Who is responsible for the past?

Roughly sixty years ago, the United States knowingly infected approximately seven hundred Central Americans with the sexually transmitted disease, syphilis for scientific experimentation purposes. Just now are United States government officials apologizing for the horrid and illegal act they performed upon these innocent people. Apparently the experiment was conducted in order to test the functionality of a somewhat recently discovered treatment, penicillin. United States government researchers purposely infected “Guatemalan prison inmates, women and mental patients with syphilis” (LA Times) and then proceeded to attempt and treat them with penicillin in order to test the usefulness of this treatment. However, it is recorded that not all of the test subjects were treated and that one of them may have died during this process.

The experiment is related to the Tuskegee experiment in which four hundred black men were infected with syphilis during the 1930s (about a decade before the Guatemalan experiment) and watched carefully for forty years as part of an experiment. They were literally treated as rats in a laboratory—given a disease that could potentially be the cause of their death. Likewise, “they were never told that they were actually subjects being followed in a long-term, "no treatment" study that finally ended in 1972” (Villarosa). Furthermore, the same researcher (Dr. J. Cutler) is associated with both experiments proving that both these experiments were intentional and planned strategically. However, the difference in the experiments lies in the fact that the Tuskegee experiment subjects already had syphilis, whereas the Guatemalan subjects were purposefully infected with it.

The United States performed a terrible deed and is now paying the consequences through embarrassment. As a leader in scientific research, it is the duty of the United States to set the standard for correct experimentation regiment. What the United States researchers conducted was undeniably unethical. However, is it right to punish the country for something that happened in the 1930s and 1940s when the people truly responsible are now deceased? How are we to punish ourselves? And is it perhaps worse that we performed an experiment not even on our own people, but on the people of another nation?

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-guatemala-std-study,0,4155801.story

http://www.essortment.com/all/alexanderflemin_rmkm.htm

http://www.theroot.com/views/tuskegee-study-s-guatemalan-roots?page=0,1