Americans reeled this weekend with the revelations that the United States during the Truman administration had funded scientists who intentionally infected people from Guatemala with sexually transmitted disease so they could study the disease and its potential treatments.Hillary Clinton properly apologized to the people of Guatemala but that hardly lessens our guilt or sense of shame. To realize that our country engaged in the same kind of cruel, immensely immoral experiments as did the Nazis of the Third Reich, is indeed a horrible disgrace. But will we learn from this mortifying example of bad science? Will it cause Americans to re-think our practices of abortion, euthanasia, or embryonic stem cell research?
Wesley J. Smith comments:
This story raises several issues and teaches important lessons. Obviously, the experiments violated human exceptionalism since the scientists treated other human beings as less than equal by intentionally giving them very serious diseases so they could be studied.
It also illustrates that focusing exclusively on furthering naked science is dangerous. Here’s what I mean: I have no doubt that from a purely scientific perspective, the experimenters believed they wold obtain important and valuable information about STDs and their treatment. But gaining scientific information alone is not all that matters. Ethics are crucial if science is to be kept from doing monstrous things in the great cause of gathering and applying knowledge. Indeed, these experiments were reminiscent of the notorious Tuskegee atrocities, in which poor African-Americans were syphilis were allowed to go untreated as the disease progressed.
We hear often today in current ethical debates over the proper parameters of scientific endeavor that the desires of scientists and the advancement of science are almost all that matters. Let scientists decide the ethics of science, we are told. But history shows–and this story verifies–that such an attitude leads to disaster. Science, like any powerful sector, needs independent checks and balances. This awful story proves it.
