Presidential panel excoriates former Pitt dean

Abstract

A presidential ethics panel today excoriated the late Dr. John Cutler, a revered dean at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1960s, and his colleagues at the U.S. Public Health Service for deliberately infecting hundreds of Guatemalan prisoners, mental patients, soldiers and prostitutes with syphilis from 1946 to 1948, including 83 who died. The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues concluded that Dr. Cutler's experiments were morally indefensible, even for the standards of the time, and that he and his fellow doctors tried to keep secret what they were doing because they knew it was wrong.