happened in the studies? Second, how much did the US government and medical establishment know about what was going on, and how far did they actively help? Third, what was the historical context, and fourth, how would the studies have been judged by the ethical standards and conventions of the time?
Bonham said her investigation would not seek to excuse or justify the experiment.
**Published in "New Scientist"
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