Aggregated News

This week, the directors of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) joined President Obama and other administration officials in condemning a human syphilis/gonorrhea experiment conducted by U.S. researchers on unsuspecting Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers and mentally ill patients in the late 1940s.

Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the CDC, and Dr. Francis Collins, director of NIH, called the Guatemalan experiment “regrettable and deeply saddening.”

The two men also insisted that such unethical studies could not be done today because of the myriad safeguards that have been put in place during the past 60 years to protect study participants, especially those drawn from vulnerable populations, such as the poor, the imprisoned and the mentally ill.

Is that true? Are there enough protections in place?

No, says Dr. Carl Elliott, a professor of bioethics at the University of Minnesota and author of the just-published “White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine.” (Last month, Elliott also published a Mother Jones article...