Crossposted from Nature’s news blog

Researchers knowingly violated ethical boundaries when they intentionally infected Guatamalan prisoners, mental health patients, and prostitutes with sexually transmitted diseases in a 1940s research project, a presidential commission concluded yesterday.

When the harrowing experiments came to light (see ‘A shocking discovery’), President Barack Obama charged the President’s Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues with investigating the matter. After picking through 125,000 pages of historical documents, the committee determined that the experiments were unethical even by the prevailing norms of the era, and that those who conducted the research actively sought to keep experiments out of the public eye.

It was also no accident that the research was performed in Guatemala, argued Amy Gutmann, chairwoman of the commission and president of the University of Pennsylvania. “Some of the people who were involved in this experiment explicitly said, ‘We could not do this in our own country’,” she said. “It was a foreign population that was seen as ethnically, racially, nationally different.”

“The only way you could continue doing this is to think of what you were working on as material as opposed to human subjects,” Gutmann added.

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