In this issue of the Report, Holly Fernandez Lynch challenges the findings of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues in the matter of the now notorious U.S. Public Health Service Sexually Transmitted Disease Inoculation Study conducted in Guatemala in the late 1940s. In a September 2011 report, the commission concluded that John Cutler and his fellow researchers had traveled to Guatemala for the express purpose of evading public surveillance and dodging American laws and ethical norms in intentionally infecting human beings with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid. Lynch argues that the commission misunderstood the "driving force" behind the decision to move the studies to Central America-namely, the availability of legalized prostitution and the advantage of a more "natural" route of infection via sexual contact, rather than the manual inoculation of prisoners, soldiers, and psychiatric hospital patients with disease organisms. Americans, Lynch explains, did not go abroad to behave badly, although once abroad, they behaved badly in a spectacular fashion.
展开▼
