From 1946 to 1948, American public health doctors deliberately¹ infected nearly 700 Guatemalans — prison inmates², mental patients and soldiers — with venereal diseases in what was meant as an effort to test the effectiveness of penicillin³.

1946至1948年间，美国医疗人员为了检验青霉素的药效，故意让将近700名危地马拉人感染上性病，其中包括监狱犯人、精神病患者和士兵。

American tax dollars, through the National Institutes of Health, even paid for syphilis（梅毒） -infected prostitutes to sleep with prisoners, since Guatemalan prisons allowed such visits. When the prostitutes did not succeed in infecting the men, some prisoners had the bacteria poured onto scrapes（刮伤处） made on their penises, faces or arms, and in some cases it was injected by spinal⁴ puncture⁵.

If the subjects contracted the disease, they were given antibiotics⁶.

“However, whether everyone was then cured is not clear,” said Susan M. Reverby, the professor at Wellesley College who brought the experiments to light in a research paper that prompted American health officials to investigate.

The revelations were made public on Friday, when Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius apologized to the government of Guatemala and the survivors⁷ and descendants of those infected. They called the experiments “clearly unethical.”

“Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged⁸ that such reprehensible⁹（应斥责的） research could have occurred under the guise¹⁰ of（以……为幌子） public health,” the secretaries said in a statement. “We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected¹¹ by such abhorrent¹²（可恶的） research practices.”

In a twist to the revelation, the public health doctor who led the experiment, John C. Cutler, would later have an important role in the Tuskegee study in which black American men with syphilis were deliberately left untreated for decades. Late in his own life, Dr. Cutler continued to defend the Tuskegee work.

His unpublished Guatemala work was unearthed¹³ recently in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh by Professor Reverby, a medical historian who has written two books about Tuskegee.

President Álvaro Colom of Guatemala, who first learned of the experiments on Thursday in a phone call from Mrs. Clinton, called them “hair-raising” and “crimes against humanity.” His government said it would cooperate with the American investigation¹⁴ and do its own.

The experiments are “a dark chapter in the history of medicine,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health. Modern rules for federally financed research “absolutely prohibit” infecting people without their informed consent（同意） , Dr. Collins said.