Vol. 75/No. 37      October 17, 2011

The experiments were carried out with the approval of the surgeon general, the attorney general, Army and Navy officials, the president of the American Medical Association, as well as officials from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Rochester. The Guatemalan government was also directly involved.

A hearing in a class-action suit by seven of the victims against U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other U.S. government officials opened October 4.

“They were used as guinea pigs,” Hiram Sosa Casteñeda, a lawyer in Guatemala City who is representing many of those infected and their families, said in a phone interview. Many passed the disease on to their wives or husbands and children, Sosa added. He estimates that 5,000 people or more were ultimately affected.

It was “the devil’s experiment,” Federico Ramos, 86, told the Spanish daily El Pais. Ramos and Manuel Gudiel, peasants who were drafted into the Guatemalan Army in 1946, are plaintiffs in the suit. Describing how he was injected, Ramos said, “In the barracks, everyone knows, you have to obey orders.” Unaware of the nature of his illness, Gudiel infected his wife. Their daughter was also infected and is blind as a result.

The U.S. government managed to keep the project a secret until last year, when Wellesley College Professor Susan Reverby discovered documents about it in the papers of Dr. John Cutler, who headed the program.

“The purpose was benignly described as … enhancing knowledge of the biology and immunology of syphilis in man,” wrote Reverby.

According to the presidential commission, toward the end of World War II top U.S. military officials wanted to find a cure for venereal diseases or a vaccine or other medicine to prevent them because of their prevalence in the armed forces and the negative effect they had on the U.S. military’s fighting capacities.

They first experimented on prisoners at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. from 1943 to 1944. They asked inmates to “volunteer,” told them they would be injected with gonorrhea, and said they would be paid $100 and get a good recommendation to the parole board as compensation. A waiver inmates signed told them they would be helping “the war effort” by participating in the project. Cutler was one of the doctors involved there.

The experiment in Terre Haute was abandoned when the military decided it was taking too long to infect prisoners. In addition, they wanted to experiment on people infected with syphilis, which is more difficult to transmit without direct sexual contact. Syphilis also has much more serious long-term health consequences if untreated. They looked for somewhere outside the U.S. where the project could be done under less scrutiny.

Both the Terre Haute and Guatemala human experiments were similar to one already under way in Tuskegee, Ala. From 1932 to 1972, nearly 400 Black men who had already contracted syphilis were “studied” by the Public Health Service, but deliberately not treated, even though the complications from the disease were well known to medical science by that time and penicillin was known to be a cure by the mid-1940s. Cutler joined the Tuskegee project in the 1950s.

In 1972, when the Tuskegee study became known, victims filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, which paid $9 million in damages and offered free health care to them and their families.

In the Guatemala study records indicate that only about half of the subjects were treated with penicillin. There are no records showing whether the treatments were successful.

In one of the more bizarre rationalizations for the experiments, Cutler injected syphilis into the spinal fluid of epileptic women, saying it could lead to a cure.

In spite of all the pretenses of aiding medical science and preventing disease, scientists involved in the experiments knew they needed to keep what they were doing secret.

In a confidential letter cited in the commission report, Dr. Richard Arnold warned that if “some goody organization got wind of the work, they would raise a lot of smoke.”

“Many paint Dr. Cutler as a monster,” Reverby told the Militant. “But he was part of a system, the institutional structure in the United States of medical science itself.”
 
 
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