Friday, September 16, 2011

Lapses by Leaders Seen in 1940s Syphilis Tests on Prisoners

Lapses by Leaders Seen in 1940s Syphilis Tests on Prisoners - NYTimes.com: The highest medical and legal officials of the American government and experts at Harvard and other top medical schools approved venereal disease experiments on people in the 1940s, which led to the deliberate infection of Guatemalan prisoners and mental patients with syphilis to test penicillin, a White House bioethics panel reported Tuesday.

The experiments were “gross violations of ethics” not just by today’s standards but by those of the time, said the report from the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues. It called the experiments “especially egregious moral wrongs because many of the individuals involved held positions of public institutional responsibility.”

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