We Are (Sort of) Sorry

The commission called in by President Obama to investigate American involvement in the deliberate infection of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases has reported its interim findings. The case concerns 5,500 Guatemalans who were the subject of "medical research" that took place with US collaboration between 1946 and 1948: 1,300 were deliberately exposed to sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhoea or chancroid.

Dr Amy Gutmann, a US university president who led the investigation, said some of the staff involved were "grievously wrong" and "morally culpable to various degrees". I note however that the implication that some were not "grievously wrong" and others were only partially guilty.
~ from This American Confession Is An Insult to Guatemala by Hugh O'Shaughnessy ~

On the surface, such "medical research" looks ghastly. The very idea that so-called scientists willingly would infect people without their knowledge borders on ghoulish. However, we would tell ourselves a huge lie if we treated episodes like this as aberrations. This kind of stuff goes on all the time.

Back in the 1940s and 1950s, scientists at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Central Washington released radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere to see if they would have adverse effects on area residents and agriculture. Nobody in the area was notified of these experiments. When some people started to notice things, likes cows dropping dead in the fields, they asked the government if federal officials had neglected to advise them of something. No, everything is fine and dandy from our end, said those officials.

There are countless other examples of this nature that are strewn throughout recent American history. They have happened all over the place.

For me, the danger is in thinking that these types of experiments are from a bygone era -- that we've cleaned up our act since then. Our lax environmental standards in so many industries have resulted with ongoing experiments in many locales in the country.

To provide one example, there is an ongoing experiment right now as to how people and the environment deal with chemicals used to disperse oil. Hopefully, you haven't forgotten about the oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico in the Spring and Summer of 2010. BP, with federal government permission, used millions of gallons of dispersant to try to clean-up the oil.

These dispersants are highly toxic. Reports have been coming in for the last year that many of the area residents and workers are experiencing weird health maladies. There have been unusually high deaths reported among many marine animal species. Our government keeps telling people there is nothing to worry about.

The big question is: Will the government be singing the same tune 10 - 20 years from now? Will some future president commission a study and then issue an apology for the "experiment" carried out in the Gulf during 2010?