Letter to the Editor 9/1

To the Editor,

Recent revelations about the syphilis experiments conducted in Guatemala from… To the Editor,

Recent revelations about the syphilis experiments conducted in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948 have called into question the ethics of Thomas Parran Jr. for whom the Graduate School of Public Health’s Parran Hall is named. According to a June 12 article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Parran knew that Dr. John Cutler, a researcher with the U.S. Public Health Service who would later become a professor and acting dean at Pitt, was deliberately infecting healthy Guatemalan people with syphilis without informing them or receiving consent so they could be test subjects in his experiments. Parran was also Surgeon General during the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which poor black men in Tuskegee, Ala., were never told they had syphilis and were denied treatment for it so the progression and spread of the disease could be studied. The Tuskegee study continued for 40 years until a whistle-blower revealed its morally indefensible nature.

Both President Clinton and President Obama have condemned and apologized for the unethical experiments. Pitt and GSPH administration should review Parran’s role and evaluate the wisdom of naming a building in his honor.

Curtis Larimer

Graduate Student

Swanson School of Engineering