WEBVTT
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It's before sunrise, sometime in nineteen forty-seven, in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Guatemala City.
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The building is called Assilio de Alienados, roughly meaning the asylum for the insane.
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A woman is asleep in a ward with six other women.
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All of them are there because they have epilepsy.
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Not because they're violent, not because they're a danger to anyone.
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This is 60 years before we understood epilepsy as a neurological condition.
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But this is where the government put people who had seizures.
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Then a doctor walks in.
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He's not a Guatemalan.
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He works for the United States Public Health Service and he has a syringe.
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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.
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She is one of seven women who received that injection.
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All seven developed bacterial meningitis, which almost certainly came from the injection itself.
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They are treated for that.
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The men running the study needed them alive to keep collecting data.
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This was not a roof doctor gone off the rims.
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This was a federally funded American research protocol run with the knowledge of superiors back in Washington, D.C.
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And it is one of the most horrible stories to come out of this particular studies, because it was survival.
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This is Just Killing Time.
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I am your host, Elizabeth Stanton.
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This is a truth, crime, conspiracy, stories that keep us up at night with a little hidden history sprinkled in.
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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.
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military considered one of the most pressing issues in all of military medicine.
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Venarial disease.
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During World War II, soldiers were getting infected with syphilis and gonorrhea in numbers high enough to actually affect troop strength.
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Every soldier pulled off the line to be treated was a soldier who wasn't fighting.
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And in 1943, public health service researchers discovered something enormous.
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It was penicillin.
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It was brand new.
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Still hard to produce in bull, but it could actually cure syphilis.
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And before that, treatment meant month of arsenic-based drugs and mercury.
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Now there was a real cure.
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But a cure is a prevention.
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Military planners didn't want to just treat infections after soldiers got them.
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They wanted something a man could use right after sex that would stop the infection from ever taking hold.
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A prophylactic wash.
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And to test whether a prophylactic actually works, you need something most researchers just don't have lying around.
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They needed freshly infected human beings on a predictable schedule whose sexual contact you can control.
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The lead investigator on this problem was a senior surgeon named Dr.
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John Charles Cutler.
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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.
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And that belief is going to matter later because it's going to reappear in a much more famous story you already know.
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And here's my opinion.
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I want it right up front.
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That sentence, he believed it served the greater good, is the most dangerous sentence in the entire history on unethical medicine.
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It's not that, you know, mustache twirling villain who scares me.
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It's the guy who genuinely convinced himself he's one of the good guys while he's doing something monstrous.
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And Cutler thought he was a hero.
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And that's what should keep us up tonight.
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Cutler's team first tried to run these prophylaxis experiments on prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
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There was one enormous problem.
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They couldn't reliably infect the prisoners with gonorrhea in a controlled way.
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The bacteria didn't behave predictably enough in a lab setting to build a clean experiment.
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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.
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citizens just wouldn't apply to them.
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The answer was Guatemala.
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And Dr.
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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.
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He worked directly alongside Cutler.
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Now Cutler later credits uh Funus with suggesting Guatemala as a site for the study, and Funas had a very specific selling point.
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In Guatemala City's central prison, commercial sex work was legal.
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Sex workers were actually allowed to enter the prison.
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That single fact solved the exact problem that had sunk the Terra Hot experiment.
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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.
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The project was recommended for federal funding through the National Institutes of Health, routed through an international body called the Pan American Sanitary Bureau.
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And Cutler's team began what they called serology experiments in November of 1946.
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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.
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And what she didn't notice, what just happened.
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Because it's easy to kind of blur past it, this wasn't the U.S.
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sneaking into a country and running secret experiments completely off the books.
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Guatemalan officials at multiple agencies cooperated.
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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.
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And historians, they just still don't have a clean answer to it.
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What we do know, without any ambiguity, is what never happen.
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Nobody asked the actual human beings involved for their consent.
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Not the prisoners, not the soldiers, not the psychiatric patients, and not the children.
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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.
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Why they always pick on me orphans?
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It just makes my stomach so sick and it makes me so mad.
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Like it's always the disenfranchised.
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Those are the people they pick the weak ones.
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And there's just something so horrid about that.
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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.
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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.
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And then tracking who got infected and when.
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But normal exposure didn't infect people reliably or fast enough for the researcher's timeline.
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So they escalated to direct inoculation.
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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.
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Now, one case documented in Cutler's own research files involves a Guatemalan woman researchers referred to by the name Berta.
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Now, Berta was a psychiatric patient.
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She was already seriously ill, and Cutler's notes describe her appearing near death, without recording exactly why.
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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.
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Within days, her eyes were filled with pus and she was bleeding from her urethra.
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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.
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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.
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They infected her with gauntrera in her eyes and elsewhere.
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And she died six months later.
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I'm not gonna soften this because I don't think it deserves it.
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I think we just need to sit with that for a second.
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Only about 700 of the more than 1,300 people who were deliberately infected actually received treatment for it.
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The rest were simply left to whatever the disease did to them.
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Because again, according to the commission's later findings, the point of the study wasn't really about curing people who were infected.
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It was about generating data for a prophylactic that would eventually protect American soldiers.
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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.
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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.
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Some historians have pointed to the gap and urged caution about that number.
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And here's where I'm the pushback just a little.
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I'll lab it as clearly as my own.
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I don't think an incomplete body count makes this story any less forrifying.
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I think it makes it more forrifying.
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These people whose lives were tracked closely enough afterward to even know for certain how they died.
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They were affected, and then in a lot of cases, they just disappear from the paperwork, and that's not a mitigating detail.
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That's the whole crime showing up again in a second form.
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The study was never published.
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Cutler's team wrapped up their work in Guatemala in 1948 and the results simply vanished into a filing cabinet.
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Not because anyone got caught, because as far as anyone involved was concerned, there was nothing to get caught for.
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This was normal.
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This was how you did research.
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If the people you were researching on didn't count as people whose permission you needed.
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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.
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And this is where I have to say something plainly.
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I think American school children learn about Nuremberg as a story about what other countries did.
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We are taught to see it as a moment the civilized world drew a line after the horror of the Holocaust.
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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.
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That's not an accident of curriculum.
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That's a choice about what gets taught as history and what gets buried as something else entirely.
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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.
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Cutler had donated roughly 12,000 pages of his personal and professional papers to the University of Pittsburgh back in 1990.
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They sat there in an archive largely unexamined.
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In 2003, a medical historian named Susan Reverby, a professor at Wesley College, was going through those exact papers.
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She wasn't looking for Guatemala.
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She was researching a book about the Tuskegee Syphilis study, the case we covered in the last episode.
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Because Cutler had also worked on the tail end of that study.
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While reading Cutler's mail, she found something else entirely.
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Detailed records complete with case notes and photographs of an earlier and in some ways even more extreme experiment, this one in Guatemala.
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She described being in her own word, floored.
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One line from a colleague's letter in Cutler's files stuck with her more than almost anything else.
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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.
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End quote.
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Read that again.
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The government's own people knew in the 1940s that this crossed the line, they wouldn't cross with American citizens.
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They did it anyway, on Guatemalan soil to Guatemalan bodies.
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Now Reverby didn't rush this into print.
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She spent years quietly verifying what she'd found before she notified U.S.
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government officials and prepared for research for publication.
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And in October of 2010, the story broke publicly.
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On October 1, 2010, President Barack Obama personally called the Guatemalan president Alvaro Colomb to apologize.
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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.
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News vans reportedly showed up on Susan Raverby's own front lawn within days.
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And President Obama then asked the body called the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to formally investigate.
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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.
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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.
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Here it is.
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Ethically if possible.
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STD research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948.
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The Commission's own language did not hedge.
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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.
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Yeah, those researchers, you don't have to be told that that's unethical.
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All you have to have is a sense of morality, a sense of right and wrong, and to look at bald people as people.
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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.
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And I I can't I can't give anyone a pass.
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I can't give Nazis a pass.
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I can't give the Americans a pass.
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I can't give anybody a pass.
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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.
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And you deserve to burn in hell for all eternity.
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End quote.
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I don't care how much good it does.
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It's wrong.
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It's wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Alright, off with soapbox.
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Back to the story.
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An apology doesn't pay a hospital bill, and it definitely doesn't undo six decades of silence.
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So in 2011, victims and their families filed a class action lawsuit against the United States government itself.
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In 2012, a federal court dismissed it.
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Not because the judge disagreed with the facts, but because of something called Sovereign immunity.
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A legal doctrine that shields the US government from being sued over actions like this.
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Especially when they happened overseas decades earlier.
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The court more or less said this was horrific.
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And we are powerless to give you anything for it.
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Sovereign immunity.
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I hope that takes the wind out of your sails the same way it takes the wind out of mine.
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That is absolutely horrific.
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So, in 2015, a new legal team went after different targets entirely.
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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.
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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.
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John Hopkins called the study deplorable, but denied any role in funding, initiating, or conducting it.
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Bristol Myers Squab said the lawsuit lacked merit.
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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.
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government owed the victims reparations while still fighting the lawsuit against their own foundation.
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The case dragged along for years.
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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.
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And in 2022, the court shut the door on it for ga.
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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.
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This is my opinion.
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I think sovereign immunity is one of the most cynical legal loopholes ever built.
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Precisely because it works best against people with the least power to fight it.
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It's not protecting the American taxpayer from like frivolous lawsuits.
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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.
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Guatemala couldn't touch it in court, and neither could the victims.
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That's not just justice.
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That's just paperwork with a badge on it.
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Now let's close the loop on John Cutler himself because his story doesn't end in Guatemala in 1948.
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Cutler stayed with the Public Health Service for another two decades.
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And then years later, the notorious Tuskegee syplis study, the one where the U.S.
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government tracked and deliberately withheld treatment from hundreds of black men in Macon County, Alabama, for 40 years.
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John Cutler was there too, involved in that study's later stages.
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The same doctor, two of the most infamous, unethical human experiments in American history.
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One government career spanning both.
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And by most accounts, Cutler was never criminally charged for either study.
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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.
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Like I said earlier, John Culler was not a comic book villain twirling a mustache in a lab quote.
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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.
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And still, and still gets remembered by his colleagues as one of the good guys.
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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.
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Let's go back to that moment.
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In this psychiatric hospital we opened with Snight, we don't know her name.
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We don't know if she survived.
00:27:19.440 --> 00:27:29.599
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.
00:27:29.920 --> 00:27:53.279
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.
00:27:55.039 --> 00:27:57.839
And here's the line I want you to walk away with tonight.
00:27:58.000 --> 00:28:03.599
I'm telling you plainly, this is not a footnote in some government report.
00:28:03.759 --> 00:28:09.440
The story of Guatemala isn't really a story about how one bad study or even one troubling doctor.
00:28:09.599 --> 00:28:15.680
It's a story about what a government will do to its people it already decided doesn't fully capt.
00:28:15.920 --> 00:28:24.160
Whether that's because they're incarcerated, they're mentally ill, they're foreign, they're poor, or they're black.
00:28:24.720 --> 00:28:32.319
Tuskegee happened to American citizens on American soil, and it took 40 years in a whistleblower to stop it.
00:28:32.400 --> 00:28:38.880
Guatemala happened to people with even less power to be believed in a country the US government just didn't answer to.
00:28:39.119 --> 00:28:43.920
And it took 60 years in a story and digging through a dead man's mail.
00:28:44.960 --> 00:28:58.640
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.
00:28:58.960 --> 00:29:15.200
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.
00:29:15.839 --> 00:29:21.359
That's the version of conspiracy I think actually deserves your attention.
00:29:21.680 --> 00:29:30.000
Not a secret room full of men and suits, but a system that just quietly counts on you never finding out.
00:29:32.799 --> 00:29:38.240
Time killers, you know, tell me what was your biggest takeaway from this, you know?
00:29:38.400 --> 00:29:46.400
The Duremberg timing, the lawsuits that Danver landed, Cutler being part of both experiments.
00:29:47.039 --> 00:29:52.079
Please submit your time killer files to me at just killingtime at gmail.com.
00:29:53.039 --> 00:29:59.440
And for everyone listening, thank you for killing time with me today.
00:30:03.279 --> 00:30:05.920
Alexa, what is a chemtrail?
00:30:07.200 --> 00:30:08.240
Chemtrail.
00:30:08.400 --> 00:30:20.160
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.
00:00:16.640 --> 00:00:25.519
It's before sunrise, sometime in nineteen forty-seven, in a psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Guatemala City.
00:00:25.679 --> 00:00:32.399
The building is called Assilio de Alienados, roughly meaning the asylum for the insane.
00:00:32.799 --> 00:00:36.079
A woman is asleep in a ward with six other women.
00:00:36.240 --> 00:00:38.880
All of them are there because they have epilepsy.
00:00:39.039 --> 00:00:42.560
Not because they're violent, not because they're a danger to anyone.
00:00:42.880 --> 00:00:48.880
This is 60 years before we understood epilepsy as a neurological condition.
00:00:49.359 --> 00:00:54.560
But this is where the government put people who had seizures.
00:00:55.600 --> 00:00:57.280
Then a doctor walks in.
00:00:57.359 --> 00:00:59.119
He's not a Guatemalan.
00:00:59.359 --> 00:01:04.640
He works for the United States Public Health Service and he has a syringe.
00:01:05.439 --> 00:01:23.200
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.
00:01:23.599 --> 00:01:27.599
She is one of seven women who received that injection.
00:01:27.920 --> 00:01:35.840
All seven developed bacterial meningitis, which almost certainly came from the injection itself.
00:01:36.159 --> 00:01:38.000
They are treated for that.
00:01:38.480 --> 00:01:44.480
The men running the study needed them alive to keep collecting data.
00:01:44.879 --> 00:01:47.439
This was not a roof doctor gone off the rims.
00:01:47.599 --> 00:01:56.239
This was a federally funded American research protocol run with the knowledge of superiors back in Washington, D.C.
00:01:56.560 --> 00:02:04.959
And it is one of the most horrible stories to come out of this particular studies, because it was survival.
00:02:05.760 --> 00:02:07.680
This is Just Killing Time.
00:02:07.840 --> 00:02:09.759
I am your host, Elizabeth Stanton.
00:02:10.080 --> 00:02:18.560
This is a truth, crime, conspiracy, stories that keep us up at night with a little hidden history sprinkled in.
00:02:19.280 --> 00:02:33.039
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.
00:02:33.199 --> 00:02:38.960
military considered one of the most pressing issues in all of military medicine.
00:02:39.439 --> 00:02:41.599
Venarial disease.
00:02:42.400 --> 00:02:52.800
During World War II, soldiers were getting infected with syphilis and gonorrhea in numbers high enough to actually affect troop strength.
00:02:53.120 --> 00:02:58.479
Every soldier pulled off the line to be treated was a soldier who wasn't fighting.
00:02:58.639 --> 00:03:04.400
And in 1943, public health service researchers discovered something enormous.
00:03:04.560 --> 00:03:05.840
It was penicillin.
00:03:05.919 --> 00:03:07.039
It was brand new.
00:03:07.280 --> 00:03:13.599
Still hard to produce in bull, but it could actually cure syphilis.
00:03:13.840 --> 00:03:19.039
And before that, treatment meant month of arsenic-based drugs and mercury.
00:03:19.759 --> 00:03:22.719
Now there was a real cure.
00:03:23.120 --> 00:03:26.000
But a cure is a prevention.
00:03:26.319 --> 00:03:31.199
Military planners didn't want to just treat infections after soldiers got them.
00:03:31.439 --> 00:03:38.240
They wanted something a man could use right after sex that would stop the infection from ever taking hold.
00:03:38.479 --> 00:03:40.240
A prophylactic wash.
00:03:40.800 --> 00:03:50.159
And to test whether a prophylactic actually works, you need something most researchers just don't have lying around.
00:03:50.400 --> 00:04:00.400
They needed freshly infected human beings on a predictable schedule whose sexual contact you can control.
00:04:01.599 --> 00:04:05.840
The lead investigator on this problem was a senior surgeon named Dr.
00:04:06.080 --> 00:04:07.840
John Charles Cutler.
00:04:08.000 --> 00:04:22.000
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.
00:04:22.480 --> 00:04:29.920
And that belief is going to matter later because it's going to reappear in a much more famous story you already know.
00:04:30.639 --> 00:04:31.920
And here's my opinion.
00:04:32.000 --> 00:04:33.920
I want it right up front.
00:04:34.959 --> 00:04:46.399
That sentence, he believed it served the greater good, is the most dangerous sentence in the entire history on unethical medicine.
00:04:46.800 --> 00:04:51.279
It's not that, you know, mustache twirling villain who scares me.
00:04:51.439 --> 00:04:59.600
It's the guy who genuinely convinced himself he's one of the good guys while he's doing something monstrous.
00:04:59.839 --> 00:05:02.720
And Cutler thought he was a hero.
00:05:02.879 --> 00:05:05.839
And that's what should keep us up tonight.
00:05:06.959 --> 00:05:15.759
Cutler's team first tried to run these prophylaxis experiments on prisoners at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
00:05:16.560 --> 00:05:19.040
There was one enormous problem.
00:05:19.439 --> 00:05:24.240
They couldn't reliably infect the prisoners with gonorrhea in a controlled way.
00:05:24.480 --> 00:05:31.120
The bacteria didn't behave predictably enough in a lab setting to build a clean experiment.
00:05:32.000 --> 00:05:41.360
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.
00:05:41.519 --> 00:05:44.800
citizens just wouldn't apply to them.
00:05:45.519 --> 00:05:48.959
The answer was Guatemala.
00:05:49.439 --> 00:05:50.160
And Dr.
00:05:50.319 --> 00:06:05.600
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.
00:06:06.160 --> 00:06:09.439
He worked directly alongside Cutler.
00:06:09.920 --> 00:06:20.079
Now Cutler later credits uh Funus with suggesting Guatemala as a site for the study, and Funas had a very specific selling point.
00:06:20.240 --> 00:06:26.000
In Guatemala City's central prison, commercial sex work was legal.
00:06:26.319 --> 00:06:29.680
Sex workers were actually allowed to enter the prison.
00:06:30.000 --> 00:06:35.040
That single fact solved the exact problem that had sunk the Terra Hot experiment.
00:06:35.279 --> 00:06:57.839
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.
00:06:59.360 --> 00:07:10.720
The project was recommended for federal funding through the National Institutes of Health, routed through an international body called the Pan American Sanitary Bureau.
00:07:10.879 --> 00:07:18.000
And Cutler's team began what they called serology experiments in November of 1946.
00:07:18.480 --> 00:07:31.279
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.
00:07:31.519 --> 00:07:34.399
And what she didn't notice, what just happened.
00:07:34.639 --> 00:07:39.279
Because it's easy to kind of blur past it, this wasn't the U.S.
00:07:39.600 --> 00:07:45.360
sneaking into a country and running secret experiments completely off the books.
00:07:45.680 --> 00:07:50.000
Guatemalan officials at multiple agencies cooperated.
00:07:50.399 --> 00:08:05.839
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.
00:08:06.160 --> 00:08:10.399
And historians, they just still don't have a clean answer to it.
00:08:10.800 --> 00:08:16.879
What we do know, without any ambiguity, is what never happen.
00:08:17.199 --> 00:08:21.680
Nobody asked the actual human beings involved for their consent.
00:08:21.920 --> 00:08:28.480
Not the prisoners, not the soldiers, not the psychiatric patients, and not the children.
00:08:29.759 --> 00:08:47.200
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.
00:08:49.759 --> 00:08:52.080
Why they always pick on me orphans?
00:08:55.919 --> 00:09:00.480
It just makes my stomach so sick and it makes me so mad.
00:09:00.879 --> 00:09:04.320
Like it's always the disenfranchised.
00:09:05.360 --> 00:09:07.679
Those are the people they pick the weak ones.
00:09:07.919 --> 00:09:12.399
And there's just something so horrid about that.
00:09:13.840 --> 00:09:35.120
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.
00:09:36.000 --> 00:09:52.480
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.
00:09:52.720 --> 00:09:55.840
And then tracking who got infected and when.
00:09:56.399 --> 00:10:03.759
But normal exposure didn't infect people reliably or fast enough for the researcher's timeline.
00:10:04.000 --> 00:10:08.159
So they escalated to direct inoculation.
00:10:08.559 --> 00:10:35.039
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.
00:10:35.919 --> 00:10:44.559
Now, one case documented in Cutler's own research files involves a Guatemalan woman researchers referred to by the name Berta.
00:10:45.039 --> 00:10:48.159
Now, Berta was a psychiatric patient.
00:10:48.480 --> 00:10:58.000
She was already seriously ill, and Cutler's notes describe her appearing near death, without recording exactly why.
00:10:58.320 --> 00:11:16.159
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.
00:11:16.559 --> 00:11:22.879
Within days, her eyes were filled with pus and she was bleeding from her urethra.
00:11:25.039 --> 00:11:40.159
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.
00:11:40.720 --> 00:11:51.840
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.
00:11:52.159 --> 00:11:56.799
They infected her with gauntrera in her eyes and elsewhere.
00:11:57.039 --> 00:11:59.919
And she died six months later.
00:12:01.600 --> 00:12:06.399
I'm not gonna soften this because I don't think it deserves it.
00:12:09.440 --> 00:12:12.559
I think we just need to sit with that for a second.
00:12:15.279 --> 00:12:22.879
Only about 700 of the more than 1,300 people who were deliberately infected actually received treatment for it.
00:12:23.120 --> 00:12:26.960
The rest were simply left to whatever the disease did to them.
00:12:27.039 --> 00:12:35.440
Because again, according to the commission's later findings, the point of the study wasn't really about curing people who were infected.
00:12:35.679 --> 00:12:43.200
It was about generating data for a prophylactic that would eventually protect American soldiers.
00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:58.399
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.
00:12:58.639 --> 00:13:15.519
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.
00:13:16.080 --> 00:13:21.120
Some historians have pointed to the gap and urged caution about that number.
00:13:21.360 --> 00:13:24.080
And here's where I'm the pushback just a little.
00:13:24.399 --> 00:13:26.720
I'll lab it as clearly as my own.
00:13:27.039 --> 00:13:33.039
I don't think an incomplete body count makes this story any less forrifying.
00:13:33.279 --> 00:13:35.519
I think it makes it more forrifying.
00:13:35.600 --> 00:13:43.519
These people whose lives were tracked closely enough afterward to even know for certain how they died.
00:13:43.679 --> 00:13:50.960
They were affected, and then in a lot of cases, they just disappear from the paperwork, and that's not a mitigating detail.
00:13:51.039 --> 00:13:55.200
That's the whole crime showing up again in a second form.
00:13:56.559 --> 00:13:58.879
The study was never published.
00:13:59.200 --> 00:14:07.120
Cutler's team wrapped up their work in Guatemala in 1948 and the results simply vanished into a filing cabinet.
00:14:07.279 --> 00:14:15.120
Not because anyone got caught, because as far as anyone involved was concerned, there was nothing to get caught for.
00:14:15.440 --> 00:14:17.360
This was normal.
00:14:18.000 --> 00:14:20.320
This was how you did research.
00:14:20.559 --> 00:14:26.799
If the people you were researching on didn't count as people whose permission you needed.
00:15:12.000 --> 00:15:26.000
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.
00:15:27.120 --> 00:15:29.679
And this is where I have to say something plainly.
00:15:29.919 --> 00:15:36.399
I think American school children learn about Nuremberg as a story about what other countries did.
00:15:36.639 --> 00:15:43.360
We are taught to see it as a moment the civilized world drew a line after the horror of the Holocaust.
00:15:43.600 --> 00:15:56.240
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.
00:15:56.639 --> 00:15:59.519
That's not an accident of curriculum.
00:15:59.679 --> 00:16:06.879
That's a choice about what gets taught as history and what gets buried as something else entirely.
00:16:07.840 --> 00:16:20.960
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.
00:16:21.200 --> 00:16:30.799
Cutler had donated roughly 12,000 pages of his personal and professional papers to the University of Pittsburgh back in 1990.
00:16:31.120 --> 00:16:36.240
They sat there in an archive largely unexamined.
00:16:36.720 --> 00:16:46.080
In 2003, a medical historian named Susan Reverby, a professor at Wesley College, was going through those exact papers.
00:16:46.320 --> 00:16:48.399
She wasn't looking for Guatemala.
00:16:48.559 --> 00:16:55.440
She was researching a book about the Tuskegee Syphilis study, the case we covered in the last episode.
00:16:55.759 --> 00:17:00.000
Because Cutler had also worked on the tail end of that study.
00:17:00.159 --> 00:17:03.919
While reading Cutler's mail, she found something else entirely.
00:17:04.240 --> 00:17:14.000
Detailed records complete with case notes and photographs of an earlier and in some ways even more extreme experiment, this one in Guatemala.
00:17:14.799 --> 00:17:18.400
She described being in her own word, floored.
00:17:18.640 --> 00:17:25.359
One line from a colleague's letter in Cutler's files stuck with her more than almost anything else.
00:17:25.519 --> 00:17:35.599
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.
00:17:36.160 --> 00:17:37.119
End quote.
00:17:38.000 --> 00:17:39.279
Read that again.
00:17:39.519 --> 00:17:48.240
The government's own people knew in the 1940s that this crossed the line, they wouldn't cross with American citizens.
00:17:48.480 --> 00:17:53.119
They did it anyway, on Guatemalan soil to Guatemalan bodies.
00:17:53.359 --> 00:17:56.160
Now Reverby didn't rush this into print.
00:17:56.400 --> 00:18:02.160
She spent years quietly verifying what she'd found before she notified U.S.
00:18:02.319 --> 00:18:06.240
government officials and prepared for research for publication.
00:18:06.480 --> 00:18:11.759
And in October of 2010, the story broke publicly.
00:18:12.160 --> 00:18:24.000
On October 1, 2010, President Barack Obama personally called the Guatemalan president Alvaro Colomb to apologize.
00:18:24.319 --> 00:18:41.839
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.
00:18:42.400 --> 00:18:48.000
News vans reportedly showed up on Susan Raverby's own front lawn within days.
00:18:48.240 --> 00:18:56.480
And President Obama then asked the body called the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues to formally investigate.
00:18:56.880 --> 00:19:15.039
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.
00:19:15.519 --> 00:19:27.440
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.
00:19:28.079 --> 00:19:29.200
Here it is.
00:19:29.839 --> 00:19:31.599
Ethically if possible.
00:19:32.079 --> 00:19:37.839
STD research in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948.
00:19:38.960 --> 00:19:42.319
The Commission's own language did not hedge.
00:19:42.559 --> 00:20:01.599
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.
00:20:04.880 --> 00:20:11.519
Yeah, those researchers, you don't have to be told that that's unethical.
00:20:11.839 --> 00:20:20.000
All you have to have is a sense of morality, a sense of right and wrong, and to look at bald people as people.
00:20:20.880 --> 00:20:54.799
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.
00:20:55.920 --> 00:21:00.400
And I I can't I can't give anyone a pass.
00:21:00.559 --> 00:21:02.079
I can't give Nazis a pass.
00:21:02.240 --> 00:21:03.759
I can't give the Americans a pass.
00:21:03.839 --> 00:21:05.599
I can't give anybody a pass.
00:21:06.559 --> 00:21:16.880
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.
00:21:17.440 --> 00:21:22.559
And you deserve to burn in hell for all eternity.
00:21:22.880 --> 00:21:23.839
End quote.
00:21:24.079 --> 00:21:26.319
I don't care how much good it does.
00:21:26.480 --> 00:21:27.359
It's wrong.
00:21:27.519 --> 00:21:30.400
It's wrong, wrong, wrong.
00:21:30.960 --> 00:21:32.960
Alright, off with soapbox.
00:21:33.200 --> 00:21:34.720
Back to the story.
00:21:35.200 --> 00:21:42.480
An apology doesn't pay a hospital bill, and it definitely doesn't undo six decades of silence.
00:21:42.640 --> 00:21:49.920
So in 2011, victims and their families filed a class action lawsuit against the United States government itself.
00:21:50.480 --> 00:21:54.799
In 2012, a federal court dismissed it.
00:21:55.279 --> 00:22:01.920
Not because the judge disagreed with the facts, but because of something called Sovereign immunity.
00:22:02.319 --> 00:22:08.480
A legal doctrine that shields the US government from being sued over actions like this.
00:22:09.279 --> 00:22:13.759
Especially when they happened overseas decades earlier.
00:22:14.319 --> 00:22:18.160
The court more or less said this was horrific.
00:22:18.480 --> 00:22:23.119
And we are powerless to give you anything for it.
00:22:29.279 --> 00:22:31.599
Sovereign immunity.
00:22:33.119 --> 00:22:38.640
I hope that takes the wind out of your sails the same way it takes the wind out of mine.
00:22:39.359 --> 00:22:42.799
That is absolutely horrific.
00:22:44.240 --> 00:22:49.519
So, in 2015, a new legal team went after different targets entirely.
00:22:49.680 --> 00:23:03.680
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.
00:23:03.920 --> 00:23:20.240
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.
00:23:20.880 --> 00:23:27.920
John Hopkins called the study deplorable, but denied any role in funding, initiating, or conducting it.
00:23:28.240 --> 00:23:32.400
Bristol Myers Squab said the lawsuit lacked merit.
00:23:32.720 --> 00:23:43.279
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.
00:23:43.279 --> 00:23:49.519
government owed the victims reparations while still fighting the lawsuit against their own foundation.
00:23:49.920 --> 00:23:52.880
The case dragged along for years.
00:23:53.119 --> 00:24:06.319
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.
00:24:06.960 --> 00:24:12.000
And in 2022, the court shut the door on it for ga.
00:24:13.279 --> 00:24:25.519
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.
00:24:28.000 --> 00:24:29.759
This is my opinion.
00:24:30.000 --> 00:24:36.960
I think sovereign immunity is one of the most cynical legal loopholes ever built.
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Precisely because it works best against people with the least power to fight it.
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It's not protecting the American taxpayer from like frivolous lawsuits.
00:24:49.839 --> 00:25:00.000
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.
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Guatemala couldn't touch it in court, and neither could the victims.
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That's not just justice.
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That's just paperwork with a badge on it.
00:25:11.359 --> 00:25:19.599
Now let's close the loop on John Cutler himself because his story doesn't end in Guatemala in 1948.
00:25:20.559 --> 00:25:24.720
Cutler stayed with the Public Health Service for another two decades.
00:25:24.960 --> 00:25:32.559
And then years later, the notorious Tuskegee syplis study, the one where the U.S.
00:25:32.640 --> 00:25:42.000
government tracked and deliberately withheld treatment from hundreds of black men in Macon County, Alabama, for 40 years.
00:25:42.319 --> 00:25:47.519
John Cutler was there too, involved in that study's later stages.
00:25:48.079 --> 00:25:56.160
The same doctor, two of the most infamous, unethical human experiments in American history.
00:25:56.559 --> 00:25:59.680
One government career spanning both.
00:26:00.000 --> 00:26:04.559
And by most accounts, Cutler was never criminally charged for either study.
00:26:04.720 --> 00:26:23.920
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.
00:26:27.119 --> 00:26:33.119
Like I said earlier, John Culler was not a comic book villain twirling a mustache in a lab quote.
00:26:39.759 --> 00:26:53.680
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.
00:26:54.240 --> 00:26:59.839
And still, and still gets remembered by his colleagues as one of the good guys.
00:27:00.000 --> 00:27:08.720
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.
00:27:10.799 --> 00:27:12.240
Let's go back to that moment.
00:27:12.559 --> 00:27:17.440
In this psychiatric hospital we opened with Snight, we don't know her name.
00:27:17.839 --> 00:27:19.279
We don't know if she survived.
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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.
00:27:29.920 --> 00:27:53.279
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.
00:27:55.039 --> 00:27:57.839
And here's the line I want you to walk away with tonight.
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I'm telling you plainly, this is not a footnote in some government report.
00:28:03.759 --> 00:28:09.440
The story of Guatemala isn't really a story about how one bad study or even one troubling doctor.
00:28:09.599 --> 00:28:15.680
It's a story about what a government will do to its people it already decided doesn't fully capt.
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Whether that's because they're incarcerated, they're mentally ill, they're foreign, they're poor, or they're black.
00:28:24.720 --> 00:28:32.319
Tuskegee happened to American citizens on American soil, and it took 40 years in a whistleblower to stop it.
00:28:32.400 --> 00:28:38.880
Guatemala happened to people with even less power to be believed in a country the US government just didn't answer to.
00:28:39.119 --> 00:28:43.920
And it took 60 years in a story and digging through a dead man's mail.
00:28:44.960 --> 00:28:58.640
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.
00:28:58.960 --> 00:29:15.200
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.
00:29:15.839 --> 00:29:21.359
That's the version of conspiracy I think actually deserves your attention.
00:29:21.680 --> 00:29:30.000
Not a secret room full of men and suits, but a system that just quietly counts on you never finding out.
00:29:32.799 --> 00:29:38.240
Time killers, you know, tell me what was your biggest takeaway from this, you know?
00:29:38.400 --> 00:29:46.400
The Duremberg timing, the lawsuits that Danver landed, Cutler being part of both experiments.
00:29:47.039 --> 00:29:52.079
Please submit your time killer files to me at just killingtime at gmail.com.
00:29:53.039 --> 00:29:59.440
And for everyone listening, thank you for killing time with me today.
00:30:03.279 --> 00:30:05.920
Alexa, what is a chemtrail?
00:30:07.200 --> 00:30:08.240
Chemtrail.
00:30:08.400 --> 00:30:20.160
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.
