ETHICALLY IMPOSSIBLE - The Guatemala Experiments

Before there was Tuskegee's whistleblower, there was Guatemala — and almost nobody knew about it for 60 years. 🩺

Between 1946 and 1948, the U.S. Public Health Service — under Dr. John C. Cutler — deliberately infected more than 1,300 Guatemalan prisoners, sex workers, soldiers, psychiatric patients, and orphaned children with syphilis, gonorrhea, and chancroid, without consent, to test venereal disease prevention methods for American soldiers.

In this episode of Just Killing Time, Elizabeth Stanton walks through:

🔎 The failed Indiana prison experiment that led researchers to Guatemala

🔎 The direct inoculation methods used — including injections at the base of the skull

🔎 The staggering fact that this ran the SAME YEAR the Nuremberg Code was written to prevent exactly this kind of experimentation

🔎 How historian Susan Reverby uncovered it by accident in 2003

🔎 President Obama's 2010 apology to Guatemala's president

🔎 The lawsuits that never resulted in a single dollar of compensation

🔎 The chilling fact that Dr. Cutler later worked on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study too

This is truth, crime, conspiracy, and hidden history — the version of American history that doesn't make it into a textbook.

🕯️ "This is Just Killing Time, I am your host Elizabeth Stanton, this is a podcast about truth, crime, conspiracy, and a little hidden history sprinkled in."

📚 SOURCES: Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues ("Ethically Impossible," 2011) • Susan Reverby, Journal of Policy History (2011) • CDC review of the John C. Cutler Papers • National Archives at Atlanta • PBS NewsHour • Al Jazeera • Baltimore Sun • CourtListener.com case records • National Library of Medicine (PMC)

💌 Got a hidden history or true crime lead? Send it in for the Time Killer Files.

🔔 Follow Just Killing Time on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio so you never miss an episode.

#JustKillingTime #GuatemalaExperiment #HiddenHistory #TrueCrime #MedicalHistory #TimeKillers

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:16

It's before sunrise, sometime in nineteen forty-seven, in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Guatemala City. The building is called Assilio de Alienados, roughly meaning the asylum for the insane. A woman is asleep in a ward with six other women. All of them are there because they have epilepsy. Not because they're violent, not because they're a danger to anyone. This is 60 years before we understood epilepsy as a neurological condition. But this is where the government put people who had seizures. Then a doctor walks in. He's not a Guatemalan. He works for the United States Public Health Service and he has a syringe. He is there to inject live syphilis bacteria into the base of her skull because he has a theory, completely unproven, and it would turn out to be completely wrong, that a fresh infection might somehow interrupt her epilepsy. She is one of seven women who received that injection. All seven developed bacterial meningitis, which almost certainly came from the injection itself. They are treated for that. The men running the study needed them alive to keep collecting data. This was not a roof doctor gone off the rims. This was a federally funded American research protocol run with the knowledge of superiors back in Washington, D.C. And it is one of the most horrible stories to come out of this particular studies, because it was survival. This is Just Killing Time. I am your host, Elizabeth Stanton. This is a truth, crime, conspiracy, stories that keep us up at night with a little hidden history sprinkled in. To understand how the United States doctor, it's a government doctor, ends up injecting syphilis into a sleeping woman's school, you have to go back a few years to a problem that the U.S. military considered one of the most pressing issues in all of military medicine. Venarial disease. During World War II, soldiers were getting infected with syphilis and gonorrhea in numbers high enough to actually affect troop strength. Every soldier pulled off the line to be treated was a soldier who wasn't fighting. And in 1943, public health service researchers discovered something enormous. It was penicillin. It was brand new. Still hard to produce in bull, but it could actually cure syphilis. And before that, treatment meant month of arsenic-based drugs and mercury. Now there was a real cure. But a cure is a prevention. Military planners didn't want to just treat infections after soldiers got them. They wanted something a man could use right after sex that would stop the infection from ever taking hold. A prophylactic wash. And to test whether a prophylactic actually works, you need something most researchers just don't have lying around. They needed freshly infected human beings on a predictable schedule whose sexual contact you can control. The lead investigator on this problem was a senior surgeon named Dr. John Charles Cutler. Now Cutler had built his entire career around venereal disease research, and he believed strongly, sincerely, by every account, that what he was doing served the greater good. And that belief is going to matter later because it's going to reappear in a much more famous story you already know. And here's my opinion. I want it right up front. That sentence, he believed it served the greater good, is the most dangerous sentence in the entire history on unethical medicine. It's not that, you know, mustache twirling villain who scares me. It's the guy who genuinely convinced himself he's one of the good guys while he's doing something monstrous. And Cutler thought he was a hero. And that's what should keep us up tonight. Cutler's team first tried to run these prophylaxis experiments on prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. There was one enormous problem. They couldn't reliably infect the prisoners with gonorrhea in a controlled way. The bacteria didn't behave predictably enough in a lab setting to build a clean experiment. So they went looking for a country where they wouldn't have that problem, and where the rules that they were starting to tighten up around research on U.S. citizens just wouldn't apply to them. The answer was Guatemala. And Dr. Juan Funas, a physician with the Guatemalan Ministry of Public Health, who was doing a research fellowship at the Public Health Services Venereal Disease Research Laboratory in New York in 1945. He worked directly alongside Cutler. Now Cutler later credits uh Funus with suggesting Guatemala as a site for the study, and Funas had a very specific selling point. In Guatemala City's central prison, commercial sex work was legal. Sex workers were actually allowed to enter the prison. That single fact solved the exact problem that had sunk the Terra Hot experiment. If prisoners were having sex with infected sex workers on a controlled schedule, researchers could split them in into groups and quote-unquote active group using an experimental prophylactic and a quote-unquote control group using nothing, and then measure the difference in infection rates. The project was recommended for federal funding through the National Institutes of Health, routed through an international body called the Pan American Sanitary Bureau. And Cutler's team began what they called serology experiments in November of 1946. Multiple Guatemalan government bodies signed on as partners, and the Ministry of Health, the National Army, and the National Mental Health Hospital, and the Ministry of Justice. And what she didn't notice, what just happened. Because it's easy to kind of blur past it, this wasn't the U.S. sneaking into a country and running secret experiments completely off the books. Guatemalan officials at multiple agencies cooperated. Whether the ordinary people running those institutions on the ground, the prison wardens, the hospital staff actually understood what serology experiments meant in practice, that's a much more murky like murky question. And historians, they just still don't have a clean answer to it. What we do know, without any ambiguity, is what never happen. Nobody asked the actual human beings involved for their consent. Not the prisoners, not the soldiers, not the psychiatric patients, and not the children. The study's population eventually grew to include more than 5,500 Guatemalans, prisoners, sex workers, soldiers, psychiatric patients, and children, including orphans at the National Orphanage. Why they always pick on me orphans? It just makes my stomach so sick and it makes me so mad. Like it's always the disenfranchised. Those are the people they pick the weak ones. And there's just something so horrid about that. Now of that total group, researchers deliberately infected somewhere around 1,300 people, and some sources saying 1,308 with syphilis, gonorrhea, and shancroid, a bacteria infection that causes genital sores. Their preferred method, when they could arrange it, was what color seam called normal exposure, using infected sex workers to transmit disease to prisoners or soldiers through actual sexual contact. And then tracking who got infected and when. But normal exposure didn't infect people reliably or fast enough for the researcher's timeline. So they escalated to direct inoculation. That meant taking plus or bacterial cultures from an infected person and introducing it directly into another person's body through abrasions cut into the skin, through injections, into the eyes, into the urethra, into the rectum, and in at least one case that we opened with tonight, injected at the base of the school. Now, one case documented in Cutler's own research files involves a Guatemalan woman researchers referred to by the name Berta. Now, Berta was a psychiatric patient. She was already seriously ill, and Cutler's notes describe her appearing near death, without recording exactly why. On that same day, with Verta already gravely sick, researchers introduced gaurrhea pus into both of her eyes, into her urethra and into her rectum, and also reinfected her with syphilis. Within days, her eyes were filled with pus and she was bleeding from her urethra. A separate case documented by the Presidential Bioethics Commission that later investigated all of this involves a female patient with syphilis who was already terminally ill from a different undisclosed condition. The researchers, the commission's language, not mine, were curious what would happen if they added a second infection on top of a body that was already dying. They infected her with gauntrera in her eyes and elsewhere. And she died six months later. I'm not gonna soften this because I don't think it deserves it. I think we just need to sit with that for a second. Only about 700 of the more than 1,300 people who were deliberately infected actually received treatment for it. The rest were simply left to whatever the disease did to them. Because again, according to the commission's later findings, the point of the study wasn't really about curing people who were infected. It was about generating data for a prophylactic that would eventually protect American soldiers. By 1953, five years after the Guatemala study itself had officially wrapped up in 1948, but while its after effects were still working through the population, at least 83 Guatemalans had died. The Presidential Bioethics Commission, when it later reviewed this, was careful to say that the record keeping was incomplete enough that they couldn't make a definitive medical finding tying every one of those 83 deaths directly to the experiment. Some historians have pointed to the gap and urged caution about that number. And here's where I'm the pushback just a little. I'll lab it as clearly as my own. I don't think an incomplete body count makes this story any less forrifying. I think it makes it more forrifying. These people whose lives were tracked closely enough afterward to even know for certain how they died. They were affected, and then in a lot of cases, they just disappear from the paperwork, and that's not a mitigating detail. That's the whole crime showing up again in a second form. The study was never published. Cutler's team wrapped up their work in Guatemala in 1948 and the results simply vanished into a filing cabinet. Not because anyone got caught, because as far as anyone involved was concerned, there was nothing to get caught for. This was normal. This was how you did research. If the people you were researching on didn't count as people whose permission you needed. Now, the Nuremberg Code was written in real time at the same exact moment American government doctors were violating every one of its principles in a country to the South with United States federal mate. And this is where I have to say something plainly. I think American school children learn about Nuremberg as a story about what other countries did. We are taught to see it as a moment the civilized world drew a line after the horror of the Holocaust. Nobody tells you in that same history class that your own government was on the wrong side of that exact line at the exact same time, funding it with your tax dollars. That's not an accident of curriculum. That's a choice about what gets taught as history and what gets buried as something else entirely. The Guatemala study stayed buried for over 60 years, not through some elaborate cover up, but through the much simpler and frankly, more scarier method of nobody ever being required to talk about it. Cutler had donated roughly 12,000 pages of his personal and professional papers to the University of Pittsburgh back in 1990. They sat there in an archive largely unexamined. In 2003, a medical historian named Susan Reverby, a professor at Wesley College, was going through those exact papers. She wasn't looking for Guatemala. She was researching a book about the Tuskegee Syphilis study, the case we covered in the last episode. Because Cutler had also worked on the tail end of that study. While reading Cutler's mail, she found something else entirely. Detailed records complete with case notes and photographs of an earlier and in some ways even more extreme experiment, this one in Guatemala. She described being in her own word, floored. One line from a colleague's letter in Cutler's files stuck with her more than almost anything else. A line where the colleague mentioned, having talked to the surgeon general, who told him, quote, we couldn't do this in the United States. End quote. Read that again. The government's own people knew in the 1940s that this crossed the line, they wouldn't cross with American citizens. They did it anyway, on Guatemalan soil to Guatemalan bodies. Now Reverby didn't rush this into print. She spent years quietly verifying what she'd found before she notified U.S. government officials and prepared for research for publication. And in October of 2010, the story broke publicly. On October 1, 2010, President Barack Obama personally called the Guatemalan president Alvaro Colomb to apologize. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sabelius, who used to be the governor of Kansas, issued a joint statement calling the experiments in their words clearly unethical. News vans reportedly showed up on Susan Raverby's own front lawn within days. And President Obama then asked the body called the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to formally investigate. That commission reviewed more than 125,000 pages of original records, Raberby's discovery, plus additional material from the Department of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and even traveled to Guatemala as part of their investigation. In September of 2011, they released their findings under a Title I think is one of the most quietly devastating report titles in American government history. Here it is. Ethically if possible. STD research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. The Commission's own language did not hedge. They wrote that the research was, quote, clearly and grievously wrong, end quote, and then it starkly revealed how the government officials and independent medical experts, despite being aware of existing ethical standards at that time, chose to violate them anyway. Yeah, those researchers, you don't have to be told that that's unethical. All you have to have is a sense of morality, a sense of right and wrong, and to look at bald people as people. But somewhere along the way, whether they chose to just be in disbelief, denial, or they had some sort of racism to them that they don't believe that those people are people, they were able to continue with these experiments and do those horrendous things like rubbing gauderhea in a dying woman's eyes and then violating her down below by putting it in her urethra and rectum. And I I can't I can't give anyone a pass. I can't give Nazis a pass. I can't give the Americans a pass. I can't give anybody a pass. In like I said at the beginning of this episode, if it's for the greater good and you do it anyways, you're a monster. And you deserve to burn in hell for all eternity. End quote. I don't care how much good it does. It's wrong. It's wrong, wrong, wrong. Alright, off with soapbox. Back to the story. An apology doesn't pay a hospital bill, and it definitely doesn't undo six decades of silence. So in 2011, victims and their families filed a class action lawsuit against the United States government itself. In 2012, a federal court dismissed it. Not because the judge disagreed with the facts, but because of something called Sovereign immunity. A legal doctrine that shields the US government from being sued over actions like this. Especially when they happened overseas decades earlier. The court more or less said this was horrific. And we are powerless to give you anything for it. Sovereign immunity. I hope that takes the wind out of your sails the same way it takes the wind out of mine. That is absolutely horrific. So, in 2015, a new legal team went after different targets entirely. They went after John Hopkins University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squad, seeking $1 billion on behalf of more than 800 plaintiffs. The argument was that John Hopkins doctor sat on the very federal panels that reviewed and approved funding for the Guatemala study in the first place, meaning the university's fingerprints were on the money trail, even if none of its doctors were on the ground in Guatemala. John Hopkins called the study deplorable, but denied any role in funding, initiating, or conducting it. Bristol Myers Squab said the lawsuit lacked merit. And a spokesman for the Rockefeller Foundation actually went further than the other two defendants, calling the research morally repugnant, and stated that they agreed the U.S. government owed the victims reparations while still fighting the lawsuit against their own foundation. The case dragged along for years. It got dismissed, got refiled with more specific detail after a judge said the claims were documented thoroughly enough, and eventually made its way to the Fourth Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. And in 2022, the court shut the door on it for ga. As of right now, in 2026, no victim of the Guatemala experiments and no descendant of a victim has ever received a single dollar of compensation from anyone involved. This is my opinion. I think sovereign immunity is one of the most cynical legal loopholes ever built. Precisely because it works best against people with the least power to fight it. It's not protecting the American taxpayer from like frivolous lawsuits. It's protecting the United States government from the consequences of the worst things it's ever done to people who couldn't vote it out of office. Guatemala couldn't touch it in court, and neither could the victims. That's not just justice. That's just paperwork with a badge on it. Now let's close the loop on John Cutler himself because his story doesn't end in Guatemala in 1948. Cutler stayed with the Public Health Service for another two decades. And then years later, the notorious Tuskegee syplis study, the one where the U.S. government tracked and deliberately withheld treatment from hundreds of black men in Macon County, Alabama, for 40 years. John Cutler was there too, involved in that study's later stages. The same doctor, two of the most infamous, unethical human experiments in American history. One government career spanning both. And by most accounts, Cutler was never criminally charged for either study. He was never stripped of his medical credentials, and he went on to have what his professional peers considered a respected career in public health, including later teaching at the University of Pittsburgh, the very institution that would end up holding the papers that exposed him. Like I said earlier, John Culler was not a comic book villain twirling a mustache in a lab quote. A career-long public servant who was so convinced that his research served a greater good, that he was able to do this twice in two different decades to two different vulnerable populations. And still, and still gets remembered by his colleagues as one of the good guys. That shouldn't terrify you more than any mass killer we've ever covered on this show, because at least a mass killer knows he's the villain. Let's go back to that moment. In this psychiatric hospital we opened with Snight, we don't know her name. We don't know if she survived. What we do know is that she was one of more than 5,500 human beings who became raw material for a study that was never even published. That violated a global ethical code being written in real time on another continent that stayed hidden for 60 years by simple institutional silence that produced an apology from a sitting American president and that has never, not once, not for a single victim, produced a dollar of compensation. And here's the line I want you to walk away with tonight. I'm telling you plainly, this is not a footnote in some government report. The story of Guatemala isn't really a story about how one bad study or even one troubling doctor. It's a story about what a government will do to its people it already decided doesn't fully capt. Whether that's because they're incarcerated, they're mentally ill, they're foreign, they're poor, or they're black. Tuskegee happened to American citizens on American soil, and it took 40 years in a whistleblower to stop it. Guatemala happened to people with even less power to be believed in a country the US government just didn't answer to. And it took 60 years in a story and digging through a dead man's mail. This is exactly how power decides which victims are allowed to become history and which ones get filed away as somebody else's problem in a country most Americans couldn't even find on a map. This is hidden history because it was hidden on purpose, not by conspiracy in the cartoonish sense, by the much quieter and much more common method of nobody with power ever being forced to say it out loud. That's the version of conspiracy I think actually deserves your attention. Not a secret room full of men and suits, but a system that just quietly counts on you never finding out. Time killers, you know, tell me what was your biggest takeaway from this, you know? The Duremberg timing, the lawsuits that Danver landed, Cutler being part of both experiments. Please submit your time killer files to me at just killingtime at gmail.com. And for everyone listening, thank you for killing time with me today.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Alexa, what is a chemtrail? Chemtrail. Trails left by aircraft are actually chemical or biological agents deliberately sprayed at high altitudes for a purpose undisclosed to the general public in clandestine programs directed by government officials.