US President Barack Obama personally apologized on Friday to his Guatemalan counterpart for a US-led study conducted in the 1940s, in which hundreds of people in the Latin American state were deliberately infected with sexually transmitted diseases.
In a phone conversation with Guatemalan President Alvaro Colom, Obama expressed his deep regret for the experiment conducted by US public health researchers in Guatemala between 1946 and 1948, and apologized “to all those affected.”
The US president also vowed that all human medical studies conducted today would be held to exacting US and international legal and ethical standards.
“This is shocking, it’s tragic, it’s reprehensible,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters, adding to apologies and outrage voiced by the president, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and other US officials.
In an impromptu news conference in Guatemala on Friday, Colom denounced the study as “a crime against humanity,” and said he had learned of the gruesome years-long experiment in the phone call from Clinton.
Clinton had phoned Colom on Thursday to express her personal outrage and deep regret over the “reprehensible research.”
“What happened all those years ago is a crime against humanity and the government reserves the right to lodge a formal legal complaint over it,” Colom said.
However, almost immediately, he backed off his tough rhetoric, saying: “We are aware that this is not the policy of the United States ... this happened so long ago.”
Clinton and Sebelius said in a joint statement on Friday that the study was “clearly unethical” and apologized to all those who had been affected by it.
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the US government body that funded the study, called it “deeply disturbing” and “an appalling example in a dark chapter in the history of medicine.”
US Senator Robert Menendez, a member of the congressional Hispanic caucus, called the experiments in Guatemala one of the “darkest moments” in US history.
“No innocent fellow human should be treated as a lab rat, no matter your nationality,” Menendez said.
The study, which was never published, came to light this year after Wellesley College professor Susan Reverby stumbled upon archived documents outlining the 1940s experiment led by controversial US public health doctor John Cutler.
Cutler and his fellow researchers enrolled people in Guatemala, including mental patients, for the study, which aimed to find out if penicillin, relatively new in the 1940s, could be used to prevent sexually transmitted diseases.
“There is no evidence study participants gave informed consent, and in fact ... the subjects were often deceived about what was being done to them,” Collins told reporters as he outlined the experiment’s most flagrant ethics violations.
Cutler, the US doctor behind the Guatemala study, was also involved in a highly controversial study known as the Tuskegee Experiment in which between 1932 and 1972 hundreds of African American men with late-stage syphilis were observed and given no remedial treatment.
Initially, the researchers infected female commercial sex workers with gonorrhea or syphilis, and then allowed them to have unprotected sex with soldiers or prison inmates.
“When few of these men became infected, the research approach changed to direct inoculation of soldiers, prisoners and mental hospital patients,” background documents on the study show.
A total of some 1,500 people took part in the study. At least one patient died during the experiments, although it is not clear whether the death was from the tests or from an underlying medical problem.
Thomas Parran, the US surgeon general in the 1940s, appeared to have been aware of the experiment, as were “components” of the Guatemalan government at the time, Collins said.
The Pan American Health Organization, whose predecessor — the Pan American Sanitary Bureau — received grant money from the NIH for the study, expressed its “deep regrets for past ethics violations” and vowed to cooperate with investigators as they dig out specifics of the study.
Independent experts under the umbrella of the US Institute of Medicine will conduct a fact-finding probe of the Guatemala study, and the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues will convene international experts to review standards surrounding human medical research, Collins said.
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
FAST RELEASE: The council lauded the developer for completing model testing in only four days and releasing a commercial version for use by academia and industry The National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) yesterday released the latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model in traditional Chinese embedded with Taiwanese cultural values. The council launched the Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (TAIDE) program in April last year to develop and train traditional Chinese-language models based on LLaMA, the open-source AI language model released by Meta. The program aims to tackle the information bias that is often present in international large-scale language models and take Taiwanese culture and values into consideration, it said. Llama 3-TAIDE-LX-8B-Chat-Alpha1, released yesterday, is the latest large language model in traditional Chinese. It was trained based on Meta’s Llama-3-8B
STUMPED: KMT and TPP lawmakers approved a resolution to suspend the rate hike, which the government said was unavoidable in view of rising global energy costs The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday said it has a mandate to raise electricity prices as planned after the legislature passed a non-binding resolution along partisan lines to freeze rates. Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers proposed the resolution to suspend the price hike, which passed by a 59-50 vote. The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) voted with the KMT. Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) of the KMT said the resolution is a mandate for the “immediate suspension of electricity price hikes” and for the Executive Yuan to review its energy policy and propose supplementary measures. A government-organized electricity price evaluation board in March
NOVEL METHODS: The PLA has adopted new approaches and recently conducted three combat readiness drills at night which included aircraft and ships, an official said Taiwan is monitoring China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercises for changes in their size or pattern as the nation prepares for president-elect William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20, National Security Bureau (NSB) Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said yesterday. Tsai made the comment at a meeting of the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, in response to Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu’s (王定宇) questions. China continues to employ a carrot-and-stick approach, in which it applies pressure with “gray zone” tactics, while attempting to entice Taiwanese with perks, Tsai said. These actions aim to help Beijing look like it has