This article can be found at http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2010/10/02/wellesley_professor_unearths_a_horror_syphilis_experiments_in_guatemala/?page=1
In the headline, the writer rightly uses the one word that truly describes the nature of this story: “horror.” This is horrible news. The bluntness of the first paragraph makes it even more chilling: “US government scientists in the 1940s deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with syphilis and gonorrhea in experiments conducted without the subjects’ permission.” The story takes us back into an age of unethical medical research—“an era when it was not uncommon for doctors to experiment on patients without their consent.” The writer does well in laying out the horror and tragedy of the story, by giving quotes of politicians and scientists today and describing the abominable research done in Guatemala with brutal honesty: “prisoners, soldiers, and inmates in mental asylums were willfully infected, sometimes by using prostitutes provided by the scientists, sometimes by pouring the germs onto skin abrasions the researchers caused.”
The story does suffer from such a mind-blowing subject. There’s not much more you can say after the initial bombshell. But the writer does keep the reader occupied with some discussion (which certainly could have been investigated deeper) of medical research on human subjects, both past and present. Sure, things were different then (a time when “institutionalized children were fed oatmeal laced with radiation as part of nutrition experiments…[and] elderly patients were injected with cancer cells”), but human subject research is still an issue. How do we test new drugs without using human subjects and what are the ethics for that?
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